Fuck Romney

[seemslikeadream]

Who is Marc Leder, Mitt Romney Fundraiser?
bynoweaselsFollow

When Mitt Romney at a private fundraiser dismissed all Barack Obama voters as moochers and victims—showing disdain for nearly half of the American electorate—he was speaking at the home of controversial private equity manager Marc Leder in Boca Raton on May 17, 2012. This is evident from references made by Romney within the full video recording of the event that has been reviewed by Mother Jones.
Mother Jones
Who is Marc Leder?

Shockingly, he’s in private capital. He was “inspired” by Mitt Romney.

Mr. Leder personifies the debates now swirling around this lucrative corner of finance. To his critics, he represents everything that's wrong with this setup. In recent years, a large number of the companies that Sun Capital has acquired have run into serious trouble, eliminated jobs or both. Since 2008, some 25 of its companies—roughly one of every five it owns—have filed for bankruptcy. Among the losers was Friendly's, the restaurant chain known for its Jim Dandy sundaes and Fribble shakes. (Sun Capital was accused by a federal agency of pushing Friendly's into bankruptcy last year to avoid paying pensions to the chain's employees; Sun disputes that contention.) Another company that sank into bankruptcy was Real Mex, owner of the Chevy's restaurant chain. In that case, Mr. Leder lost money for his investors not once, but twice.
New York Times
And, in between (so to speak) . . .

It was as if the Playboy Mansion met the East End at a wild party at private-equity titan Marc Leder's Bridgehampton estate, where guests cavorted nude in the pool and performed sex acts, scantily dressed Russians danced on platforms and men twirled lit torches to a booming techno beat.
The divorced Sun Capital Partners honcho rented a sprawling beachfront mansion on Surf Side Road for $500,000 for the month of July. Leder's weekly Friday and Saturday night parties have become the talk of the Hamptons -- and he ended them in style last weekend with his wildest bash yet.

NY Post 8-7-2011
“I think the portrayal of me as having wild and crazy parties is absolutely incorrect,” Mr. Leder said during a wide-ranging interview in Sun Capital’s offices in Midtown Manhattan. “I spend a small percentage throwing some parties, attending some parties. I like music. I like to dance. But rather than reporting on how I spend 340 days and nights of my year, the media likes to report on the other 25.”
New York Times
Yes, during those 340 days . . .

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the federal agency that helps safeguard corporate pensions . . . accused Sun Capital in bankruptcy court filings of using the bankruptcy to shift Friendly’s pension burden onto the agency.
“That’s absolutely not true,” Mr. Leder said. Friendly’s pension fund, he said, was underfunded well before Sun Capital bought the company. The outcome, he added, is simply the way the bankruptcy process works.

“We don’t make the rules,” he said with a shrug.

Butt Out, Bibi
Posted on Sep 18, 2012

AP/Lior Mizrahi
U.S. presidential candidate Gov. Mitt Romney, left, shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

By Stanley Kutler

President Barack Obama and his wife stood in a moment of silence outside the White House at 8:46 a.m. on Sept. 11, a sacred day in this country. At the same time, in Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointedly assailed the Obama administration over its reluctance to set “red lines” to prevent Iran from any further uranium enrichment.

Exactly which regime change does Netanyahu have in mind—Iran’s or the United States’? Republican nominee Mitt Romney is an old friend of Netanyahu, and the candidate is blatantly willing to outsource the making of our Israel policy. A Romney White House would advance the Netanyahu agenda, which is shared neither by the majority of Americans nor probably a majority of Israelis.

We need not look back too far in history to realize the danger of handing blank checks to client states. In 1914, the lights went out all over Europe as its nations embarked on a war that eventually spread to the rest of the world, lasting until 1945. The war happened because the great powers, England, Germany and Russia, blindly supported the extremist ambitions of their feeble client nations, Serbia and Austria. The long-range results were catastrophic—far beyond any anticipated—including the Holocaust, which Netanyahu now twists into an all-purpose rationalization for Israeli behavior.

Netanyahu’s remarks smack of his usual political opportunism and willingness to interfere in American domestic affairs. This is from a man who supposedly understands the United States. Netanyahu’s own political problems are myriad, with his coalition dependent on extreme right-wing and racist allies, the settlers and a collection of war hawks, eager to stand up to the United States. Polls are mixed, but Israelis are divided on the prospect of an attack on Iran. That is not the nature of Israeli politics. The prime minister stirs the pot to maintain his political alliances. Such is his definition of leadership. His usual American allies, Sens. Joseph Lieberman, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, sing in the Romney chorus, with Lieberman proclaiming that this will seal the deal for Obama to lose Florida.

Make no mistake: Domestic politics are very much in play. The White House hurriedly announced that the president had spoken with the prime minister for an hour “as part of their ongoing consultations.” We received the usual boilerplate confirming American determination to prevent Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon, and Obama and Netanyahu agreed to continue their “close consultations.” The statement gratuitously concluded that Netanyahu never requested a meeting with Obama in Washington. What a wonderful way to invoke “plausible deniability.”

In measuring the political calculus, Israel is no different from us. Friends and opponents alike threaten Netanyahu. He plays his moral authority and a stiff neck to the Americans to overcome any criticism. Dan Meridor, Netanyahu’s deputy prime minister for intelligence and atomic affairs, and certainly no peacenik, bluntly undercut the PM, telling Israeli Army Radio, “I don’t want to set red lines or deadlines for myself.” The leader of Kadima (a party that briefly joined Netanyahu’s coalition and then thought better of it), Shaul Mofaz, strongly criticized the prime minister but some of his party members worried he may have gone too far and cost Kadima votes. After all, as one said, Netanyahu is more popular than Obama in Israel.

Netanyahu is coming to the United States ostensibly to address the U.N.; of course he and his American supporters wanted the legitimacy of a White House meeting. Why else would Netanyahu come to the United States? To speak to all of his close friends and allies at the U.N., who tuned him out long ago? Sheldon Adelson, Netanyahu’s best money friend, is in Las Vegas. The trip to New York is hardly a subtle provocation. It deserves the back of the president’s hand, and not such a polite response.

Dennis Ross, the American special envoy to the Middle East for many years, in his book “The Missing Peace,” quotes President Bill Clinton as telling his aides after his first meeting with Netanyahu in July 1996 that “he thinks he is the superpower and we are here to do whatever he requires.”

As Israel has isolated itself further from the international community, the country’s government has mostly itself to blame. But the United States, likewise, has much to answer for because of its long-standing indulgence of extreme views held in both Israel and among a small group of well-financed, well-placed and shrill supporters in the United States. Why is the Obama administration so diffident toward Ross, an AIPAC man who periodically doubles as the president’s Middle Eastern adviser, or even to the deservedly out of power neocon crowd, including Elliott Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, Charles Krauthammer et al.? Why are they so fearful of Eric Cantor, AIPAC’s favorite Capitol Hill shill?

The Israeli prime minister’s blustering, demanding his way or, in one of his more inelegant statements, the prospect of “Auschwitz,” is a false choice. Israel remains militarily powerful, its economy is innovative and prosperous, and it has American guarantees for its security, not to mention a treasure of aid and bribes. Netanyahu would be well advised to look to his own tsoris, and deal with the blood sport of Israeli politics rather than meddle in ours.

Netanyahu should reflect on what he wishes for. His postures have provoked unprecedentedly critical American media reaction, focusing on matters rarely raised, including the U.S. military’s forceful opposition in 2006, and again this year, to any military action against Iran. We’ve also heard reports of opposition within Israeli intelligence and military circles to any attack on Iran because Israel lacks the bomb power, and even if it didn’t, the Iranians would only rebuild. These press portrayals offer a withering critique of Netanyahu’s blatant interference in U.S. domestic politics, and they tell of Netanyahu’s egomaniacal news conferences, which brook no opposition or criticism. Altogether, a rather refreshing moment that should give the Israeli prime minister real pause.

Though they may feel some loyalty to Israel, most American Jews will not support any nation that so blatantly interferes in our domestic affairs. On the whole, they have managed to walk that line quite well, acknowledging at once their emotional attachment to the land of Israel, supporting its military and other needs, and they have created a lobby that rivals the force and power of the NRA. Yet American Jews are on record as opposing the harsh brutality of the occupation—except when AIPAC or the likes of the Israeli government overwhelms their voice. Polls consistently reveal that American Jewry’s doubts about U.S. policy toward Israel are marginalized in single figures. Any charge of disloyalty simply cannot hold water, and Netanyahu should not ask American Jews or any Americans to set aside our national interest for the sake of his own political needs and ambitions.

Romney: Palestinians not interested in peace

Today, Mitt Romney Lost the Election

[seemslikeadream]

Mitt Romney admits using Chinese slave labor @ Bain. (Leaked Video)

Romney Camp Silent On Whether Bain Purchased Brutal Chinese Factory

BENJY SARLIN SEPTEMBER 17, 2012, 6:48 PM 17279
The Obama campaign is pouncing on a leaked fundraiser video in which Mitt Romney describes touring a factory in China as president of Bain Capital. According to Romney, the company packed workers into crowded dormitories behind barbed wire, while paying them a fraction of American wages.

Left unclear, however, is whether Romney ended up investing in the facility himself. While the video has circulated for weeks, and drawn renewed attention in recent days, the Romney campaign has yet to deny that the candidate bought the factory. It’s likely to get more attention now that more secretly filmed clips of a Romney fundraiser leaked to Mother Jones. The clips of Romney describing the Chinese factory appear to be from the same event in which Romney suggests all Obama supporters receive government handouts.

“You know, that video’s old, you can call Bain and ask them what they did in terms of investing on it,” senior Romney adviser Ed Gillespie told reporters on Monday. “I don’t have any information on it.”

The Romney campaign told TPM Monday that Gillespie’s “no comment” would be its final word on whether Bain acquired the factory. A spokesman for Bain Capital did not immediately return a message left on his phone, but CNN reported a “source familiar with Bain’s investment history” said Bain did not purchase the factory.

In the video, Romney describes life at the factory as harsh:

When I was back in my private equity days, we went to China to buy a factory there. It employed about 20,000 people. And they were almost all young women between the ages of about 18 and 22 or 23. They were saving for potentially becoming married. And they work in these huge factories, they made various small appliances. And as we were walking through this facility, seeing them work, the number of hours they worked per day, the pittance they earned, living in dormitories with little bathrooms at the end of maybe 10 rooms. And the rooms, they had 12 girls per room, three bunk beds on top of each other. You’ve seen, you’ve seen them? And around this factory was a fence, a huge fence with barbed wire and guard towers. And we said gosh, I can’t believe that you, you know, keep these girls in. And they said, no, no, no. This is to keep other people from coming in. Because people want so badly to work in this factory that we have to keep them out.
Romney used the story to make the point that Americans shouldn’t take for granted the level of opportunity that comes with being born in the United States: “The Bain partner I was with turned to me and said, you know, 95 percent of life is settled if you are born in America,” he says in the clip.

The Boston Globe suggested that the factory may be part of Global Tech, a Chinese appliances company that Bain invested in in 1998. While the nature of the company’s ownership is unclear, the Obama campaign has suggested Global Tech was the factory Romney was referring to in recent statements accusing the Republican nominee of hypocrisy for pledging to crack down on Chinese trade violations. Essentially, they’re daring Romney to deny his involvement.

“Before Mitt Romney started claiming he’d stand up to China and its unfair trade practices, he was profiting off of them,” Obama campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt said in a statement Saturday. “Gov. Romney even maintained his investment in a Chinese manufacturing company that relied on outsourcing American jobs after seeing its poor work conditions, which he described as surrounded by barbed wire and packed with 12 women per dormitory room. When our competitors started a global race to the bottom, rather than placing a premium on creating American jobs and lifting the middle class, Mitt Romney dove in head first.”

[norton ash]

The Romney/Ryan candidacy is just getting too 'unbelievable.' I mean, McCain/Palin was a patsy ticket, but this is like 1919 Chicago White Sox bad.

[seemslikeadream]

The Romney/Ryan candidacy is just getting too 'unbelievable.' I mean, McCain/Palin was a patsy ticket, but this is like 1919 Chicago White Sox bad.

All Koch Kings horses and all the Koch Kings men won't put Humpy GOP back together again

GOP Civil War Is Coming as Mitt Romney Campaign Flails in Video’s Wake
by Robert Shrum Sep 18, 2012 7:32 AM EDT
The video carping about government moochers may well have sealed it. Mitt Romney is going down, and the fight already is on for the future of the Republican Party. The battle will be bitter—and prolonged, says Robert
There is a civil war gathering in the Republican Party. It looks more and more like a dispirited and disappointed collection of factions, preparing to lay blame for a lost presidential election and to do battle to shape a new direction for the Grand Old Party.

Last week the view hardened that the Republican nominee was in close to terminal trouble. Having lost the summer as he let the Obama campaign define him, having lost the conventions when he let Clint Eastwood step all over his acceptance speech, Mitt Romney spectacularly lost his head on Sept. 11 during the mob attack on U.S. diplomats in Egypt and Libya. He came across as a low-life opportunist rushing to exploit a national tragedy in order to score political points and then doubling down on this venal dumbness with a smirking and contentious press conference. This week he may well have finished the job, with a video leaking of him referring to 47 percent of the electorate as government moochers.

Romney’s advisers have taken to bashing the press for covering the bad news, a near-certain sign of a losing campaign, as is the simultaneous effort to quarrel with the methodology of polls showing him trailing in the battleground states with almost no way of reaching 270 electoral votes. The surveys were largely in the field before Romney’s graceless and craven charge that the Obama administration sympathized with those who murdered the nation’s ambassador to Libya and three other Americans. More polls are on the way, and for Mitt the Knife, with his self-inflicted wounds, most of the numbers won’t be pretty.

John Heilemann, who knows a game change when he sees it, rendered a damning verdict in New York: “Romney … badly missed the mark.” Heilemann cited the array of GOP leaders, strategists, and commentators who declined to offer even faint support or instead outright rebuked their own candidate, on and off the record. He pointed to the broader narrative emerging in the media across the ideological spectrum: Romney is losing, knows he is losing, and is starting to panic.


There are the ritual caveats. The Republican standard-bearer could transform the race during the debates. Despite the Obama enterprise’s predictable and tactically savvy efforts to pump up the deflated expectations for his performance, Romney seems unlikely to morph into a latter day John F. Kennedy. It’s far more likely that he will be on the defensive about his false claims and his Medicare-shredding, Social Security–threatening, education-slashing, middle-class tax-raising policies, all designed to shower more money on those who already have the most.


Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney campaigns at Van Dyck Park in Fairfax, Va., Sept. 13, 2012. (Win McNamee / Getty Images)

In an America where the party of angry white men increasingly speaks for and to a permanent minority, it could take another defeat and maybe another before the GOP comes to its senses.
Moreover, you can’t run on the economy if you don’t have specific economic proposals—or won’t answer basic questions about a 59-point plan that, in critical areas, offers zero details. In the latest New York Times/CBS numbers, the president now leads where Romney had for months: which candidate would “do a better job handling the economy and unemployment?” If Romney doesn’t have the economy, what can he run on? Banning contraception? Or bankrupting the auto industry?

Or maybe exogenous events will ride to the rescue. But one of them, last week’s Federal Reserve decision to launch an open-ended third round of “quantitative easing,” helps the stock market and Obama in the short run and the unemployed over a longer term. The decision strengthens perceptions that the nation is on the right track, a sentiment already on the rise in the wake of Bill Clinton’s and President Obama’s convention speeches. Chasing another news cycle and the tale of his own flagging campaign, Romney promptly and predictably condemned the Fed for doing its statutory job, which is not only to control inflation but also to promote job creation and full employment. It was a transparent tic from a candidate who’s been rooting for a slowdown all along.

What else is left, another foreign crisis? First, that’s when Americans tend to rally around a president, especially one who’s demonstrated coolness, judgment, and a sure sense of command, which is exactly what Obama has done. He’s in an extraordinary position for a Democrat of holding a decided advantage on foreign policy, national security, and fighting terrorism. In contrast, Romney instinctively says the wrong thing, which frequently makes him look not only out of touch but out of his depth, unready for a job that demands the capacity to cope with unanticipated and potentially mortal dangers.

And Romney won’t make up lost ground by pursuing a makeover on daytime TV. Last week he told Kelly Ripa that he’s a “fan” of Snooki from Jersey Shore and likes to sleep wearing “as little as possible.” The latter elicits an image we didn’t need. The show was taped as the Middle East upheaval escalated. It wasn’t humanizing, but cringe-inducing. “Jersey Shore canceled—and Romney soon will be,” was the reaction of one Republican pro.

After the first debate, see if the doubts become a rout. One measure will be the conduct of the Republican super PACs. The corpulent moneybags of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson probably will continue to flow into the presidential ad wars; after all, Adelson stuck with Newt Gingrich as Gingrich struck out in the Republican primaries. But hardheaded operatives like Karl Rove could shift their resources to Senate and House contests. They’ll deny it even if they do it. And it wouldn’t be good news for Democrats; the possibility—or probability—is already worrying party officials.

Such a scenario also would set the stage for the GOP’s post-Romney civil war. The Tea Party Republicans who detest, or more accurately hate, this president will be maddened by his reelection. They will rage against it as illegitimate, stolen, un-American. You name it, they’ll say it. And they will tear at the GOP’s 2012 nominee as insufficiently conservative and insist that Republicans in the Senate and House block a second-term Obama at every turn.

A prudent party might venture at least a measure of cooperation and compromise, to prevent the standing of Republicans from collapsing as the economy moves back to prosperity. This is what smart GOP strategists will recommend. And it’s precisely what John Boehner will fear to do lest he lose his House speakership—or with hope, his minority leadership—to the lean and hungry Eric Cantor.

So with Romney consigned in 2013 to his four-car elevator mansion in La Jolla, Calif., the president may face daunting challenges to governing even as he once again reaches across the aisle. His mandate could prove momentary, which is what happened to Harry Truman, who achieved almost nothing domestically in the four years after his upset win in 1948. At least this time, the Supreme Court will be saved from a right-wing coup and health-care reform won’t be dispatched to extremist defenestration. And Democrats could hold the high ground for elections to come.

This outcome—in an Obama second term, in 2016, and campaigns beyond—will be magnified or modulated by the course of the irrepressible conflict between the Jeb Bush Republicans and the Paul Ryan Republicans. The two men represent very different paths. Bush stands for a tempered conservatism; he understands the impending demographic doom of a reactionary, anti-Hispanic Republican Party. He’s writing a book on immigration; as he said this summer: “Don’t just ... say immediately we must have controlled borders. Change the tone ... think we need a broader approach.” Ryan, on the other hand, champions a hardline approach on immigration, along with virtual repeal of the New Deal and the social progress of the 1960s.

Bush’s attitude—I’ll borrow from his father and call it “a kinder, gentler” conservatism—could be broadly acceptable in the country, even if his brother George was all but anathema at the 2012 Republican convention. Ryan is out of step with the majority of Americans not only on immigration but on his budget plans and across a wide range of domestic policy. If Romney goes down, then Bush, the practical choice, and Ryan, likely to be lionized on the right, will be the 2016 front-runners for each faction of the GOP. Meanwhile, Republicans on Capitol Hill will have to determine whether to be modestly practical—or relentlessly ideological.

Which way will this civil war go?

Undoubtedly it will be bitter. The true believers will fulminate that they were tricked by the establishment into accepting Romney, John McCain, and free-spending, big-government fellow traveler George W. Bush. The Tea Partiers are a minority in America but almost certainly a majority in what could become a smaller and smaller Republican Party. And the GOP’s experience in California suggests that one beating, or even several, may not yield a GOP self-correction but a dug-in revanchism. The state party’s response has been to lurch rightward. The result, as McCain’s chief 2008 strategist Steve Schmidt predicts, is that Republicans could soon become “the third party” in the nation’s largest state—behind Democrats and independents.

In an America where the party of angry white men increasingly speaks for and to a permanent minority, it could take another defeat and maybe another before the GOP comes to its senses. Surely Romney himself would have been better off in the general election if he had defended his Massachusetts health-care reform and sounded occasional notes of pragmatism and compassion. But then, of course, he never would have been the nominee. He could even have let us assume he wore pajamas to bed. Now hovering over his apparently desperate march toward a concession speech is the specter of Republicans fighting their protracted civil war. Someday, somehow, someone will do for the conservative side of our politics what Bill Clinton did as the progressive who brought Democrats back to the mainstream. But post-2012, maybe even Ryan won’t be pure enough; it could be full-Santorum ahead.

Former Pres. Jimmy Carter Congratulates Grandson on Unearthing Romney Video
byDartagnanFollow

Poetic justice.

FiredUpInCa has a Diary up confirming that the person responsible for facilitating the release of the now-infamous Romney video is none other than James Carter IV, the grandson of former President Jimmy Carter. In his Diary, FiredUpInCa asks

Wouldn't it be ironic if the guy who takes such glee in denigrating the legacy of former President Jimmy Carter, has his political career ended by the literal legacy of Jimmy Carter?
At 7:16 am this morning, we heard from former President Carter:
After emailing his grandfather the magazine's story about the tape -- under the subject, "Huge campaign news," and calling it "my biggest story yet" -- the former president wrote back at 7:16 am Tuesday: "James: This is extraordinary. Congratulations! Papa."
Jimmy Carter, probably the best ex-President who has ever graced our country, has served as a punching bag and punch line for Republicans for the last twenty years. Because he dared to tell the truth to Americans about the economic malaise that we were living through in the late 70's, none of which was particularly his doing, and because he lost the 1980 election to a Republican icon, a man so bereft of personal character as to inform on his colleagues in the film industry and even enlist J. Edgar Hoover to spy on his own family, he has had to endure a constant stream of vituperation and smearing during the latter part of his extraordinary life.
The young Mr Carter is well aware of the opprobrium foisted on his grandfather's shoulders by the same people who nearly destroyed the US Economy and deliberately sabotaged our current President's attempts to resuscitate it.

I'm proud of my role in being able to track him down," James Carter, 35, said about the source who took the video. "I'm a partisan Democrat. My motivation is to help Democrats get elected. If there is anything I can find in any race, I try to do that."
But his motivation went well beyond partisan politics:
But Carter also confirmed there is a personal side to the backstory of the campaign video: he was especially motivated, he said, because of Romney's frequent attacks on the presidency of his grandfather, including the GOP candidate's comparisons to the "weak" foreign policy of Carter and Barack Obama.
"It gets under my skin -- mostly the weakness on the foreign policy stuff," Carter said. "I just think it's ridiculous. I don’t like criticism of my family."

Let's explore that a little.
Here is what the Romney campaign said when they disastrously jumped the gun the make political hay out of our Ambassador's death at the hands of a violent attack on our consulate last week:

“For the first time since Jimmy Carter, we’ve had an American ambassador assassinated,” Romney foreign policy adviser Richard Williamson told the Washington Post.
Here's the zombie-eyed granny starver weighing in with his wonky wisdom:
“When it comes to jobs, President Obama makes the Jimmy Carter years look like good old days,” Ryan told about 1,000 supporters. “If we fired Jimmy Carter then, why would we rehire Barack Obama now?”
And on and on they went:
Up to this week, GOP leaders have used Carter comparisons mostly to undermine Obama on economic issues. Now foreign policy and national security have been added to the mix, propelled by the murders of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other U.S. officials, along with mobs rioting in the streets of several Middle Eastern countries.
Here's something to consider. Because of Jimmy Carter, every hostage made it out of Tehran alive. He didn't try to trade weapons to the regime holding them. He didn't start a pointless and unnecessary war killing hundreds of thousands or bluster on about American hegemony. He didn't destroy our international reputation.
No, the Republicans did all these things.

So yes, FiredUpInCa, it is a delicious irony that we see the grandson of former President James Earl Carter effectively pulling the the switch on the trapdoor that Mitt Romney and the Republican Party have found themselves falling through right now.

[8bitagent]

Romney says peace in the middle east impossible, pretty much declares all Palestinians frothing at the mouth crazy terrorists who all want to destroy Israel
http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2012 ... kable?lite

Ok this is getting a bit out of hand. Ive never seen a candidate implode so close to the election date on all fronts. What gives?

[seemslikeadream]

Romney says peace in the middle east impossible, pretty much declares all Palestinians frothing at the mouth crazy terrorists who all want to destroy Israel
http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2012 ... kable?lite

Ok this is getting a bit out of hand. Ive never seen a candidate implode so close to the election date on all fronts. What gives?

Your time is gonna come Republicans


It's a new dawn it's a new day..................And this old world is a new world

[seemslikeadream]

Mitt Romney’s Hedge Fund host Marc Leder part of investigation in Tax Abuse probe
September 18, 2012 : Permanent Link

New York (HedgeCo.Net) South Florida gossip columnist Jose Lambiet was the first to connect the dots between the host of Mitt Romney’s now infamous $50,000-a-plate dinner party in Boca Raton and an ongoing investigation being conducted by New York attorney general.

Marc Leder, co-founder of Sun Capital Partners and co-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers, has given nearly $300,000 to Romney and other Republican candidates this year.

The 8 billion dollar private equity fund, Sun Capital Partners, joins Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company, TPG Capital, Apollo Global Management, Silver Lake Partners Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, Crestview Partners, H.I.G. Capital, Vestar Capital Partners, Providence Equity Partners and Bain Capital to receive subpoenas in the investigation.

Eric Schneiderman Attorney General of New York is looking into a tax strategy which includes re-investing the management fees into the hedge fund and avoiding being taxed as regular income. This is a common strategy in the industry, and according to an article by the New York Times.

SEC filings show that K.K.R which is also part of the tax investigation converted over $180 million in fees between 2007 and 2009. Bain Capital’s leaked financial statements show that $1 billion in fees were converted to investments, according to NYT, this means a saving of $200 million in federal income tax and $20 million in Medicare taxes.

The political implications of this investigation have not been missed. At the State of the Union address, President Obama announced his Mortgage Crisis unit, and shortly thereafter tapped Eric Schneiderman to chair it. In a sharp criticism of this move a New York Post editorial in January stated that “demonizing financial institutions in populist fashion might help rile up the left — which, no doubt, is what Obama and Schneiderman care about most.

[jingofever]

What is this?

[seemslikeadream]

sorry....it's the timewave graph I use

[DrVolin]

so they brought out Bob Woodward to handle this video debacle. On CNN right now, asked by Erin Burnett if this will have a lasting impact, he says: 'Well, we don't know. This is September, and there are always October surprises. Things happen'.

How ominous is that intervention?

[seemslikeadream]

September 18, 2012, 7:04 PM
Time for an Intervention

PEGGY NOONAN'S

What should Mitt Romney do now? He should peer deep into the abyss. He should look straight into the heart of darkness where lies a Republican defeat in a year the Republican presidential candidate almost couldn’t lose. He should imagine what it will mean for the country, for a great political philosophy, conservatism, for his party and, last, for himself. He must look down unblinkingly.

And then he needs to snap out of it, and move.

He has got seven weeks. He’s just had two big flubs. On the Mideast he seemed like a political opportunist, not big and wise but small and tinny. It mattered because the crisis was one of those moments when people look at you and imagine you as president.

Then his comments released last night and made months ago at the private fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla. Mr. Romney has relearned what four years ago Sen. Barack Obama learned: There’s no such thing as private when you’re a candidate with a mic. There’s someone who doesn’t like you in that audience. There’s someone with a cellphone. Mr. Obama’s clinger comments became famous in 2008 because when people heard what he’d said, they thought, “That’s the real him, that’s him when he’s talking to his friends.”

* * *
And so a quick denunciation of what Mr. Romney said, followed by some ideas.

The central problem revealed by the tape is Romney’s theory of the 2012 election. It is that a high percentage of the electorate receives government checks and therefore won’t vote for him, another high percentage is supplying the tax revenues and will vote for him, and almost half the people don’t pay taxes and presumably won’t vote for him.

My goodness, that’s a lot of people who won’t vote for you. You wonder how he gets up in the morning.

This is not how big leaders talk, it’s how shallow campaign operatives talk: They slice and dice the electorate like that, they see everything as determined by this interest or that. They’re usually young enough and dumb enough that nobody holds it against them, but they don’t know anything. They don’t know much about America.

We are a big, complicated nation. And we are human beings. We are people. We have souls. We are complex. We are not data points. Many things go into our decisions and our political affiliations.

You have to be sophisticated to know that. And if you’re operating at the top of national politics, you’re supposed to be sophisticated.

I wrote recentlyof an imagined rural Ohio woman sitting on her porch, watching the campaign go by. She’s 60, she identifies as conservative, she likes guns, she thinks the culture has gone crazy. She doesn’t like Obama. Romney looks OK. She’s worried about the national debt and what it will mean to her children. But she’s having a hard time, things are tight for her right now, she’s on partial disability, and her husband is a vet and he gets help, and her mother receives Social Security.

She’s worked hard and paid into the system for years. Her husband fought for his country.

And she’s watching this whole election and thinking.You can win her vote if you give her faith in your fairness and wisdom. But not if you label her and dismiss her.

As for those workers who don’t pay any income taxes, they pay payroll taxes—Social Security and Medicare. They want to rise in the world and make more money. They’d like to file a 1040 because that will mean they got a raise or a better job.

They too are potential Romney voters, because they’re suffering under the no-growth economy.

So: Romney’s theory of the case is all wrong. His understanding of the political topography is wrong.

And his tone is fatalistic. I can’t win these guys who will only vote their economic interests, but I can win these guys who will vote their economic interests, plus some guys in the middle, whoever they are.

That’s too small and pinched and narrow. That’s not how Republicans emerge victorious—”I can’t win these guys.” You have to have more respect than that, and more affection, you don’t write anyone off, you invite everyone in. Reagan in 1984 used to put out his hand: “Come too, come walk with me.” Come join, come help, whatever is happening in your life.

You know what Romney sounded like? Like a kid new to politics who thinks he got the inside lowdown on how it works from some operative. But those old operatives, they never know how it works. They knew how it worked for one cycle back in the day.

They’re jockeys who rode Seabiscuit and thought they won a race.

* * *
The big issue—how we view government, what we want from it, what we need, what it rightly asks of us, what it wrongly demands of us—is a good and big and right and serious subject. It has to be dealt with seriously, at some length. And it is in part a cultural conversation. There’s a lot of grievance out there, and a sense of entitlement in many spheres. A lot of people don’t feel confident enough or capable enough to be taking part in the big national drama of Work in America. Why? What’s going on? That’s a conversation worth having.

I think there is a broad and growing feeling now, among Republicans, that this thing is slipping out of Romney’s hands. Today at a speech in New York with what seemed like many conservatives and Republicans in the audience, I said more or less the above. I wondered if anyone would say, in the Q&A, “I think you’ve got it wrong, you’re too pessimistic.” No one did. A woman asked me to talk about why in a year the Republicans couldn’t lose, the Republican candidate seems to be losing.

I said pre-mortems won’t help, if you want to help the more conservative candidate, it’s a better use of your time to pitch in with ideas. There’s seven weeks to go. This isn’t over, it’s possible to make things better.

Republicans are going to have to right this thing. They have to stabilize it.

It’s time to admit the Romney campaign is an incompetent one. It’s not big, it’s not brave, it’s not thoughtfully tackling great issues. It’s always been too small for the moment. All the activists, party supporters and big donors should be pushing for change. People want to focus on who at the top is least constructive and most responsible. Fine, but Mitt Romney is no puppet: He chooses who to listen to. An intervention is in order. “Mitt, this isn’t working.”

Romney is known to be loyal. He sticks with you when you’re going through a hard time, he rides it down with you. That’s a real personal quality, a virtue. My old boss Reagan was a little colder. The night before he won the crucial 1980 New Hampshire primary—the night before he wonit—he fired his campaign manager, John Sears. Reagan thought he wasn’t cutting it, so he was gone. The economist Martin Anderson once called Reagan genially ruthless, and he was. But then it wasn’t about John Sears’s feelings or Ronald Reagan’s feelings, it was about America. You can be pretty tough when it’s about America.

Romney doesn’t seem to be out there campaigning enough. He seems—in this he is exactly like the president—to always be disappearing into fund-raisers, and not having enough big public events.

But the logic of Romney’s fundraising has seemed, for some time, slightly crazy. He’s raising money so he can pile it in at the end, with ads. But at the end will they make much difference? Obama is said to have used a lot of his money early on, to paint a portrait of Romney as Thurston Howell III, as David Brooks put it. That was a gamble on Obama’s part: spend it now, pull ahead in the battlegrounds, once we pull ahead more money will come in because money follows winners, not losers.

If I’m seeing things right, that strategy is paying off.

Romney’s staff used to brag they had a lower burn rate, they were saving it up. For what? For the moment when Americans would rather poke out their eyeballs and stomp on the goo than listen to another ad?

Also, Mr. Romney’s ads are mostly boring. It’s kind of an achievement to be boring at a moment in history like this, so credit where it’s due: That musta taken effort!

* * *
When big, serious, thoughtful things must be said then big, serious, thoughtful speeches must be given. Mr. Romney is not good at press conferences. Maybe because he doesn’t give enough, and so hasn’t grown used to them, and confident.

He should stick to speeches, and they have to be big—where America is now, what we must do, how we can do it. He needs to address the Mideast too, because it isn’t going to go away as an issue and is adding a new layer of unease to the entire election. Luckily, Romney has access to some of the best writers and thinkers in the business. I say it that way because to write is to think, and Romney needs fresh writing andfresh thinking.

Romney needs to get serious here.Or, he can keep typing out his stray thoughts with Stuart Stevens, who’s sold himself as a kind of mad genius. I get the mad part.

Wake this election up. Wade into the crowd, wade into the fray, hold a hell of a rally in an American city—don’t they count anymore? A big, dense city with skyscrapers like canyons, crowds and placards, and yelling. All of our campaigning now is in bland suburbs and tired hustings. How about: New York, New York, the city so nice they named it twice? You say the state’s not in play? It’s New York. Our media lives here, they’ll make it big. How about downtown Brooklyn, full of new Americans? Guys—make it look like there’s an election going on. Because there is.

Be serious and fight.

If you’re gonna lose, lose honorably. If you’re gonna win do it with meaning.

* * *
Romney always seems alone out there, a guy with a mic pacing an empty stage. All by himself, removed from the other humans. It’s sad-looking. It’s not working.

Time for the party to step up. Romney should go out there every day surrounded with the most persuasive, interesting and articulate members of his party, the old ones, and I say this with pain as they’re my age, like Mitch Daniels and Jeb Bush, and the young ones, like Susana Martinez and Chris Christie and Marco Rubio—and even Paul Ryan. I don’t mean one of them should travel with him next Thursday, I mean he should be surrounded by a posse of them every day. Their presence will say, “This isn’t about one man, this is about a whole world of meaning, this is about a conservative political philosophy that can turn things around and make our country better.”

Some of them won’t want to do it because they’re starting to think Romney’s a loser and they don’t want to get loser on them. Too bad. They should be embarrassed if they don’t go, and try, and work, and show support for the conservative candidate at a crucial moment. Do they stand for something or not? Is it bigger than them or not?

Party elders, to the extent you exist this is why you exist:

Right this ship.

* * *
So, these are some ideas. Others will have more, and they’ll be better.

But an intervention is needed.

Mitt Romney, Class Warrior
Published: September 18, 2012 Comment

It turns out that Mitt Romney was right. There is class warfare being waged in the 2012 campaign. It is Mr. Romney who is waging it, not President Obama, and he’s stood the whole idea on its head.

When you think of class warfare, you probably think of inciting anger, resentment and jealousy among the have-nots against the haves. That’s what Mr. Romney has accused Mr. Obama of doing, but those charges have always been false. The truth is that Mr. Romney has been trying to incite the anger of a small slice of the richest Americans who need no government assistance but get it anyway, against the working poor, older Americans, the disabled workers and veterans, and even a significant chunk of middle-class Americans.

That was the message of remarks that Mr. Romney made in May at a private fund-raiser held at a private equity manager’s estate in Florida, a moment when he thought he was safe from annoying reporters and cameramen, and other Americans who are not rich enough to have bought a ticket to the event.

A video made public on Monday by the magazine Mother Jones showed a Mitt Romney who felt free to speak candidly about his campaign and how he would conduct a presidency. In that safe zone, Mr. Romney spoke with a bone-chilling cynicism and a revolting smugness. If he is elected, he said, capital will come back and “we’ll see — without actually doing anything — we’ll actually get a boost in the economy.” That’s the state of trickle-down economics in the 21st century.

Gone was the pretense that he will be a president of all Americans. Mr. Romney rather neatly divided the country between the people who matter and the 47 percent he does not care about.

To Mr. Romney, that 47 percent consists of people who do not make enough money to be required to pay federal income tax. They are freeloaders, he said, “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.” It is not his job, he said, as a candidate nor apparently as president if he is elected, “to worry about those people.”

By his definition, those undeserving freeloaders include workers in low-paying, menial jobs (sometimes more than one job) who don’t even earn $9,750 a year, the amount at which they would start to owe federal income tax. Also included are older Americans whose Social Security pensions are too low to be taxed, disabled veterans and people who were maimed on the job.

This group also includes some middle-income Americans who make, say, $50,000 a year but are not required to pay taxes after they take advantage of child credits, marriage penalty relief and other tax breaks, many of which are part of the Bush-era tax cuts that Mr. Romney backs with a blind ideological fervor.

But, of course, Mr. Romney was not talking about the Americans who make so much money that they are able to avoid paying any tax at all or who, like him, are able to shelter their incomes in overseas banks or tax loopholes that permit them to pretend that ordinary income comes from investment and thus pay lower taxes. Mr. Romney has been paying, by his own account, about 13 percent to 15 percent of his enormous income in federal income taxes. Just compare that with your own tax return.

Everything about Mr. Romney’s characterization of this mythical slice of lazy, shiftless Americans was wrong. A vast majority of Americans pay federal taxes, either income tax or payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare — or both — as well as other federal fees. They also pay state and local taxes and sales taxes.

The government’s revenue problem does not start with the poor but with the richest people, through the Bush tax cuts and other changes. The tax cuts for the richest people should expire now, and the middle-class cuts should do so eventually. But that will not happen as long as people like Mr. Romney protect the rich by turning the working poor and middle class into the enemy.

Mr. Romney may have been talking about electoral tactics: those people are going to vote for Mr. Obama, so let’s concentrate on our kind of people. It’s also possible that he was mouthing the words of the extreme right without really believing them. But all the possible explanations say terrible things about Mr. Romney’s character.

The right wing has long been whining about people who don’t pay taxes and who, therefore, don’t deserve a say in government. They have it backward. The shame is not that those people don’t pay income taxes. The shame is how many poor people there are when the top 1 percent can amass uncountable fortunes fed by tax breaks and can donate tens of millions of dollars to political candidates to keep it that way.

[JackRiddler]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... cret-video

Full Transcript of the Mitt Romney Secret Video

[snip]
— By the MoJo News Team
Wed Sep. 19, 2012 1:00 AM PDT

Below is a complete transcript, produced by Mother Jones, of the entire unedited Romney videos that we published on Tuesday...

[snip]

Romney: ...And I guess everybody here is a dignitary, and I appreciate your help. And by the way, I am serious about the food. Bring that…clear the place, but Hilary has to eat her beets. [Audience laughs.] I'm gonna—because the table is small enough and the room is intimate enough, I'd like to spend our time responding to questions you have, listening to advice you might have. Occasionally, as I did just a moment ago, I get envelopes like that, which is, and I'll open this and there'll be campaign ideas—"Why don't you talk about the following issues…"—so I'm happy to take advice and then we can all vote on it, whether it's a good piece of advice or bad advice. And so we'll get a chance to do that, but I'm looking to get your perspectives. Just to tell you a couple of things you may not know about me. You probably know that I'm father of five and grandfather now of 18—my oldest son just had twins just last week, and so our grandchild nest is getting larger, and they're a source of great joy. When I was probably halfway through my career at Bain Consulting, I met with a lawyer to draft a will, and she said, "How do you want to divide what estate you might eventually have?" And I said—I didn't have anything at that point—I said, "I want to divide it equally among my five sons." And she said, "Well, how much will you want to give to the grandchildren that they will ultimately have," and I said, "Well, I don't want to give anything to the grandchildren—I'll give it to the sons, and they in turn will give it to their children as needed." And she said, "You'll change your mind." And I said, "No, I don't think so." So I saw her not long ago, and I said, "I don't want to give anything to my sons, I want to give it [to all to my grandchildren.] [Audience laughs.]

Audience member: You lost Samantha's vote. [Audience laughs.]

Romney: This, uh, it's not as…

Audience member: This is my daughter. [More laughter.]

Romney: It's not just because I love my grandchildren, as I do, and I love my sons and [unintelligible], it's that I'm very concerned about what the nation is gonna be like over the coming decade or two. And I really do. As I said in my remarks earlier, I see these two very different scenarios. One is as America really powering the world economy, with an extraordinary economy here, with China working with us, wanting to see stability in the world, and a very vibrant America, with freedom and prosperity for the great bulk of the American people. On the other hand, I really do see something like Europe. And I think that's the path we're on right now. So that's why I wanna make sure what little I'll have left after the campaigns goes to you know, goes to my grandchildren. That's one piece about me that you may not know. The other is just about my heritage—my dad, you probably know, was the governor of Michigan and was the head of a car company, but he was born in Mexico. And had he been born of Mexican parents I'd have a better shot at winning this, but he was [audience laughs] unfortunately born of Americans living in Mexico. They'd lived there for a number of years, and, uh, I mean I say that jokingly, but it'd be helpful if they'd been Latino…

Audience member: Pull an Elizabeth Warren!

Romney: Pardon?

Audience member: Pull an Elizabeth Warren.

Romney: That's right. Those that don't know Elizabeth Warren—she's the woman who's running for US Senate in Massachusetts, who said that she's Cherokee, has put in her application over the years that she's Cherokee, and Harvard put down that she's one of their minority faculty members. It turns out that at most she's 1/32 Cherokee, and even that can't be proven. So, in any event, yeah, I can put down my dad was born in Mexico and leave it at that. But his dad was in construction, very successful in Mexico, but in America went broke more than once. So my dad never had the money or time to get a college degree. Without a college degree, became head of a big car company and ultimately a governor. And believed in America, believed in the opportunity in this country, never doubted for a moment that he could achieve his dreams. And Ann's dad, my wife's dad, was born in Wales. His dad was a coal miner. This coal miner got injured in a coal mining accident; realizing that there was no future there for him or his four children, he came to Detroit and worked in the auto factories until he could save enough money to bring his kids over, which he did. And then they got together as a family and said, you know, to be successful in America, you've got to get an education. And they couldn't afford an education. And the kids and the parents said you know, if we all work, and we all save, we could afford to send one of us to college. And they, they sent my wife's dad.

Can you imagine working every day, taking a couple of jobs, saving your money so that your brother could go to—I mean, I would never do that for my brother—that he could go to co…so he went to college, and got a degree at the General Motors Institute of Technology, which is one of these programs where you work a semester, and then you go to school a semester and…and then after it was over he started a little company, he became more successful, and he was able to hire his brothers and his brother-in-law, and provide for them in an extraordinary way. By the way, both my dad and Ann's dad did quite well in their life, but when they came to the end of their lives, and, and passed along inheritances to Ann and to me, we both decided to give it all away. So, I had inherited nothing. Everything that Ann and I have we earned the old-fashioned way, and that's by hard work and…[applause] I see that—

Audience member: You've just lost Samantha's vote for a second time. [Audience laughs.]

Audience member (female): These jokes are [unintelligible]. [More laughter.]

Romney: I say that because there's the percent that's, "Oh, you were born with a silver spoon," you know, "You never had to earn anything," and so forth. And, and frankly, I was born with a silver spoon, which is the greatest gift you could have, which is to get born in America. I'll tell ya, there is—95 percent of life is set up for you if you're born in this country. And I remember going to—sorry just to bore you with stories—but I was, when I was back in my private equity days, we went to China to buy a factory there, employed about 20,000 people, and they were almost all young women between the ages of about 18 and 22 or 23. They were saving for potentially becoming married, and they worked in these huge factories, they made various small appliances, and as we were walking through this facility, seeing them work, the number of hours they worked per day, the pittance they earned, living in dormitories with little bathrooms at the end with maybe ten rooms. And the rooms, they had 12 girls per room, three bunk beds on top of each other. You've seen them.

Audience member: Oh, yeah.

Romney: And around this factory was a fence, a huge fence with barbed wire, and guard towers. And we said, "Gosh, I can't believe that you, you know, you keep these girls in." They said, "No, no, no—this is to keep other people from coming in. Because people want so badly to come work in this factory that we have to keep them out, or they'll just come in here and start working and try and get compensated. So, we—this is to keep people out." And they said, "Actually, Chinese New Year, is the girls go home, sometimes they decide they've saved enough money and they don't come back to the factory." And he said, "And so on the weekend after Chinese New Year, there'll be a line of people hundreds long outside the factory, hoping that some girls haven't come back and they can come to the factory. And so, as we were experiencing this for the first time, for me to see a factory like this in China some years ago, the Bain partner I was with turned to me and said, "You know, 95 percent of life is settled if you're born in America." This is an amazing land. And what we have is unique, and fortunately it is so special we're sharing it with the world. I'm concerned about the future, but also optimistic as I said, and I look forward to getting America back on track, and having people plan on bringing their ideas and their dreams to this country. We get big dreamers, by the way. Oh, I just, we didn't talk about immigration today. Gosh, I'd love to bring in more legal immigrants that have skill and [unintelligible]. I'd like to staple a green card to every Ph.D. in the world and say, "Come to America, we want you here." Instead, we make it hard for people who get educated here or elsewhere to make this their home. Unless, of course, you have no skill or experience, in which case you're welcome to cross the border and stay here for the rest of your life. [Audience laughs.] It's very strange. It's run by people who don't understand the words "global competition of ideas," and our idea has to win, but only if America reigns strong. But with that introduction, I'm going to turn to you for counsel, advice, or questions. Policy questions. Wanna talk about tax policy? Or political questions? How I win? Please.

Audience member: One comment, Governor.

Romney: Yes.

Audience member: The debates are gonna be coming, and I hope at the right moment you can turn to President Obama, look at the American people, and say, "If you vote to reelect President Obama, you're voting to bankrupt the United States." I hope you keep that in your quiver because that's what gonna happen. And I think it's going to be very effective. Just wanted to give you that.

Romney: Yeah, it's interesting…the former head of Goldman Sachs, John Whitehead, was also the former head of the New York Federal Reserve. And I met with him, and he said as soon as the Fed stops buying all the debt that we're issuing—which they've been doing, the Fed's buying like three-quarters of the debt that America issues. He said, once that's over, he said we're going to have a failed Treasury auction, interest rates are going to have to go up. We're living in this borrowed fantasy world, where the government keeps on borrowing money. You know, we borrow this extra trillion a year, we wonder who's loaning us the trillion? The Chinese aren't loaning us anymore. The Russians aren't loaning it to us anymore. So who's giving us the trillion? And the answer is we're just making it up. The Federal Reserve is just taking it and saying, "Here, we're giving it.' It's just made up money, and this does not augur well for our economic future.

You know, some of these things are complex enough it's not easy for people to understand, but your point of saying, bankruptcy usually concentrates the mind. Yeah, George.

Audience member, "George": Governor, to your point on complexity. How is—you've traveled around America and talked to people in larger groups and perhaps people with different backgrounds, and people in this room: To what extent do people really understand that we're hurtling toward a cliff, and to what extent do people understand the severity of the fiscal situation we're in. Do people get it?

Romney: They don't. By and large people don't get it. People in our party, and part of—it's our fault because we've been talking about deficits and debt for about 25 or 30 years as a party, and so they've heard us say it and say it and say it. The fact that Greece is going what it's going through, and they read about France and Italy and Spain, has finally made this issue topical for the American people. And so when you do polls, and you ask people what is the biggest issue in the 2012 election, No. 1 is the economy and jobs by a wide margin. But No. 2 is the deficit. But debt, that doesn't calculate for folks, but the deficit does. They recognize you can't go on forever like this. Although the people who recognize that tend to be Republicans, and the people who don't recognize that tend to be Democrats. And what we have to get is that 5 or 10 percent in the middle who sometimes vote Republican, sometimes vote Democrat, and have them understand how important this is. It's a challenge. I did the calculation for folks today, and USA Today publishes this every year. It's a front-page story: the headline once a year, it somehow escapes people's attention, and that is, if you take the total national debt and the unfunded liabilities of Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, the amount of debt plus unfunded liabilities per household in America is $520,000. Per household.

Audience member: It's like 12 times their income, right?

Romney: At least. 10, 12 times their income. Even though we're not going to be writing the check for that amount per household, they're going to be paying the interest on that. You'll be paying the interest on that. [Audience laughs.] Because we—my generation will be long gone, and you'll be paying the interest. And so you'll be paying taxes, not only for the things you want in your generation, but for all the things we spent money on, which is just—it's extraordinary to think the tax rates, someone calculated what would happen. If we don't change Medicare or Social Security, the tax rate—you know what the payroll tax is now, it's 15.3 percent—if we don't change those programs, that tax rate will have to ultimately rise to 44 percent. The payroll tax. Then there's the income tax on top, which the president wants to take to 40 percent. Then there's state tax in most states. And sales tax. So you end up having to take 100 percent of people's income. And yet the president, three and a half years in, won't talk about reforming Social Security or Medicare. And when the Republicans do, it's "Oh, you're throwing granny off the cliff." It's like you're killing the kids. The biggest surprise that I have is that young people will vote for Democrats. They look at this and say, "Holy cow! The only guys who are worried about the future of our country and our future are Republicans." But the Democrats, they talk about social issues, draw in the young people, and they vote on that issue. It's like, I mean, there won't be any houses like this if we stay on the road we're on.

Please. Yeah—I heard a voice, please.

Audience member: Gov. Romney, we are former Bostonians, and we'll talk about how we know you.

Romney: Uh, oh. [Audience laughter, cross talk.]

Audience member: It's good!…and we totally agree with what you said economically. But I would like to know, and I would like to get into much more discussion on what I consider the real issues: the real issues of Iran, and how your point of view differs from President Obama's.

Romney: Thank you—and by the way, start eating, those of you who have food in front of you that's warm, start eating. I'm standing up so I can see you, but I'm not standing up so you that you have to stop and look at me. It's important to look at your food as you're eating it. [Audience laughs.] Noticed you putting a fork in your finger here, all right…[cross talk, laughter].

You are right, which is a nuclear Iran is an unthinkable outcome, not just for our friends in Israel and our friends in Europe, but also for us. Because Iran is the state sponsor of terror in the world, has Hezbollah now throughout Latin America, Hezbollah with fissile material. If I were Iran, and a crazed fanatic, I'd say let's get a little fissile material to Hezbollah, have them carry it to Chicago or some other place, and then if anything goes wrong or if America starts acting up, we'll just say, "Guess what, unless you stand down, why we're gonna let off a dirty bomb." This is where we head, where American can be held up and blackmailed by Iran, by the mullahs, by crazy people. So we really don't have any option but to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon.

I'll give the specifics about Iran, and then maybe talk more broadly about foreign policy. The specific on Iran is that we should have put in place crippling sanctions at the beginning of the president's term. We did not. He will say, "Yes, but Russian wouldn't go along with us." Well, he gave Russia their No. 1 foreign objective: For a decade, all they've cared about is getting the missile defense sites out of Poland, and he gave them that and got nothing in return. He could have—I presume—gotten them to agree to crippling sanctions on Iran. He did not, which is in my opinion, one of the greatest foreign policy errors of the modern time. And by the way, if he could not have gotten that from Russia, he should have kept the missile defense sites in Poland, just to keep a bargaining chip on table. I mean, put nothing in if he wants—I would have kept them, I wouldn't have traded them away, but that's where he was.

No. 2, we should have been aggressively supporting the voices of dissent in Iran, and when there was an effort towards revolution there we should been aggressively supporting. And finally we should have made it clear, at least by now, that we have military plans to potentially remove their nuclear capabilities. That doesn't mean we actually pull the trigger, but it means we communicate to them that we're ready to do so. And that it is unacceptable to America to have a nuclear Iran. Instead what this administration has done is communicate to the Iranians that we're more worried about Israel attacking them than we are about them becoming nuclear. It's extraordinary. So those are some thoughts directly at Iran.

I'll step back on foreign policy: The president's foreign policy, in my opinion, is formed in part by a perception that he has that his magnetism and his charm and his persuasiveness is so compelling that he can sit down with people like Putin, Chávez, and Ahmadinejad. And that they'll find we're such wonderful people that they'll go on with us. And they'll stop doing bad things. And it's an extraordinarily naive perception, and it has led to huge errors in North Korea, in Iraq, obviously in Iran, in Egypt, around the world. My own view is that that the centerpiece of American foreign policy has to be strength. Everything I do will be calculated to increasing America's strength. When you stand by your allies, you increase your strength. When you attack your allies, you become weaker. When you stand by your principles, you get stronger. When you have a big military—that's bigger than anyone else's—you're stronger. [Unintelligible.] When you have a strong economy, you build America's strength. For me, everything is about strength and communicating to people what is and is not acceptable. It's speaking softly but carrying a very, very, very big stick. And this president instead speaks loudly and carries a tiny stick. And that is, you know, that's not the right course for a foreign policy. I saw Dr. Kissinger in New York—you're not eating! [Audience laughs.]

Romney: He's bored to tears. [Audience laughs.] I saw Dr. Kissinger; I said to him, "How are we perceived around the world?" And he said, "One word: VEAK!" [Audience laughs.] We are weak, and that's how this president is perceived, by our friends and, unfortunately, by our foes. And it's no wonder that people like Kim Jong Un, the new leader of North Korea, announces a long-range missile test only a week after he said he wouldn't. Because, it's like, what's this president going to do about it? If you can't act, why, don't threaten. [To another audience member with a question] Please.

Audience member: [Asks about Iraq. (Garbled.)]

Romney: I'm just gonna taste this by the way. I just wanna show you how it's done: You take this in your fork…[Audience laughs.]…you put it in…That's good, that's good. [To audience member]: Please, go ahead.

Audience member: If you get the call as president, and you had hostages…Ronald Reagan was able to make a statement, even before he became, was actually sworn in—

Romney: Yeah—

Audience member: the hostages were released—

Romney: on the day of his inauguration, yeah.

Audience member: So my question is, really, how can you sort of duplicate that scenario?

Romney: Ohhhh. [A few chuckles in audience.] I'm gonna ask you, how do I duplicate that scenario.

Audience member: I think that had to do with the fact that the Iranians perceived Reagan would do something to really get them out. In other words [unintelligible]…and that's why I'm suggesting that something that you say over the next few months gets the Iranians to understand that their pursuit of the bomb is something that you would predict and I think that's something that could possibly resonate very well with American Republican voters.

Romney: I appreciate the idea. I can't—one of the other things that's frustrating to me is that at a typical day like this, when I do three or four events like this, the number of foreign policy questions that I get are between zero and one. And the American people are not concentrated at all on China, on Russia, Iran, Iraq. This president's failure to put in place a status forces agreement allowing 10-20,000 troops to stay in Iraq? Unthinkable! And yet, in that election, in the Jimmy Carter election, the fact that we have hostages in Iran, I mean, that was all we talked about. And we had the two helicopters crash in the desert, I mean that's—that was—that was the focus, and so him solving that made all the difference in the world. I'm afraid today if you said, "We got Iran to agree to stand down a nuclear weapon," they'd go hold on. It's really a, but…by the way, if something of that nature presents itself, I will work to find a way to take advantage of the opportunity.

Romney [to another audience member]: Please—yes?

Audience member: It's your lucky night: more foreign policy! [Audience laughs/crosstalk.]…actually the first time you were in Jerusalem. And we appreciate you being there. How do you think that the Palestinian problem can be solved, and what are you going to do about it?

Romney: I'm torn by two perspectives in this regard. One is the one which I've had for some time, which is that the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace. And that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish. Now, why do I say that? Some might say well just let the Palestinians have the West Bank and have security and set up a separate nation for the Palestinians. And then come a couple of thorny questions. And I don't have a map here to look at the geography. But the border between Israel and the West Bank is obviously right there, right next to Tel Aviv, which is the financial capital, the industrial capital of Israel. The center of Israel. It's, uh—what? The border would be maybe seven miles from Tel Aviv to what would be the West Bank?

Audience member: Nine.

Romney: Nine miles. Okay, I'd be close. Nine miles. The challenge is the other side of the West Bank…the other side of the West Bank, the other side of what would be this new Palestinian state would either be Syria at one point or Jordan. And, of course, the Iranians would want to do through the West Bank exactly what they did through Lebanon and what they did in Gaza. Which is the Iranians would want to bring missiles and armament into the West Bank and potentially threaten Israel. So Israel, of course, would have to say that can't happen. We've got to keep the Iranians from bringing weaponry into the West Bank. Well, that means that—who?—the Israelis are going to control the border between Jordan, Syria, and this new Palestinian nation? Well, the Palestinians would say, "Ah, no way! We're an independent country. You can't guard our border with other Arab nations." And then how about the airport? How about flying into this Palestinian nation? Are we going to allow military aircraft to come in? And weaponry to come in? And if not, who's going to keep it from coming in? Well, the Israelis. Well, the Palestinians are going to say, "We're not an independent nation if Israel is able to come in and tell us what can land at our airport." These are problems, and they're very hard to solve, alright?

And I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say there's just no way. And so what you do is you say you move things along the best way you can. You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that it's going to remain an unsolved problem. I mean, we look at that in China and Taiwan. All right, we have a potentially volatile situation, but we sort of live with it. And we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve. We don't go to war to try and resolve it.

On the other hand, I got a call from a former secretary of state—and I won't mention which one it was—but this individual said to me, "You know, I think there's a prospect for a settlement between the Palestinians and the Israelis after the Palestinian elections." I said, "Really?" And his answer was, "Yes, I think there's some prospect." And I didn't delve into it but you know, I always keep open the idea of, I have to tell ya, the idea of pushing on the Israelis?—to give something up, to get the Palestinians to act, is the worst idea in the world. We have done that time and time and time again. It does not work. So, the only answer is show your strength. Again, American strength, American resolve, as the Palestinians someday reach the point where they want peace more than we're trying to push peace on them—and then it's worth having the discussion. Until then, it's just wishful thinking. [Audience crosstalk.]

Audience member: Individuals in this room obviously are your supporters. I am very concerned that the average American, who doesn't know you, there's a terrible misconception. And I spend numerous hours trying to [unintelligible]. Years and years ago, I called George Bush Sr., and he had helped me in my campaign in Massachusetts when I ran for Senate. I told him that there's a guy named Clinton who's running for the following reasons. And he laughed. Right now, I'm very concerned…Women would not want to be involved for you. Hispanics, majority of them do not want to vote for you. College students don't. After talking to them, and explaining and rationalizing on a one-on-one basis, we are able to change their opinions. But on a mass level, what do you want us to do, this group here, as your emissaries, going out to convert these individuals to someone who's obviously going to be such an incredible asset to this country. We want you.

Romney: Well…

Audience member: But what do we do? Just tell us what we can help…

Romney: I have—I have some good news for you. It's not impossible. Now, the reason I say that is for instance, the New York Times had a poll last week, the New York Times and NBC, and I was leading by two points among women. All right. Now, the president came out and said this is an outrageous poll, they don't know what they were doing—by the way, the polls at this stage make no difference at all—but the point is, women are open to supporting me. They like the president [unintelligible], but they're disappointed. They're disappointed with the jobs they're seeing for their kids, they're disappointed with their own economic standing right now. So we can capture women's votes, we're having a much harder time with Hispanic voters. And if the Hispanic voting bloc becomes as committed to the Democrats as the African American voting bloc has in the past, why we're in trouble as a party and, I think, as a nation.

Audience member: Rubio!

(Different) audience member: Exactly.

Audience member: Pick him up!

Romney: And so…[Audience laughs.] We have some great—we have some great Hispanic leaders in our party who will help communicate what our party stands for, and what I think, frankly, what I need you to do is to raise millions of dollars, because the president's going to have about $800 to $900 million. And that's—that's by far the most important thing you could do.

Audience member: [Unintelligible.]

Romney: Because, well, because you don't have the capacity to speak to hundreds of thousands of people. I will be in those debates. It will be, I don't know, 150 million Americans watching. If I do well, it'll help. If I don't, it won't help…

Audience member: You will do so well. Your debates are incredible. [Audience laughs, claps.]

Romney: Thank you, thanks, thank you. But advertising makes a difference, and the president will engage in a personal character assassination campaign. And so we'll have to fire back one, in defense, and No. 2, in offense. And that's [unintelligible]…Florida will be one of those states that is the key state. And so all the money will get spent in 10 states, and this is one of them. So, I—the best thing I could ask you to do—I mean, yeah, sure, talk to people and tell them how you know me and word of mouth makes a big difference. But you know, I'm not terribly well known by the general American public, because…

Audience member: You're known as a rich boy. I mean, they say, "He's a rich man."

Romney: They don't. But don't worry—given all those negative things, given all those negative things, the fact that I'm either tied or close to the president, and the fact that, you know, he's out there talking about the one-year anniversary of Osama bin Laden being captured, unemployment coming down, unleashing his campaign, new campaign, and we're still sort of tied? That's very interesting. And it's, it's encouraging. Please.

Audience member: I would disagree with that. I think a lot of young children coming out of college feel they're let down by the president. And they feel there's not a job out there for them, and [unintelligible] making $60,000 and now they're making $30,000. Very similar to the U6.

Romney: Yeah, yeah.

Audience member: My question to you is, Why don't you stick up for yourself? To me, you should be so proud of your wealth. That's what we all aspire to be—we kill ourselves, we don't work a nine to five. We're away from our families five days a week. I'm away from my four girls five days a week and my wife. Why not stick up for yourself and say, "Why is it bad to be, to aspire to be wealthy and successful? You know, why is it bad to kill yourself? And why is it bad to cut 30 jobs that protect 300?" And, when people talk about you cutting jobs, you save companies that were failing...[unintelligible]. So my question is, when does that stand up…[unintelligible].

(Different) audience member: …neighborhood…and worked his way up from nothing to be an incredibly successful entrepreneur, so, it, it…

Romney: You heard in my speech tonight, I talked it [crosstalk]...again, but if it…oh, you weren't here.

Audience member: He came here, so he missed the…

Romney: In every stump speech I give, I speak about the fact that people who dream and achieve enormous success do not make us poorer—they make us better off. And the Republican audience that I typically speak to applauds. I said that tonight, and the media's there, and they write about it, they say that Romney defends success in America and dreamers and so forth. So they write about it. But in terms of what gets through to the American consciousness, that's—I have very little influence on that in this stage, as to what they write about. And that will happen—and we'll have three debates, we'll have a chance to talk about that in the debates. There will be ads which attack me; I will fire back in a way that describes in the best way we can the fact that if, the theme in my speech is that—I wind up in, you know, the ambassadors [unintelligible] me today, several times—I wind up talking about how the thing which I find most disappointing in this president is his attack of one American against another American, the division of America based on going after those who have been successful.

And then I quote Marco Rubio, I tell in my speeches, I say, Marco Rubio—I think what I said would be [unintelligible]…I also think I said that at a fundraising event earlier today, but I did when I was in Empire…[unintelligible] [Audience laughs.]…I just said Sen. Rubio says that when he grew up here, poor, that they looked at people that had a lot of wealth, and his parents never once said, "We need some of what they have, they should give us some." Instead they said that you work hard and go to school, someday we might be able to have enough. That's…[Applause.] I will continue to do that, how much of that gets picked up, there are so many things that don't get picked up in a campaign because people aren't watching them. By the way, most people don't watch during the summer. I said we're going to go into a season here starting with the beginning of June with almost no attention paid, then after Labor Day, in September and October, that's when it'll get fun.

Audience member: For the last three years, all everybody's been told is, "Don't worry, we'll take care of you." How are you going to do it, in two months before the elections, to convince everybody you've got to take care of yourself?

Romney: There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. And he'll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that's what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what it looks like. I mean, when you ask those people…we do all these polls—I find it amazing—we poll all these people, see where you stand on the polls, but 45 percent of the people will go with a Republican, and 48 or 4…

[Recording stops.]

Romney: …and about twice as much as China, not 10 times as much like it's reported. And we have responsibility for the whole world. They're only focused on one little area of the world, the South China Sea, the East China Sea, that's it. And they're building a military at a rapid rate. So this idea that somehow we've already spent so much money in the military—it's like, guys, don't overthink how strong we are. We—you probably know it, this was a couple of years ago, but we had one of our aircraft carriers sailing by Japan, and the Chinese pulled up behind it in a diesel sub, in a super-quiet diesel sub, pulled up behind it. It could have been torpedoed. And, I mean, we're in that kind of—our Navy's smaller in number of ships than anytime since 1917, and this president wants to shrink it. The list goes on. Our Air Force is older and smaller than anytime since '47 when the Air Force was formed, and he wants to shrink it. If we go the way of Europe, which is spending 1 to 2 percent of their economy on the military, we will not be able to have freedom in the world.

Audience member: When the [unintelligible] in September, the markets are going to be looking—marginal tax rates going up, overheads going, fine, but sequestration under the debt ceiling deal—what do they call it?

Romney: Taxageddon?

Audience member: Yeah, they call it that. The Obamacare, taxes on dividends and capital gains—I mean, the markets are going to be speaking very wildly in October on all of those issues.

Romney: They'll probably be looking at what the polls are saying. If it looks like I'm going to win, the markets will be happy. If it looks like the president's going to win, the markets should not be terribly happy. It depends, of course, which markets you're talking about, which types of commodities and so forth, but my own view is, if we win on November 6th there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We'll see capital come back, and we'll see—without actually doing anything—we'll actually get a boost in the economy. If the president gets reelected, I don't know what will happen. I can never predict what the markets will do. Sometimes it does the exact opposite of what I would have expected. But my own view is that if we get the—the "Taxageddon," as they call it, January 1st, with this president, and with a Congress that can't work together, it really is frightening, really frightening in my view.

Audience member: Fifty-four percent of American voters think China's economy is bigger than the US. When I first met you four or five years ago, you did a diagram where you went very granular and you said, "Look, guys"—this was a small group—and you said, "this is it, this is what it is, tell it like it is." How are you going to win if 54 percent of the voters think China's economy is bigger than ours? Or if it costs 4 cents to make a penny and we keep making pennies? Canada got it right a month ago. Why isn't someone saying, "Stop making pennies, round it to the nearest nickel?" You know, that's an easy thing, compared to Iran. I want to see you take the gloves off and talk to people that actually read the paper and read the book and care about knowing the facts and acknowledges power. As opposed to people who are swayed by, you know, what sounds good at the moment. If you turned it into like, "Eat what you kill," it'd be a landslide. In my humble opinion.

Romney: [Laughs.] Well, I wrote a book that lays out my view for what has to happen in the country. And people who are fascinated by policy will read the book. We have a website that lays out white papers on a whole series of issues that I care about. I have to tell you, I don't think this will have a significant impact on my electability. Um, I wish it did. I think our ads will have a much bigger impact. I think the debates will have a big impact. You know, I—

Audience member: No one even knows who Pete Peterson is and he's [unintelligible] trouble 20 years ago.

Romney: But that's my point. Which is—my dad used to say, "Being right early is not good in politics." And in a setting like this—a highly intellectual subject, a discussion of a whole series of important topics—typically doesn't win elections. And there are, for instance, this president won because of hope and change. All right? He won because of hope and change.

Audience member: Keep the change. [Audience laughs.]

Romney: Yeah, well. So it's—I can tell you I have a very good team of extraordinarily experienced, highly successful consultants. A couple of people in particular who've done races around the world. I didn't realize these guys in the US, the Karl Rove equivalents, they do races all over the world. In Armenia. In Africa. In Israel. I mean, they work for Bibi Netanyahu in his races. So they do his races and see which ads work and which processes work best and, uh, we have ideas about what we do over the course of the campaign. I'd tell them to you, but I'd have to, you know, shoot ya. [Audience laughs.] Hopefully it will be a successful place.

Audience member: I think one of the aspects about hope and change that worked well for Obama four years ago was he promised to bring us more honest, transparent governance in Washington. I've been around politics—the first campaign I worked for was Barry Goldwater in 1964. I've gotta be the oldest Republican in [unintelligible]. But from what I've seen, particularly in the last seven months because of my own personal involvement in an issue, is the government in Washington right now is just permeated by cronyism, outright corruption. Our regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect the public are protecting the people that they're supposed to be regulating. And I think people are fed up with that. Doesn't matter if you're in the tea party of Occupy Wall Street, people see that the government is working for the powerful interests and the people who well-connected politically and not the common person. Which threatens that whole idea that we have this great opportunity—which we should have and have had, historically—in the US for anybody, from whatever background, to become successful. One way that that becomes compromised is when the government is no longer seen as being an honest agent. And where our tax dollars are not really being put to work for us but for the people who are plugged-in politically. You know, you had cases like Solyndra and [unintelligible] that I've talked about and gotten involved in. You have Eric Holder who is probably the most corrupt attorney general that we had ever in American history. And I think it's something that if spun the right way in simple terms can actually resonate with the American people. Obama did not keep his promises. Nancy Pelosi was supposed to give us an honest Congress and has given us just the opposite as speaker. And I think that's a campaign issue that can work well. I'm optimistic that you'll be elected president. And my recommendation would be clean house, immediately. The SEC, the CFEC are disaster areas.

Romney: I wish they weren't unionized, so we could go a lot deeper than you're actually allowed to go. Yeah. I can say this, which I'm sure you'll agree with this as well. We speak with voters across the country about their perceptions. Those people I told you, the 5 to 6 or 7 percent that we have to bring onto our side, they all voted for Barack Obama four years ago. So, and by the way, when you say to them, "Do you think Barack Obama is a failure?" they overwhelmingly say no. They like him. But when you say, "Are you disappointed in his policies that haven't worked?" they say yes. And because they voted for him, they don't want to be told that they were wrong, that he's a bad guy, that he did bad things, that he's corrupt. Those people that we that have to get, they want to think they did the right thing but he just wasn't up to the task. They love the phrase, "He's in over his head."

But we, you see, you and I, we spend our day with Republicans. We spend our days with people who agree with us, and these people are people who voted for him and don't agree with us. And so the things that animate us are not the things that animate them. And the best success I have speaking with those people is, you know, the president's been a disappointment. He told you he'd keep unemployment below 8 percent, hasn't been below 8 percent since. Fifty percent of kids coming out of school can't get a job. Fifty percent. Fifty percent of the kids in high school in our 50 largest cities won't graduate from high school. What are they gonna do? They usually pass on saying…and I could say to that audience that they nod their heads and say, "Yeah, I think you're right." What's he going to do by the way is try and vilify me as someone who's been successful. Or who's closed business or laid people off—an evil, bad guy. And that may work. I actually think that right now people are saying, "I want somebody who can make things better, that's gonna motivate me, who can get jobs for my kids and get rising incomes." And I hope to be able to be the one who wins that battle.

Audience member: I've seen Obama a lot of times on talk shows, interviews, but I've never seen you on any of them. I think a lot of people, especially you know, [unintelligible] I think people would see you in a different light. I think a lot of women especially do not watch debates. They don't come to these functions. You maybe have to show your face more on TV and talk just like regular [unintelligible] typical American last name.

Romney: Smith.

(Different) audience member: In Sweden, you say Johansson. [Audience laughs.]

Audience member: So I think maybe you could reach a lot of people.

Romney: Well, thank you. I have been on The View twice now. [Audience laughs.] I've been on The View twice. It went very well. [Audience cross talk.]

Romney: Regis is gone. I've done the night, the evening shows. I've been on Letterman a couple of times. I've been on Leno more than a couple times, and now Letterman hates me because I've been on Leno more than him. They're very jealous of one another as you know. And there's, I was asked to go on Saturday Night Live. I did not do that, in part because you want to show that you're fun and you're a good person, but you also want to be presidential. And Saturday Night Live has the potential of looking slapstick and not presidential. But The View is fine. Although The View is high risk because of the five women on it, only one is conservative. Four are sharp-tongued and not conservative, Whoopi Goldberg in particular. Although last time I was on the show, she said to me, "You know what? I think I could vote for you." And I said, "I must have done something really wrong." [Audience laughs.] I had to sit down and—oop, Darlene, you get the last word.

Audience member: I was just gonna say, I think a media strategy would be sending Ann on the road. Because she, I think, is your best friend, your best advocate. She connects so well. People talk so much about this connect—and somebody said over there, people think he's a rich, rich guy. Most of us know that you know that's—

Romney: You know that I'm as poor as a church mouse. [Audience laughter]

Audience member: We know that you value [unintelligible] and hard work. And Ann really connects with people, and she can tell a story about the hard work and she can tell about the person who [unintelligible] and go on Good Morning America and go on The View and hold her own against these people. And really get you the women connecting to you more. Seeing her and think she's a great—

Romney: I think you're right. Absolutely right. We use Ann sparingly right now, so that people don't tired of her, or start attacking.

Audience member: Who gets tired of Ann?

Romney: [Audience laughs.] I'll tell ya—. But you will see more of her in the September, October timeframe. And you know we had, what's her name, Hilary Rosen, who, you know, attacked her, and that made Ann much more visible to the American people, which I think is very helpful. It gave her a platform she wouldn't have had otherwise. And I agree with you. I think she will be extraordinarily helpful.

Audience member: Just a quick—. Can you be a friend of her on Facebook or whatever happened after Hilary Rosen [unintelligible]…That shows you the value of social networking and just how important the media can be in this election cycle, and I just think that she is amazing. And I know she wants, she wants [unintelligible]…

Romney: She's out there. She's, she's in Texas tonight. She was in Louisiana last night. She's raising money in those places. She was at Ben Crenshaw's house for dinner today, tonight. [Unintelligible.] So there are some benefits. One of the benefits I get is eating the world's best dessert, which I will. [Audience laughs.] Thank you. [Applause.]

Transcription by Sydney Brownstone, Maya Dusenbery, Ryan Jacobs, Deanna Pan, and Sarah Zhang.

[300 comments follow...]

[The Consul]

So is he saying the only way out of boredom is to go on offense?

[8bitagent]

It's...almost as if Mitt Romney is intentionally throwing the election, like a pro wrestling "jobber" or a fixed boxing match. Unless they have some sneaky October Surprise planned(or electronic vote rigging) I can't see how Romney can recover. Like pro wrestling, so much of what happens in politics seems scripted("Obama got Osama!")

[JackRiddler]

It's...almost as if Mitt Romney is intentionally throwing the election, like a pro wrestling "jobber" or a fixed boxing match. Unless they have some sneaky October Surprise planned(or electronic vote rigging) I can't see how Romney can recover. Like pro wrestling, so much of what happens in politics seems scripted("Obama got Osama!")

Yawn.

It's almost as if you will write the same post over and over no matter what happens.

Maybe Bull Connor was scripted to intentionally throw the Civil Rights movement!