No more Texas governors for president
Oops, again.
The footage was used without permission and the extensive use of the broadcast “inaccurately suggests that NBC News and Mr. Brokaw have consented to the use of this material and agree with the political position espoused by the videos,” NBC’s vice president of media law, David N. Sternlicht, wrote Romney’s campaign manager, Matt Rhoades.
“Aside from the obvious copyright issues, this use of the voice of Mr. Brokaw and the NBC News name exploits him and the journalistic credibility of NBC News,” the letter said. The network asked for the campaign to stop running the ad immediately and revise any other videos or commercials to remove at NBC material.
“As a news organization, NBC News objects to any use of NBC News journalists and our copyrighted material that suggests to the public that we or our journalists are taking sides with any individual or organization involved in a political campaign or dispute, and we request that your organization respect that concern,” the letter said.
The tax returns show that Romney is a wealthy man who doesn’t actually work for what he makes. He pays taxes, but at a far lesser rate than most middle class Americans. He also hoards undisclosed amounts of money in the Caymans which the great majority of Americans can’t afford to do, and I suspect most would frown upon those who use such accounts. It means Romney has something to hide still. Romney may also have something to hide in returns going back further than 2010. If his tax rate was 13.9% in 2010, I’m curious to know if it was lower in 2009, and I’d like to know what it was during the Bush years of 2001-2008. Plus, I want to know more about the Swiss bank account and those older returns may tell that tale.
Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski, one-man wrecking crew: Kaczynski managed to unearth a 200-page booklet with all of John McCain’s talking points against Mitt Romney in 2008. While RedState.com had part of it, this is the first time the whole thing’s showed up online. Opposition researchers, time to jump in. (via Reuters)
(via shortformblog)
Out-of-touch Republican presidential front-runner MITT ROMNEY, who earned $374,327.62 in speaker’s fees from February, 2010 to February, 2011 — an average of more than $41,000 per speech.
Only a dumbass One Percenter with six houses would call $374K “not very much.”
Vulture capitalism at work: Bain Capital hurt Georgetown
Want to know why Mitt Romney won’t release his tax returns? Well, one of the reasons is that he probably pays less taxes than you do. As a corporate buyout specialist, he’s made millions of dollars in income from investments, which are taxed at a far lower rate than the wages of regular Americans — as low as 15% for the richest Americans in the country. That means Mitt Romney pays a lower tax rate than many teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other middle class Americans, a policy he would continue if he becomes President. Use our tool to find out how much more you pay in taxes on your income than you would if you enjoyed the special millionaire investor tax rate that Mitt Romney gets.
The first South Carolina ad from the Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert Super PAC accuses Mitt Romney of being a serial killer.
As recently as two weeks ago, Romney had a fairly specific number in mind when it came to the jobs created by his vulture-capitalist firm.
“I’m very happy in my former life; we helped create over 100,000 new jobs.”
A few days ago, the total dropped.
“People here in the state know that in the work that I had, we started a number of businesses, invested in many others, and that over all created tens of thousands jobs.”
This morning, the Romney campaign unveiled a new ad, which moved the goal post again. Greg Sargent picked up on the new message:
The ad claims Romney only created “thousands of jobs,” which is the latest shift in his campaign’s claims.
So, over the course of two weeks, Romney has gone from “over 100,000 jobs” to “tens of thousands” to “thousands.”
By next week, I expect Romney to tell us, “I probably created a handful of jobs.”
Mitt Romney walks away from dying medical marijuana patient without answering his question.
I agree:
“I think anyone who puts his dog in a cage on top of a car for a 12-hour drive and then deludes himself or tries to delude others that the dog really enjoyed it — to me, with all due respect, I feel such a man shouldn’t be president of the United States.”
A special raspberry to my sonofabitch governor:
RICK PERRY: Perry, 61, gets his insurance from the state of Texas, a benefit he can continue to receive for the rest of his life. (According to the Texas Tribune, Perry is already collecting a state pension, even while he earns his salary as governor.)
These men are insured in large-group policies that don’t discriminate against pre-existing conditions and spread the risks and costs of insurance among a pool of healthy and sick applicants who can use the advantages of their size to negotiate better rates with medical providers. (It’s unclear if Santorum actually has an individual policy or a group plan through his campaign or think tank affiliation.)
Their campaign proposals, however, would encourage individual Americans to face down health insurance companies on their own and seek out affordable rates in an unregulated national market where companies can sell policies that don’t comply with state consumer protections and offer little reliability. Insurers have an incentive to enroll the healthiest beneficiaries and avoid or price out older applicants, so that the GOP candidates and many millions of Americans who suffer from pre-existing conditions, would have a hard time finding affordable insurance if they don’t have an alternative offer of employer coverage. In that case, they could (under the Republican proposals) end up uninsured or in a state-based high-risk insurance pool, where the enrollees’ older and sicker risk profile leads to higher premiums and out-of-pocket spending. Those are costs that this particular set of wealthy candidates could surely afford, but many other Americans will struggle with.
