Mittler for President!
Why settle for the lesser Evil?
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by DrEvil » Tue May 15, 2012 5:18 pm
by NeonLX » Tue May 15, 2012 5:47 pm
by 8bitagent » Tue May 15, 2012 8:17 pm
NeonLX wrote:I should add that I had a little bit of respect for Mittler's old man, George. The guy did a very good job of running American Motors, which was formed by the merger of Nash and Hudson back in 1954. Some of my very favorite cars are the Ramblers from the 1950s and 1960s, produced under the competent management of George Romney. Ramblers were practical, well-built and reasonably fuel efficient vehicles that provided a nice alternative to the other big barges of the era.
by Simulist » Tue May 15, 2012 8:19 pm
by NeonLX » Wed May 16, 2012 9:42 am
by Elvis » Thu Jun 07, 2012 7:28 pm
Classmates: Mitt Romney Impersonated Police Officer In High School And College
The Huffington Post | By Nick Wing
Posted: 06/07/2012 10:43 am Updated: 06/07/2012 12:43 pm
GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has long contended that he's a good-humored practical jokester who is only misunderstood as stiff and over-programmed.
As a high school student, Romney's mischievous disposition was frequently on display. Classmates told the Washington Post in a piece published last month that this sometimes led him into unpleasant territory, such as the time he and a group of friends pinned down a screaming boy -- who was presumed to be gay -- and gave him a "hack job" haircut with a pair of scissors.
In another questionable display of his inner prankster, it now appears that Romney was also reportedly fascinated with police uniforms, which he sometimes put on to carry out elaborate practical jokes.
According to a report from National Memo, Romney was open about this practice, telling fellow students at Stanford University, where he studied for two years, that he "sometimes disguised himself as a police officer."
According to classmate Robin Madden, Romney once brought a group of classmates up to his dorm room where he showed them his Michigan State Trooper’s uniform.
From the National Memo report:Said Madden in a recent interview, “He told us that he had gotten the uniform from his father,” George Romney, then the Governor of Michigan, whose security detail was staffed by uniformed troopers. “He told us that he was using it to pull over drivers on the road. He also had a red flashing light that he would attach to the top of his white Rambler.”
In Madden’s recollection, confirmed by his wife Susan, who also attended Stanford during those years, “we thought it was all pretty weird. We all thought, ‘Wow, that’s pretty creepy.’ And after that, we didn’t have much interaction with him,” although both Madden and Romney were prep school boys living in the same dorm, called Rinconada.
Madden's account of a young Romney who excitedly spoke of his habit of impersonating a police officer, which is illegal in many states, has been corroborated in the past by other acquaintances from the GOP presidential candidate's youth.
A magistrate at Cranbrook, Romney's boarding school, recounted a famous prank in which Romney dressed up in full uniform and a badge, and placed a police light on top of his vehicle in order to pull over a car full of friends on a double date.
The story has also been told in the book The Real Romney as well as by fellow students of the future Massachusetts governor.
Graham McDonald, a friend of Romney's at the time who'd helped him plan the joke, explained the high jinks in an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer:As planned, Romney pulled their car over, demanded the vehicle registration, and asked for the keys to the trunk - where he "found" the bottle of bourbon McDonald had taken from his dad and planted as part of the ruse.
"He told me and my friend to get out with him, and that he was taking us in," McDonald remembered. The idea was to spook the girls.
One of the young women involved told the Washington Post that she was "terrified" at the time, but that they'd all shared in the laugh after they realized what was really happening.
While the treatment of such behavior has no doubt become more severe in the period between Romney's antics and the present, National Memo points out that impersonating a police officer is a crime -- and a fairly serious one at that -- in the states of California, where Stanford is located, and Michigan, where Cranbrook is located. While some may be concerned about the legal implications of the decades-old acts, the episodes appear more indicative of a Romney who, from a young age, displayed a comfort with power and privilege that his peers have suggested he used to act out in his quest for social acceptance.
by Simulist » Thu Jun 07, 2012 8:43 pm
by semper occultus » Fri Jun 08, 2012 4:25 am
by 2012 Countdown » Fri Jun 08, 2012 3:02 pm
by seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 13, 2012 4:11 pm
Romney Cedes US Policies to Israel
June 13, 2012
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s “conservative” foreign policy contrasts with what many past GOP conservatives have advocated, such as Romney’s blunt assertion that he will follow Israel in setting U.S. policy in the Middle East, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
By Paul R. Pillar
Anthropologists have only partially constructed the evolutionary paths of modern mankind and of human species that have died out. There is not necessarily direct progression from known species of one era to those of a later one.
The same is true of the varieties of homo politicus americanus, even though the fossil record is more complete because it is more recent. Contributing to confusion is the application of similar labels to very different sub-species at different times.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Such thoughts arise in reading Jacob Heilbrunn’s insightful commentary on the revisiting of the Richard Nixon story by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. As Heilbrunn correctly points out, it was the Right and not just the Left that distrusted Nixon, with backward-looking liberals having perhaps more reason than conservatives to remember favorably many of Nixon’s policies. But the meaning of Right and Left in the United States has changed significantly since Nixon’s time.
The lineage of the conservative opposition to Nixon included Senator Everett Dirksen, who when nominating the conservative Robert Taft at the 1952 Republican convention pointed down at Thomas Dewey and said, “Don’t take us down the path to defeat again.”
It included Barry Goldwater telling conservatives at another Republican convention eight years later — conservatives who were not happy about Nixon getting the presidential nomination — to “grow up” if they wanted to take control of the party. It included Goldwater’s winning of the nomination four years after that, Ronald Reagan’s primary challenge in 1976 to Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford, and Reagan’s eventual electoral triumph in 1980.
But any ancestral lines from Reagan to the Right of today are at best tenuous and muddled. On many domestic and fiscal policies, it is hard to see any lines at all. According to former Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett, Reagan’s tax increases, which he endorsed in return for spending cuts, totaled the equivalent of $367 billion in current dollars.
This past weekend former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush commented that both his father — Reagan’s vice-president and successor — and Reagan himself would have had a hard time winning a nomination from today’s Republican Party.
On foreign policy, it is misleading to describe Reagan’s approach, as Heilbrunn does, as having “essentially repudiated the Nixon-Kissinger approach to foreign affairs by substituting a combination of the old rollback doctrine and neoconservative anticommunism.” Reagan’s underlying assumptions about the USSR had something in common with those of George Kennan, in that they both foresaw the crumbling of the Soviet system from within due to that system’s inherent weaknesses.
Reagan did give the process a nudge by declaring an arms race, knowing the United States could always outspend the Soviets. There also were proxy wars, but they were much less a factor in the eventual crumbling. Stoking the Afghan insurgency may have been partially an exception, but that started as a project of Zbigniew Brzezinski and Jimmy Carter, whom no one can accuse of being neoconservatives.
There was nothing in Reagan’s policies anything like the neoconservative trademark — seen most clearly with the Iraq War — of trying to use U.S. military force to inject American values directly into benighted foreign lands ruled by loathed regimes.
Like Nixon and Kissinger, Reagan engaged with the chief foreign adversary of the day. And as with Barack Obama, a long-term (beyond any one presidency) objective of that engagement was the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons.
Some of the senior figures in Reagan’s administration — though not Secretary of State George Shultz — did not seem to believe Reagan really envisioned a nuclear-weapons-free world, and in any case did not accept that objective themselves. Cold Warriors such as Caspar Weinberger and William Casey seemed content, or even anxious, to wage that war forever.
In the two decades since the presidencies of Reagan and the elder Bush, a different subspecies, now bearing the label “conservative,” has evolved and has come to dominate a major portion of the American political environment. It is markedly different from previously dominant creatures who carried the same label as recently as 25 years ago, although one can find bits of genetic material from the likes of Weinberger or Casey.
The curious disjunction between the elder George Bush and the younger George Bush epitomizes the remarkable transition involved. Political anthropologists still have a lot of work to do in helping us to understand the evolution of this newer breed. Some attributes of the breed, such as a close link to revealed religion and a fixation on matters of the pelvis, may be rooted in larger societal trends or be reactions to those trends.
This political evolution can be considered part of an overall rightward lurch in American politics, but some of the most important characteristics involved cannot best be described in right-vs.-left terms. There are, for example, certain uses of the imperial presidency, with regard to which, as Heilbrunn aptly puts it, “next to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, Nixon was a piker.”
Perhaps the most salient set of characteristics comprises a self-righteousness, an associated denial of legitimacy to political opponents, and a further associated resistance to compromise. These were the characteristics to which Jeb Bush was referring when he observed that Reagan, “based on his record of finding accommodation … as would my dad” would have had difficulty winning acceptance amid “an orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement, doesn’t allow for finding some common ground.”
Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, in their recent work on dysfunction in the American political system, put it succinctly and bluntly: “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
The contrast between old and new is just as stark between some present-day congressional leadership and Everett Dirksen, who as Republican leader in the Senate — although he was a strong conservative on fiscal matters — worked closely and effectively with his Democratic counterparts and also was a key source of support for major aspects of Lyndon Johnson’s foreign policy.
The attributes of the new breed of conservatism have major implications for the foreign policy postures of today, including the positions of this year’s presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney. The self-righteousness and resistance to compromise show through.
Those positions include unbridled confidence in the all-purpose efficacy of U.S. military power, spending to expand that power substantially without regard to either specific uses of that power or fiscal implications, acceptance of permanent conflict with adversaries (including even the legacy Cold War adversary, Russia), rejection of engagement with adversaries, and contracting out a major portion of U.S. foreign policy to the government of Israel.
Romney has said: “The actions that I will take will be actions recommended and supported by Israeli leaders.” This is very different not only from what Richard Nixon did but also from what conservatives who opposed Nixon favored.
by Handsome B. Wonderful » Thu Jun 14, 2012 6:58 pm
by Luther Blissett » Thu Jul 12, 2012 1:42 pm
by justdrew » Thu Jul 12, 2012 5:48 pm
It's Romney's Voter Fraud, Stupid
Far be it for me to call TPM's Josh Marshall "stupid", though it does make for a more eye-catching headline. It also happens to be a fact, as I see it, that Romney's refusal to release his tax returns from any year prior to 2010, and especially his local state return from 2010, is about hiding evidence of a felony crime, as much or likely more than it is about hiding embarrassing details of off-shore bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Switzerland, etc.
Josh argued yesterday that the latter is the reason for the presumptive GOP nominee's continuing refusal to publicly disclose those tax returns. It's almost certainly a part of the campaign's calculations and, as he posits convincingly in his blog item headlined "Kryptonite", hard visual confirmation of Romney's foreign tax shelters would be difficult to shake off with explanations to Mr. and Mrs. America.
But the use of legal off-shore tax shelters can be massaged through the "conservative" "messaging" machine with a legitimate-sounding case that avoidance of federal taxes is somehow a patriotic "conservative" duty and/or otherwise yet another example of Romney's keen business insight and smart, fully legal fiscal discipline which every American should someday aspire to.
What cannot be so easily brushed off or propagandized away --- not without completely undermining the current culmination of the GOP's nearly-decade long effort in creating the imaginary notion of massive Democratic "voter fraud" which must be rectified immediately with polling place Photo ID restrictions (actually little more than the GOP's attempt to suppress the legitimate Democratic-leaning vote while preventing almost no existing voter fraud) --- is the likelihood that those tax returns would reveal indisputable evidence that this year's GOP standard-bearer is an actual voter fraud felon himself...
To date, there has been no legitimate explanation for Mitt Romney having cast a vote in the January 2010 Special Election for the U.S. Senate between Scott Brown and Martha Coakley. At the time of his vote (which he has admitted doing) he owned no house in MA, and yet he was registered to vote from the address of his son's unfinished basement in Belmont, MA.
While Romney owned houses in both CA (purchased in May of 2008 for $12.5m) and NH (April of 2009 for $3.5m) at the time, it wouldn't be until July of 2010 --- a full six months after the Special Election to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy --- that the state's former Governor would once again own a house there, after purchasing an $895,000 townhouse in Belmont.
The state's requirements for residency for the purposes of voting are quite clear in MA. Ones residence must be "where a person dwells and which is the center of his domestic, social, and civil life," according to state law. Yet, the evidence demonstrating that Romney ran afoul of those requirements in order to vote in that election are similarly clear, at least as fairly meticulously compiled by a former Republican Presidential candidate last year.
Romney's 2010 state tax return, which he still refuses to release, even though he finally released his federal return from that same year, likely shows that he did not pay state income tax in MA, but rather declared himself to be a NH resident for its more friendly tax purposes.
Such a declaration, if revealed via his 2010 state tax return, would underscore the apparent fact that Mitt Romney himself is actually a voter fraud felon.
I can think of no reasonable response to that fact if it were to finally be revealed without ambivalence on official tax returns --- not while the GOP has so many years and so much invested in their voter suppression "ferreting out 'voter fraud'!" canard this year.
Romney's going to have to deal with the off-shore investment thing whether the tax returns are released or not. He's already being forced to do so. And, to some extent, his base even likes that part of him, perversely or not. On the other hand, to date, he's largely been able to keep the voter fraud thing --- about which the Pavlovian GOP base has been well-trained over the last ten years to yelp uncritically --- far below the radar. That all changes if he releases his taxes and they show what it seems likely they will.
No amount of "conservative" "messaging" will be able to hide the fact that the party itself has nominated someone who, himself, committed voter fraud in a high-profile federal election just two years ago, even as the party is itself in courtrooms across the nation trying to defend their case that access to the polling place must be tightened up in order to keep those ne'er-do-well zombie ACORN "Democrat" thieves from stealing the election yet again by "diluting" the votes of legal American voters with their rampant voter fraud.
And it is that point, even more than embarrassment over off-shore tax havens, as Josh otherwise-convincingly asserts, which is likely the real "Kryptonite" right now to the GOP, and likely driving Romney's untenable position of keeping years of tax returns a secret even as he runs for the highest office in the land.
* * *
RELATED COVERAGE FROM THE BRAD BLOG:
• 6/13/11: Full details about Romney's apparent voter fraud in MA.
• 6/16/11: My interview [MP3] with former GOP Presidential candidate Fred Karger, just after he first revealed the facts of Romney's voting record and filed a complaint in the state of MA.
• 1/23/12: Updated details on Romney voter fraud concerns after he finally disclosed his 2010 federal tax return, but refused to release that year's state return.
Obama campaign: ‘Severe consequences’ if Romney committed felony with Bain lies
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney may be guilty of federal felony if he lied to the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) about when he ceded control of Bain Capital, President Barack Obama’s campaign suggested on Thursday.
The Boston Globe reported on Thursday that SEC documents showed that Romney continued to serve as Bain’s “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president” until 2002 — even though he has repeatedly claimed that he left the company in 1999.
In an attempt to defend against claims that Romney was Bain’s CEO during the period that the company invested in firms that moved American jobs to countries like China, FactCheck.org may have accidentally revealed that the GOP candidate committed a “federal felony.”
“In fact, if the Obama campaign were correct, Romney would be guilty of a federal felony by certifying on federal financial disclosure forms that he left active management of Bain Capital in February 1999,” FactCheck.org wrote before the The Boston Globe‘s report came to light.
Obama campaign lawyer Robert Bauer noted on Thursday that there could be “severe consequences” for individuals and companies that lied to the SEC.
“If in fact as he now claims that he was not active with the company, that he was not the controlling person that is described here, that means that these statements are false and as I said, there are very, very serious legal consequences that would follow,” Bauer explained.
“Of particular consequence would be a misrepresentation that involves a controlling person,” he added. “And as these representations show, Romney is the controlling person. You know, he is the person who is the sole stockholder, the chairman of the board, the chief executive officer and the president. And the consequences for the controlling person of this sort of potential misrepresentation — and frankly on this record, it appears by his own words — absolute misrepresentation because he’s now saying none of this matters, none of this is true.”
“[It's] very, very serious. And in the normal course would subject somebody in this position to every manner of investigation with all the consequences that you can imagine that would follow.”
For its part, the Romney campaign has claimed that the Globe article is simply incorrect.
“The article is not accurate,” Romney press secretary Andrea Saul said on Thursday. “As Bain Capital has said, as Governor Romney has said, and as has been confirmed by independent fact checkers multiple times, Governor Romney left Bain Capital in February of 1999 to run the Olympics and had no input on investments or management of companies after that point.”
And Romney adviser Matt McDonald told Politico that the FactCheck.org analysis had been misunderstood.
“FactCheck was saying, if Mitt Romney was actively managing Bain, as the Globe asserts, and he certified that he wasn’t actively managing Bain, then he would be guilty of a federal felony,” McDonald said. “They are not saying that he would be guilty of a federal felony [just] for saying he left in 1999.”
by NeonLX » Fri Jul 13, 2012 9:30 am
by seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 17, 2012 8:36 am
REPORT: Biggest Donor To Romney And GOP Did Business With Chinese Mob
By Ali Gharib on Jul 16, 2012 at 4:24 pm
GOP mega-donor and casino kingpin Sheldon Adelson
Things are getting awkward for Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate who pledged to spend a “limitless” amount of money to get Mitt Romney elected. Adelson’s latest woes stem from business practices surrounding his lucrative casino in Macau, the only Chinese city with legalized gambling.
The Macau operation has long been under scrutiny but a new in-depth investigation from ProPublica and PBS focused on allegations of improper, and perhaps in some cases illegal, business dealings by Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands company in China. While focusing on the possibility that Sands violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act with a $700,000 payment to a Chinese associate, PBS also released documents that bolstered accusations of business ties between Adelson’s shop and Chinese organized crime figures.
PBS reports that Sands was clear that, in order to drive business from mainland China to their Macau casino, they would need to use “junkets” — trips arranged by private companies to ferry high-stakes gamblers to Macau:
Among the junket companies under scrutiny is a concern that records show was financed by Cheung Chi Tai, a Hong Kong businessman.
Cheung was named in a 1992 U.S. Senate report as a leader of a Chinese organized crime gang, or triad. A casino in Macau owned by Las Vegas Sands granted tens of millions of dollars in credit to a junket backed by Cheung, documents show.
Cheung did not respond to requests for comment.
Another document says that a Las Vegas Sands subsidiary did business with Charles Heung, a well-known Hong Kong film producer who was identified as an office holder in the Sun Yee On triad in the same 1992 Senate report. Heung, who has repeatedly denied any involvement in organized crime, did not return phone calls.
Because Nevada gambling authorities forbid doing any business with organized crime, Sands’s Las Vegas gambling licenses could hang in the balance. (Adelson and his company refused to comment for the PBS story.) But Adelson has other issues with his China operations.
In 2001, Adelson allegedly helped derail House Republican measure opposing Beijing’s Olympic bid due to human rights issues. “The bill will never see the light day, Mr. Mayor. Don’t worry about it,” he reportedly told Beijing’s mayor after phoning then-House Majority Whip Tom Delay. Sands went on to receive its lucrative casino license from China.
Part of Adelson’s Chinese dealings, which came under federal scrutiny in 2011, went through a non-profit called the Adelson Center for U.S.-China Enterprise. According to a WikiLeaks cable flagged by Salon, the association, which was meant to facilitate business between the U.S. and China, was shut down by China after some “missteps” with “funds transfer mechanisms” used by Sands. Unlike competitors, the cable said, Sands lobbied Beijing directly instead of going through Macau authorities. Adelson and Sands deny any wrongdoing related to the federal investigation.
Adelson’s many interests in politics are sometimes business-oriented and, on other issues, purely driven by ideology. Either way, his spending is massive. Adelson pledged to join forces with the Koch brothers to take down President Obama. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) — a top surrogate for Romney’s campaign — said of Adelson’s Chinese business interests and political giving that “maybe in a round-about way, foreign money is coming into an American campaign, political campaigns.”
Romney’s ‘Fact-Checker’ Cover-up
July 16, 2012
Exclusive: The “independent fact-checkers,” who have been shielding Mitt Romney from questions about Bain Capital’s off-shoring jobs and closing factories, are growing more isolated as the New York Times and other news outlets call for Romney to disclose more, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Mitt Romney is refusing to answer questions about contacts with his Bain Capital subordinates after he took a partial leave of absence in February 1999 to work on the Winter Olympics. Instead, he’s sticking to sweeping denials that he had any role in managing the company as it off-shored jobs and shuttered factories.
Increasingly, Romney’s defense relies on self-styled “independent fact-checkers,” Brooks Jackson at Annenberg Center’s FactCheck.org and the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, who have issued quarrelsome denunciations of President Barack Obama’s campaign for connecting Romney to Bain’s activities from 1999 to 2002.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney waving to a crowd in Ohio. (Photo credit: mittromney.com)
Yet, these “fact-checkers” acknowledge that they are operating with a limited body of facts, i.e. what has so far been made public. In an interview on MSNBC on Monday, Kessler admitted that he had no access to internal information at Bain Capital regarding how often Romney was in touch with his company in those three years.
In an e-mail, I asked Kessler if he would join in calling on Romney to provide more data and thus resolve the issue of exactly what his role was at Bain. Kessler agreed that “Romney could certainly clear this up by releasing more information,” but Kessler did not indicate that he would ask Romney to do so.
Instead, Kessler continued complaining that “the Obama campaign has not provided enough evidence to back up claims of Romney being personally involved in deals post-1999. The burden really is on them since they are making the charge.”
Kessler also said he is not responsible for how campaigns cite his work or that of other “fact-checkers.” Romney repeatedly has cited Kessler and FactCheck.org as clearing him of allegations from the Obama campaign – and now from a number of news organizations – despite the long paper trail from Bain Capital (and Romney himself) reporting his continued Bain involvement during the three years in question.
To state the obvious, it seems like a contradiction in purpose for “independent fact-checkers” to allow themselves to become accomplices in a politician stonewalling the disclosure of facts that bear directly on his qualifications and integrity. At minimum, it would seem that Kessler and FactCheck.org should suspend their denunciations of the Obama campaign until Romney and Bain clear up the many discrepancies.
On Monday, the New York Times tallied 142 times when Romney’s name appears on Bain’s securities regulation forms during the three-year period, many listing him as owner, chairman, chief executive officer and the controlling person. Talking Points Memo cited one such form that listed Romney’s “principal occupation” as “managing director” of Bain Capital Investors VI Inc., a private equity fund.
Romney also told the Boston Herald in 1999 that he would continue assisting Bain in decisions regarding investments and personnel. However, in TV interviews last Friday, Romney repeated his current mantra that he provided no such input. When pressed on exactly what contacts he actually had, he dodged the questions and referred back to the supportive stories by the two “independent fact-checkers.”
‘Retroactive’ Retirement?
On Sunday, Ed Gillespie, a senior adviser to the Romney campaign, went on CNN to reiterate Romney’s position, but added a new twist by claiming that Romney had “retired retroactively” from Bain Capital two years after moving to Salt Lake City – whatever that means.
Ever since he ran for Massachusetts governor in 2002, Romney has sought to distance himself from the results of Bain Capital investments, including some that he engineered before his partial leave of absence in 1999. Some of those investments led to closed factories, painful layoffs and off-shoring of jobs to low-wage countries.
Instead of taking responsibility for those outcomes, Romney has insisted that a bright line existed between his 15 years of hands-on control of the private equity firm and the three years after he agreed to oversee the Winter Olympics games in Salt Lake City.
That attempt to convince voters that there was a “good” Bain Capital under Romney and a “bad” Bain Capital once he left has led to the current confusion and — as far as the Romney campaign is concerned — the helpful intervention of the two “independent fact-checkers.” But they acknowledge that they have no inside information about exactly what Romney was telling his subordinates during those years or how often he was in communication with them.
The “fact-checkers” simply have taken Romney at his word and taken Obama to task. Annenberg’s FactCheck.org told the President’s campaign that it was “all wet” in its six-page defense of the Obama ads that blamed Romney for Bain-related layoffs and off-shoring. Kessler gave Obama and his campaign four “Pinocchios” (a total “whopper”) in one “fact-check” and three “Pinocchios” in a follow-up.
Those “fact-checking” reports, which read more like tendentious legal arguments from Romney’s lawyers than journalistic assessments, prompted Romney to flood the airwaves with attack ads citing those “independent fact-checkers” and calling President Obama a liar. Romney also demanded an “apology,” which Obama refused to give. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Romney ‘Fact-Checking’ Scandal.”]
Demands for Answers
Though Brooks Jackson and Glenn Kessler have become heroes to the Romney campaign and its Republican backers, these “independent fact-checkers” have found themselves increasingly isolated within the journalistic community as more news outlets note the contradictory Bain filings and call for more disclosures by Romney’s camp.
On Monday, the New York Times published an editorial, entitled “Mitt Romney’s Complaints” with a sub-head, “He is not coming clean with voters and President Obama has nothing to apologize for.” The editorial states: “If Mr. Romney doesn’t want to provide real answers to the questions about his career, he had better develop a thicker skin. Mr. Romney’s descriptions of when he left Bain have been erratic and self-serving.
“In 2002, when he needed to show he was still a Massachusetts resident, he denied he had quit in 1999, saying he had taken a leave of absence to run the Olympics committee. A series of documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Committee show that Bain certainly didn’t describe him as absent after 1999. …
“Mr. Romney has persistently refused to tell voters about his finances. Even now it is not clear how much money he has made from Bain in the 13 (or 10) years since he left the company. The right way to respond to Mr. Obama is to release his tax returns from that period, or open up Bain documents. But Mr. Romney told CNN he would not release more than the one year’s return he has already released and the one for 2011 when it is finished.”
If Annenberg’s Jackson and the Post’s Kessler want to show that they truly care about facts, they would join the New York Times and others in demanding more disclosures from Romney – and they would be offended that he is using them to hide relevant information from the American voters.
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