Finally, it’s Friday. And another warm day in store for us around here (and just about everybody else, I expect). Yesterday we had our 12th day of the year where we got into the 90s, and today, appropriately, will be number 13. In a typical year, we hit 90+ seven times, so this has been a hot one. Dry, too. My sister had to come over and get some water, ‘cuz her well is getting dangerously low, and I (thank goodness) have city water.
Poor Mitt Romney. First, he said he was a job creator. Then it turns out he was an outsourcing job killer at Bain. Then he said, “nu-uh, I wasn’t even at Bain after 1999.” Then SEC documents surfaced showing that Mitt was CEO, sole shareholder, and chief cook and bottle washer. Then Mitt said, “doesn’t count. That was just some legal mumbo-jumbo.”
So now, it turns out that back when he was trying to prove he was eligible to run for MA Governor (despite the fact that he had been living in Utah for three years), he testified that he had all kinds of business ties to Bain and Bain-related companies.
Mitt Romney testified to Massachusetts officials in 2002 that he maintained business ties during his Olympics work, undermining his argument that he had no connection to Bain Capital or related companies after 1999. Notably, his campaign has refused to deny whether or not he ever held meetings with Bain during his time in Salt Lake City.
So, once again, Mitt. Were you lying then, or lying now?
Just got back from a morning diversion. The fire alarm went off here, so we all got to go stand out in the parking lot for half an hour. Sadly, the building is still standing, so I had to come back to my office.
If you have a Yahoo account, you may be screwed.
Nearly 443,000 email addresses and passwords for a Yahoo site were exposed late Wednesday. The impact stretched beyond Yahoo because the site allowed users to log in with credentials from other sites — which meant that user names and passwords for Yahoo, Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Hotmail, AOL and many other email hosts were among those posted publicly on a hacker forum.
It’s always something, I guess.
Oh well, back to work. Let’s get this damn long week over with.
My cousin’s ex-husband just came by to fix my sister’s AC so my upstairs guest room is chilling down right now.
:hot: :pup: :banana: :penguin:
We had a nice cool day with rain here and there. 90 is a cool day. Plus the sun was behind clouds most of the day and that helps too.
The Rasta Family is at the park again. A family of 7 with 5 kids and mom and dad. They are there all day long when they are there so they must be homeless. This park has a pool. All of them have the most beautiful dreads that’s why I call them the Rasta Family. I hate seeing homeless people in the summer. I can’t imagine being stuck out in the heat 24 hours a day. I give them cold melons sometimes but it seems like so little. I’m sure they get first dibs at the shelter being a family but still. I wonder if they are refugees from New Orleans. We got a bunch of them when that happened.
Happy Anniversary PJ and Granny! :banana: You’re as stable as most of the gay couple I know! 😉
Mitt’s Political Vortex
By GAIL COLLINS
Published: July 13, 2012 153 Comments
Do you think it’s a coincidence that ever since the world’s physicists announced that they had discovered a possible breakthrough in the study of mass and energy last week, our politics has taken on a kind of black-hole quality?
First, Bain Capital. Let’s see if we can get this straight. In 1999, Mitt Romney quit his hypersuccessful financial career at the private-equity firm in order to run the troubled Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. “I would walk away from my leadership at Bain Capital at the height of its profitability and take a position without compensation,†he wrote in his book “Turnaround.â€
He was out, gone — walked away. Get it? It is very important that you do because given the hysteria with which the Romney campaign is defending this 1999 termination marker, you would think that in the next few years Bain had embarked on a new and lucrative path involving the slave labor of My Little Ponies.
Romney gave five network television interviews on the subject on Friday. While it was true that a bunch of Securities and Exchange Commission filings submitted into the new millennium described Romney as Bain Capital’s boss, that was a technicality, he told CNN.
Well, actually, he said, “I was the owner of an entity that is filing that information.†Also that there’s a difference between an owner and “a person who’s running an entity.â€
It was Romney’s Star Trek moment. They were always talking about entities on Star Trek, and entities were very seldom good news.
By the time Mitt had cleared the interview decks, he was sounding more earthbound and demanding that President Obama apologize for an aide who said that Romney had either lied or committed a felony. I believe I speak for all Americans when I say that it would be nice if presidential campaigns avoided the use of the word “felony†except perhaps when discussing the occasional member of Congress.
But let’s get back to that entity. In the period between 1999 and 2002, Bain Capital engaged in a certain amount of activity along the steel-mill-closing, toymaker-killing, job-exporting lines. But Romney says he wasn’t responsible because he had walked away. The figure skaters and curling teams needed him. He and Bain were finito.
Sort of. While he was in Utah getting the luge runs in shape, Romney was also still getting a six-figure salary for being a Bain “executive.†Perhaps for Mitt, that was just the going-away equivalent of a monogrammed briefcase. Although it does sort of take the steam out of his principled refusal to accept any money from the Olympics until his turnaround was successfully completed.
So to summarize: Romney was at Bain after 1999, but not necessarily in the sense of occupying physical space. He was employed by folks in Utah, but not in the sense of the people who made out his paycheck.
If we ever manage to really get our heads around Higgs boson, perhaps we will also be able to understand the Mitt Romney Olympics period.
The Democrats suggested all this could be cleared up if Romney would release his back tax returns. There are actually very few things in the universe that the Democrats do not think would be made better if Romney released his tax returns.
This has not been a great stretch for Mitt. Pictures from his family vacation made him look dorky and rich. A woman recently asked the House speaker, John Boehner, how he was going to “make me love Mitt Romney,†and Boehner basically told her that it was impossible.
This was at a fund-raiser in West Virginia. Boehner said that come November, his side would be going to the polls to get rid of Barack Obama, and that the only ones marching off to vote Republican because they actually liked the idea of making Mitt Romney president would be his co-religionists and folks who have been invited to his house for dinner. (“Mitt Romney has some friends, relatives and fellow Mormons … some people that are going to vote for him. But that’s not what this election is about.â€)
Barack Obama is anti-matter. That’s what this election is all about.
Returning to Washington, Boehner triumphantly led the House through its 33rd symbolic vote to eliminate the Obama health care program. According to an estimate by CBS News, the House has spent 80 hours on this effort. As a result, the Republican leadership probably won’t have time to deal with a bipartisan Senate bill to fix the financial problems at the U.S. Postal Service, which is overwhelmed with debt obligations, many of them because of unnecessary and intrusive Congressional regulations.
The Republicans currently have a symbolic legislative agenda and a presidential candidate who can be in two places at one time, but whom nobody likes.
Other than that, it’s all good. Nobody’s brought up the dog on the car roof for days.
From FireDog Lake here is the Sunday rundown
ABC’s This Week: Chicago mayor and former Obama White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, and Romney supporter and potential vice presidential nominee Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH). Roundtable: George Will, James Carville, Mary Matalin, Matthew Dowd.
CBS’ Face the Nation: Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). Obama deputy campaign manager Stefanie Cutter and Romney senior adviser Kevin Madden. Economic Roundtable:TIME’s Rana Foroohar, Moody’s Mark Zandi, UC Berkeley’s Robert Reich, American Spectator’s John Fund. Political Roundtable: Michael Gerson, Frank Rich, John Dickerson, Norah O’Donnell.
Chris Hayes: Edward Conard, former partner at Bain Capital from 1993-2007 and author of “Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy is Wrong.†Alexis Goldstein (@alexisgoldstein), Occupy Wall Street activist and former vice president of information technology at Merrill Lynch. William Black, associate professor of economic and law at University of Missouri-Kansas City and author of “The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry.†Victoria DeFrancesco Soto, Communications Director for Latino Decisions and visiting scholar at University of Texas-Austin. Dedrick Muhammad, senior economic director of NAACP Alyona Minkovski (@thealyonashow), host “The Alyona Show†on RT, the first Russian 24/7 English-language news channel. Stephen Carter, law professor at Yale University and Bloomberg View Columnist. Author of “The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln.â€
Chris Matthews:
CNN’s State of the Union: Horse race, State Budgets, Drought. Romney Senior Campaign Adviser Ed Gillespie and Obama Senior Campaign Adviser David Axelrod. VA Gov. Bob McDonnell and MA Gov. Deval Patrick. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack on the worst drought in 25 years.
Fareed Zakaria – GPS: Roundtable: Larry Kudlow, Zanny Minton Beddoes, Chrystia Freeland, Zachary Karabell. Syrian opposition leader Abdul Basit Sieda. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Higgs boson.
Fox News Sunday: Brit Hume hosts. Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Gov. Terry Branstad (R-IA). Then, Karl Rove and Joe Trippi. Roundtable: Bill Kristol, Jeff Zelany, Fred Barnes, Juan Williams.
Moyers & Company: Banking on Greed. The uphill fight to make banks honest and accountable, plus the latest battleground in the war on Planet Earth with Sheila Bair, Then, genetically modified seeds with Vandana Shiva.
NBC’s Meet the Press: Ed Gillespie. Then, Assistant Democratic Leader Sen. Dick Durbin (IL) and Assistant Republican Leader Sen. Jon Kyl (AZ). Roundtable: Grover Norquist, NAACP President Ben Jealous, Mike Murphy, Hilary Rosen, Bob Woodward. Finallly, Bob Costas on the Penn State scandal.
Newsmakers: Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX), one of the top-ranking House Republicans on economic issues, talks about the future of the Bush-era tax cuts and tax and spending legislation, GOP reaction to President Obama’s tax plan and jobs and the economy…
Q & A: Military historian and author Antony Beevor. He discusses his newly released historical narrative, “The Second World War.†Beevor talks about the origins of the conflict spanning from before Hitler’s invasion of Poland to the aftermath of the war and its global impact on the major powers of the day…
Religion & Ethics.
60 Minutes: Steve Jobs – In his first interview about the visionary Apple CEO, biographer Walter Isaacson reveals the private Steve Jobs few knew. Jobs also tells his story in his own words, as Isaacson recorded some of the over 40 interviews he conducted with him. Apps for Autism – Autistic people whose condition prevents them from speaking are making breakthroughs with the help of tablet computers and special applications that allow them to communicate, some for the first time.
To the Contrary: Panelists discuss the shocking video of an Afghan woman’s execution by the Taliban. Then, a first for women and the Olympics. And, Behind the Headlines: BPA. A plastic by-product that’s everywhere and rasing health concerns.
Univision’s Al Punto: First Lady Michelle Obama, former Mexico presidential candidate Santiago Creel, musicians Juan Andres and Nicolas Ospina.
Chinese Workers Hail Romney’s Record as Job Creator
Mass Pro-Romney Rally in Beijing
BEIJING (The Borowitz Report) – After a brutal week in which he was booed by the NAACP and grilled by the media, Republican presidential choice Mitt Romney got some support from an unlikely place today: Beijing.
Manufacturing workers from across China flooded downtown Beijing to show their gratitude for Mr. Romney’s robust record of job creation in China while at the helm of the private equity firm Bain Capital.
While Mr. Romney’s feats of outsourcing have taken a political toll at home, they have made him a national hero in China, according to workers like Qiu Huang, who attended the rally.
“I owe my job to Mitt Romney, and so do many of my friends and family members,†he said. “His record as a job creator, in China at least, is second to none.â€
Mr. Qiu said that if Mr. Romney ran for President of China, “he’d win in a landslide – he wouldn’t even need those billionaire brothers to buy ads for him.â€
But the Chinese worker was surprised to learn that Mr. Romney had spent the better part of the week denying that he still worked at Bain during the company’s frenzy of outsourcing jobs to China.
“Why would you deny doing a great thing like that?†he asked. “That would be like denying you gave people healthcare.â€
Somewhere in china perhaps there is a community organizer who just got an idea. :rofl2: