David Frum. During the Bush administration, I used to really hate him, but now, kinda like how Bruce Springsteen has a grudging respect for NJ Governor Chris Christie, I think he’s pretty good (for a Republican). Pretty astute. Frum says really smart things.

Things the GOP ought to listen to.

David Frum’s instantly published new e-book, Why Romney Lost grabs the lapels of shell-shocked Republicans and attempts to talk some sense into them.

His article in The Daily Beast today, “How the GOP Got Stuck in the Past,” is a must read, an absolute must-read:

The ratification of the Obama agenda will understandably enrage and depress conservatives. Yet if there is any lesson conservatives ought to have learned from the past four years, it is the danger of succumbing to angry emotion. We’ve had four years of self-defeating rage. Now it’s time for cool.

Those who would urge the GOP to double down on ideology post-2012 should ask themselves: would Republicans have done better if we had promised a bigger tax cut for the rich and proposed to push more people off food stamps and Medi­caid? Would we have done better if we had promised to do more to ban abortion and stop same-sex marriage? If we had committed ourselves to fight more wars? To put the country on the gold standard? Almost half of those surveyed on voting day said they wanted to see taxes raised on Americans earning more than $250,000. Exit polls do tend to oversample Democrats, but the tax result is consistent with other polling that has found that even Republicans would prefer to raise taxes on the rich than see cuts in Medicare.

Some combative conservatives may wish that Mitt Romney had talked more about the various plots and conspiracies they believed Obama to have launched upon the land: Fast & Furious, ACORN, Pigford, U.N. bike lanes, Obama’s imagined plan to abolish the suburbs. But while this kind of angry talk may gain eyeballs on Hannity, it’s not the stuff that swings undecided voters in Colorado and ­Virginia—­especially not the women voters who formed 53 percent of the electorate on Tuesday; or the moderates, men and women, who formed 41 percent of it; or the nonreligiously observant, who formed three quarters of it. Only 34 percent of the vote Tuesday was made up of white men. The share of the vote that was made up of older, conservative white men must have been much smaller still. Fox Nation never was more than a very tiny slice of the American nation, and it was only sad self-delusion that ever led anyone to think otherwise.

Interesting to note how much agreement David Frum and Rachel Maddow would find themselves in, post election, isn’t it? I’d love to see Frum as a guest on her show and being interviewed by Bill Moyers, too.

How the GOP Got Stuck in the Past (The Daily Beast)

Do yourself a favor and watch this video clip at least until the end of Frum’s first answer to the big question: “Why did Mitt Romney lose?” He also gets a very good point in at around the 11 minute mark about how Republican voters were exploited and fleeced for their donations with apocalyptic, “death of America” rhetoric. Fellow Republican Joe Scarborough strongly agrees with him.
 

 
The clip with Newt Gingrich at approximately 1:40 is a fucking classic. Also, notice how Rick Santorum speaks of the multi-millionaire who beat him for the GOP nod with such unbridled contempt. You can tell that he absolutely hates Mitt Romney. Then again who can blame him? Santorum doesn’t even try to hide it. He can’t! (It almost makes me like him, but not quite).

Some Democrat-leaning PAC or The Daily Show or Rachel Maddow needs to make a slicker, nastier version of this puppy, pronto! There’s so much great material to work with.
 

 
Via reddit/r/politics

 
Mitt Romney’s VP running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan was booed repeatedly throughout his speech at the AARP convention today. Some of the loudest boos followed Ryan’s claim that the Affordable Health Act “turned Medicare into a piggy bank for Obamacare.”

Ryan’s lying to them. He knows that he’s lying to them and they obviously know that he’s lying to them:

“The first step to a stronger Medicare is to repeal Obbamacare. I had a feeling there would be mixed reaction, so let me get into it. It weakens medicare for today’s seniors and puts it at risk for the next generation. First, it funnels $716 billion out of Medicare to pay for a new entitlement we didn’t even ask for. Second, it puts 15 unelected bureaucrats in charge of medicare’s future.”

Congressman Ryan has included the exact same $716 billion savings from Medicare in his own infamous “Ryan Plan” budgets. Repealing Obamacare would take away several popular benefits for senior citizens included in the law, such as ending the “donut hole” exemption that required seniors to pay more out of pocket for brand name prescription drugs.  And they know it.

Fuck Paul Ryan. What a smug Republican shithead he is.
 

 
While the media is busy focusing on the idiotic “47% of Americans are lazy bums looking for handouts” comments made by Mitt Romney in the “secret” videotape from that $50,000 per plate Republican donor luncheon back in May, now that Mother Jones has published the full transcript of the tape, new turds of “wisdom” from Shit Romney are starting to float to the top. Like this one:

“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.”

Just when you think he can’t possibly get any worse, he gets way worse!

As Mother Jones’ Adam Serwer wrote:

The GOP has finally seen that silver bullet. Only it’s not aimed at the guy they were trying to take out.

That it’s a fuckin’ self-inflicted wound, makes this all the more delicious!

Elizabeth Heath tried to get her head around this latest Romney gaffe at Mamiverse, a website for Latina mothers:

Whoa. It’s one thing to say that the Republican Party will struggle without the Hispanic vote. But to say that “we’re in trouble…as a nation” if Hispanics become committed Democrats suggests that Mr. Romney is nationalistic and maybe, just maybe, a little racist. Perhaps he’s worried about the U.S. becoming a nation of Democrats, as Hispanics, who already make up the country’s largest and largest-growing minority, continue to lean Democratic in their politics. Or is he worried about Hispanics taking over and the white males who make up his constituency becoming a minority? One has to wonder.

One does!

Good luck trying to back-pedal this one Mittens. You’re going to need heaps of it.

Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter… start your “spingines.”
 

Via reddit/r/politics

 
SNL‘s parody anti-Mitt Romney ad is pretty hilarious, but the piece already seems a bit outdated with so much humiliating water running under the bridge for poor Mitt ever since it aired…
 

 
“This man has no dick.”—Bill Murray in Ghostbusters

Another day, another massive, Matterhorn-sized pile of shit for Mitt Romney to step in. In this case, it was actually some shit with a long fuse that he stomped around in awhile back that was caught on videotape. Today that tape came back to haunt him. Today was the day, as Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce so brilliantly put it, that Mitt Romney “declared a class war on himself. “

In a closed-door meeting with an inner circle of high-end, millionaire GOP donors, Romney let his hair down—as much as he ever does, of course—and testified to his fine-feathered friends that:

“There are 47% of the people who will vote for the President no matter what. All right, there are 47% who are with him, 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. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this President no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.”

As David Corn put it at Mother Jones (where the story of the secret videotape first broke today):

Here was Romney raw and unplugged—sort of unscripted. With this crowd of fellow millionaires, he apparently felt free to utter what he really believes and would never dare say out in the open. He displayed a high degree of disgust for nearly half of his fellow citizens, lumping all Obama voters into a mass of shiftless moochers who don’t contribute much, if anything, to society, and he indicated that he viewed the election as a battle between strivers (such as himself and the donors before him) and parasitic free-riders who lack character, fortitude, and initiative. Yet Romney explained to his patrons that he could not speak such harsh words about Obama in public, lest he insult those independent voters who sided with Obama in 2008 and whom he desperately needs in this election. These were sentiments not to be shared with the voters; it was inside information, available only to the select few who had paid for the privilege of experiencing the real Romney.

“Generally you don’t see that kind of behavior in a major appliance.”—Bill Murray in Ghostbusters

He said this shit, too:

My heritage, my dad as you probably know was the governor of Michigan and was the head of a car company. But he was born in Mexico, and, uh, had he been born of, uh, Mexican parents, I’d have a better shot at winning this. [Rich donors cracking up]
But he was unfortunately born to Americans living in Mexico. He lieved there for a number of years. And, uh, uh, I say that jokingly, but it would be helpful to be, uh ... Latino.

I hope none of you had liquids in your mouth when you read that last one, but I would imagine that whopper of a line left plenty of shorted-out computer keyboards and iPads in its wake.

And best of all, he said THIS:

“We ... we, uh, use Ann sparingly right now so that people don’t get tired of her.”

I can think of at least one numskull Mormon multi-millionaire Republican Presidential candidate who’s going to be sleeping on the couch tonight. You, too?

If Romney is this comically clueless when it comes to talking about his own wife in public, how would Mittens fare with the G8 leaders and NATO? Vladimir Putin probably can’t wait to look deep into Mitt Romney’s eyes and make him piss right in his pants…

I’ve always seen Mitt Romney as “Thurston Howell III” from Gilligan’s Island, but he’s really much closer to another Jim Backus character: “Mr. Magoo”!

Happily, we’ll probably never get to find out what sort of damages Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan would inflict upon America. I am actually starting to give a lil’ credence to those wingnut conspiracy theories that Mitt Romney is a Manchurian candidate sent to infiltrate and then destroy the Republican Party. I mean, this guy sucks! He’s the worst of the worst. How can Mittens even top this latest misstep? Pull his dick out during the third debate?

“This chick is TOAST!”—Bill Murray in Ghostbusters

Here’s the wholly inadequate statement that his campaign puked up this afternoon, via TPM:

“Mitt Romney wants to help all Americans struggling in the Obama economy. As the governor has made clear all year, he is concerned about the growing number of people who are dependent on the federal government, including the record number of people who are on food stamps, nearly one in six Americans in poverty, and the 23 million Americans who are struggling to find work,” Romney spokesperson Gail Gitcho said in a statement. “Mitt Romney’s plan creates 12 million new jobs in four years, grows the economy and moves Americans off of government dependency and into jobs.”

AS IF this even begins to address this latest mess. So sweet to watch this shit happen in real time. And it’s not even like I’m “rooting” for the Democrats or Obama to win, I just want to see Mitt Romney and the Republicans lose!

UPDATE: Romney himself finally made a statement about the videotape at a press conference Monday evening, via AP

Republican Mitt Romney says a video clip in which he called nearly half of Americans “victims” was “not elegantly stated” and was “spoken off the cuff.” But he says President Barack Obama’s approach is “attractive to people who are not paying taxes.”
...

The Republican nominee did not disavow the comments but said they were made during a question-and-answer session. He said it was indicative of his campaign’s effort to “focus on the people in the middle.”

Not elegantly stated? Oh my, now aren’t we deluded?!?!

During the presser Romney called for the entire videotape to be released. Mother Jones seems happy to oblige him. MJ reporter Adam Serwer tweeted:

“Mitt wants the full video huh? Well don’t worry, there’s more to come.”

The liberal American Bridge PAC has already hit Romney, hard, over his private remarks with a viral video. Watch until the end:
 

(*No, that’s not what he said at all, but hey, Matt Drudge can do it, so why can’t I?)

I was as much amused by Rick Santorum’s comment yesterday—“We will never have the elite, smart people on our side”—during his speech at the ultra conservative Values Voter Summit as I was by this paragraph—or some variation thereof—that invariably followed without any need for further comment or elaboration:

“Rep. Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Kirk Cameron, Gov. Jan Brewer, Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Steve King are among other scheduled speakers.”

On nearly every blog, the ingredients of the report were the video of Santorum (see below) and a mention of some of his fellow far-right fuit loops who would be speaking at the conservative Christian political confab. Perhaps they were trying to be droll—I decided to take it that way—or maybe they were just dryly reporting the facts. Either way, a list of those particular Republican names speaks volumes, doesn’t it?

Former GOP presidential candidate Santorum’s full quote was:

“We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country. We will never have the elite, smart people on our side, because they believe they should have the power to tell you what to do.”

Well, Rick, that’s one way to look at it, but there’s an obvious—or what should be obvious—flip-side to that equation that you might want to take into consideration: WHY do you reckon that it’s difficult for these “elite, smart people” to acquiesce to the will of a bunch of folks who they perceive as a bunch of ignorant hicks who have decided that they’re going to “take back our country” and so forth?

Take it back from…? And where will these science-denying dumbshit Tea party Taliban types take it back to? Before African Americans had the vote or before they were allowed to play Major League Baseball? Just how far back are we talking, here?

His delightfully candid remark calls into question how Mr. Santorum and other Christian conservatives define “freedom,” a word and concept that was thrown around—and shit on—by at least half of the Values Voters Summit’s speakers: Should “the elite, smart people” stand silently by and do nothing and simply allow, without protest or objection, a group of people they consider to be rank ignoramuses and dangerous buffoons to run roughshod over what they see as THEIR OWN RIGHTS (or the rights of others)?

If you take only the example of marriage equality, one groups wants to get married for a variety of benefits that will have virtually ZERO effect—none—on the lives of conservative religious straight people, so why A.) do the people who attend the VVS even care and B.) why do they think that THEY should have final say over what gay people do, simply because they “don’t agree with it”?

Because… Jebus?

That’s not a reason!

What I don’t get, and what is making me laugh, is how it doesn’t seem to phase Rick Santorum even one tiny little bit that he’s is, in essence, defining himself as being a member of the STUPID TEAM that the evil smart elite people want to subjugate with stuff like gay marriage and insurance being required to cover birth control. His argument isn’t “We’re smarter than they are so they should listen to us,” it’s more like… well, to be honest, I don’t even know, really, how the fuck to parse what Santorum believes. Once someone admits that they’re hositle to intelligence itself, I don’t really feel it’s incumbent upon me to search out the nuance of their blinkered, unsophisticated worldview.

Mr. Santorum doesn’t seem to have noticed the causality between his own position of being against birth control and the fact that he lost—and lost miserably—to a man who now seems set to lose handily himself in the general election. But he has made an important observation: “Smart people” and Republicans don’t have a whole lot in common anymore.

In any case, why aren’t the right wing bloggers and peanut gallery commenters at Breitbart, The National Review and WorldNetDaily absolutely up in arms about Santorum calling them stupid?

Tee-hee! Personally, I think Rick Santorum has inadvertently hit on THE defining reason for the GOP’s problems with “the elite, smart people”: Intelligent, NON-GULLIBLE voters will, never, ever cede the control of their lives to the likes of Michele Bachmann, Steve King or Todd Akin. Any Republican politician who could carry Mississippi, Alabama or Arkansas in a national election IS GOING TO LOSE in the more populous, better-educated coastal states. You can stuff your face with Chick-fil-A until you puke, but nothing is going to change that fact, bunky. The GOP has backed itself into a demographic corner, a demographic that’s literally dying off.

So what advice will those multi-million dollar consulting and marketing firms come up with to help the GOP keep winning elections after they get absolutely trounced this November? Forget about them, I say to you, Republican overlords: It was those top dollar marketing smarty-pantses that gave you guys Mitt fuckin’ Romney in the first place

Nope, Rick Santorum has already got it all figured it out for ya, you shadowy reptilian Republican druids who pull the levers of power behind the curtain: It’s all coming down a simple matter of smart vs DUMB and Santorum defined the battle yesterday in a single sentence of crystal clear truth:

“We will never have the elite, smart people on our side.”

That’s right, NEVER.

Gutting the educational system is the far right’s very last chance of even holding the ground they have now. The Republican establishment pretty much knows that they can’t win national elections strictly along racial demographic lines anymore. Richard Nixon’s so-called “Southern Strategy” is kaput after this current election cycle. But since blockheads tend to vote as a bloc, in the long game, taking advantage of “The Great American IQ Stratification” (which is inevitably how history will see it, unless history is written by future David Bartons) and trying to encourage deeper ignorance and more widespread stupidity is the GOP’s only hope.
 

 
A poll released Monday by Public Policy Polling shows that Mitt Romney is at a distinct disadvantage in the highly important Electoral College swing state of Ohio, polling just 45% to Obama’s 50%, but one of the ancillary questions the pollsters mischievously slipped in sheds some light on how pathetically misinformed—or willfully ignorant—some Ohio Republicans really are.

Does this seem like a trick question to you?

“Who do you think deserves more credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden: Barack Obama or Mitt Romney?”

63% percent said Obama, 6% said Mitt Romney and 31% of the respondents said they were not sure.

If you break it down (see cross tabs), about 15% of the Ohio Republicans who rated themselves “very conservative” actually believe that Mitt Romney deserves the credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden.

That’s more than one in ten!

Mitt Romney obviously can count on, and receive, the support of the most blinkered ignoramuses in the country. No wonder the GOP is so virulently anti-education. Without the low IQ buffoon bloc standing so square-headed in their corner, they’d never win another election, EVER.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying “Democrat” = “smart,” because that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms, but self-identifying as a “Republican” is an admission of one of two things: that you are either throwing your lot with the fucking idiot brigade or that you are a fucking idiot yourself.

Pick one. It’s not a trick question.

 
Kos, the majordomo of liberal blog Daily Kos, cracked me up with his blunt assessment of what is perhaps Mitt Romney’s most difficult to surmount problem with the American electorate: Even after $180 million in TV ads, too many voters still think the guy’s a fucking dick.

And at this late stage of the game, Romney has little time, and few options left, to change their minds…

So if money isn’t doing it, and Romney’s personality isn’t winning him converts, what’s left?

The debates. They start in early October, then it’s bam, bam, bam: 10/3, 10/11 (veep), 10/16, and 10/22. They will present Romney with his last chance to gain points from Obama.

However, he can’t score points by playing it safe. If he tries to be nice and gracious and not touch Obama like he touched Gov. Rick Perry in one of those early-season debates, he might earn brownie points, but Obama will remain unscathed.

So he has to attack.

But remember, people think he’s a dick. So Romney has to attack in a manner that doesn’t reinforce the narrative that he’s a dick. And who really thinks Romney has the chops to pull that off? He can’t interact with NASCAR fans or picnicking ladies or British prime ministers without coming off as a dick. He’s now supposed to deftly attack—with a convincing smile—the guy who is standing between him and his birthright presidency?

Meanwhile, Obama can play it safe. He is winning. He can be gracious and accommodating, all the while rising above any nastiness with presidential bearing. He doesn’t need to win these debates as much as not lose them, and that makes his job so much easier.

It seems pretty clear cut. If Romney plays it safe, he continues to lose. He has to throw that Hail Mary. But by going on the offensive, he’ll remind people that they think he’s a dick. Because he is.

Watching Thurston Howell III Mitt Romney and the Marie Antoinette Republicans flailing this hard—like fish on the sand, right?—is such good fun. I’m not that all hot on the Democrats or Obama, but I would very much like to see Mitt Romney’s richie rich nose rubbed in dogshit in November.
 

Those fucking Disney Obama communists also serve FRENCH fries at the American Pavilion! FRENCH fries! Call the Tea party!

GOP delegates Mark and Irene Harris, of Snyder County, Pennsylvania, were “highly offended” to see a Mexican employee working at the “American Pavilion” of Disney World’s Epcot Center, as Irene posted on their “Rock Star GOP” blog from the GOP national convention in Tampa:

Prior to National Republican Convention we visited Disney for three days.  During our time at Epcot we visited the different countries.  It was neat seeing each country and the employees were from that individual country.  Then we visited America . . . one would think you would find American employees.  We were offended to find a person from Mexico working in America.  Mark spoke up and told them he was highly offended after visiting the other countries and seeing employees from that country and then come to America and find a Mexican.  He was very civil but his point was well made.

I’ll bet it was. Imagine being the manager who had to absorb that piece of Mark’s tiny mind… I can’t currently think of anything that could be more painful. Or stupid.

According to their website, “Mark and Irene are both pro‐life, believe marriage is between one man and one woman, are for open records and transparency, believe in very conservative principles and the Republican platform.”

Sounds about right to me! To this information, I have nothing, absolutely nothing, to add.
 

 
Via Think Progress

 
As an unapologetic IQ snob, I was both appalled and yet amused by the abject stupidity and irrational xenophobia exhibited by Tea Party Express chairwoman Amy Kremer over the weekend when she was asked a direct question by CNN’s Soledad O’Brien about something idiotic that she had posted on Twitter.

As is obvious from the video, Amy Kremer was ready, willing and quite able to inflict her aggressive ignorance on CNN’s global audience. Watching her strain to verbalize her tiny thoughts like turds that would just not plop out was nothing short of incredibly painful… but funny.

Kremer says Mitt Romney “loves America” whereas with the black guy currently occupying the Oval Office it’s “about more a global — having, uh, global, um, oh what’s the word? Being more global, one-world, with other countries, and it’s not about the shining city on the hill, the greatness that has always been America that our Founding Fathers were all about.”

Sarah Palin herself would have winced if she’d have witnessed Amy Kremer’s nincompoopish attempt to Madlib her way out of O’Brien’s question. The muted, comical reactions from the bemused newscaster and the other guests is fairly priceless, especially the reporter who calmly tries to school the inarticulate buffoon sitting beside him. Normally, you would expect to hear the rest of the panel vociferously rebutting such ridiculous, unintelligent statements of questionable “facts” but in the case of the shockingly brain-dead Amy Kremer, it’s obvious that none of them seem to think she’s worth much of an effort! (They’re right.)

A question for CNN’s bookers: What value (besides the lulz) does someone as utterly devoid of intelligence as Amy Kremer OBVIOUSLY IS bring to your newscast?

Then what the fuck is she doing there?

Hey, CNN, why not just invite Jessica Simpson on to see what she thinks about politics and shit? I’d much rather see her on CNN, because at the very least she’s got one up on Kremer since she’s probably figured out the difference between tuna and chicken by now!
 

 
Via Wonkette

via Armchair Patriots

If Todd Akin’s asinine comment about rape moved people as high up on the GOP totem poll as Karl Rove and Mitt Romney to call on him to step down from the Republican ticket in the Missouri Senate race, then why aren’t the GOP bigwigs (and the media and frankly every single woman in the entire US of A) calling for Paul Ryan’s head over his EQUALLY offensive, head-shaking, gob-smackingly stupid comment that RAPE is but a “method of conception”???

WTF???

As DM pal Paul Slansky put it in a new column Paul Ryan Said Something That Should Force Him Off the Ticket, But You Probably Didn’t Hear About It at Huffington Post, rape is “like love-making, just without the love.”

There could be no greater testament to the utter abdication of responsibility by what passes for a “news” media in America in 2012 than that, despite the grotesquerie of this cavalierly callous comment, chances are better than good that this is the first you’re hearing of it.

Here, watch it—and try to figure out why this has gotten NO MAINSTREAM MEDIA play (not even here at the Huffington Post) despite it being, to my mind, a far more offensive remark than Todd Akin’s imbecilic blurt of last weekend. What, are we tired of stupid remarks about rape now, so Ryan gets a free pass?

Given the demands for Akin’s resignation from a mere Senate race when his musings on “legitimate rape” were publicized, what do you imagine the reaction would be if people were as familiar with VP wannabe Ryan’s stunning statement? Might there be a cacophony of outrage? Might there be calls for his resignation from the ticket? Might there be a focus on how fundamentally oblivious these people who would make our laws are to not just women’s but humans’ rights and dignity? Sure, there might, but then of course people would have to have heard about it.

According to the man who would be the proverbial heartbeat away from the White House, and who in any event would—given Romney’s utter hollowness—have an inordinate influence on the judicial appointments that will determine how much freedom our children get to live under, RAPE = “METHOD OF CONCEPTION.” And yet, unless you’re a frequenter of one of a dozen or so lefty blogs—or my friend on Facebook—you probably knew nothing about it.

I truly despair for the country my 14-year-old daughter is inheriting. That a remark this intensely revealing of the danger posed by this ticket can go basically unreported is as nauseating to me as the quote itself.

Hear, hear!

Just look at this smug fuckwit:
 

 
God bless you Nick Denton! There is no schadenfreude quite like Republican schadenfreude and this is just…. a beautiful thing.

Gawker’s John Cook on what they’ve got:

Today, we are publishing more than 950 pages of internal audits, financial statements, and private investor letters for 21 cryptically named entities in which Romney had invested—at minimum—more than $10 million as of 2011 (that number is based on the low end of ranges he has disclosed—the true number is almost certainly significantly higher). Almost all of them are affiliated with Bain Capital, the secretive private equity firm Romney co-founded in 1984 and ran until his departure in 1999 (or 2002, depending on whom you ask). Many of them are offshore funds based in the Cayman Islands. Together, they reveal the mind-numbing, maze-like, and deeply opaque complexity with which Romney has handled his wealth, the exotic tax-avoidance schemes available only to the preposterously wealthy that benefit him, the unlikely (for a right-wing religious Mormon) places that his money has ended up, and the deeply hypocritical distance between his own criticisms of Obama’s fiscal approach and his money managers’ embrace of those same policies. They also show that some of the investments that Romney has always described as part of his retirement package at Bain weren’t made until years after he left the company.

Bain isn’t a company so much as an intricate suite of steadily proliferating inter-related holding companies and limited partnerships, some based in Delaware and others in the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, and elsewhere, designed to collectively house roughly $66 billion in wealth in its many crevices and chambers. When Romney left in 1999, he and his wife retained significant investments in many of those Bain vehicles—he claims they are “passive investments” and that they are managed in a blind trust (though the trustee isn’t blind enough to meet federal standards of independence). But aside from disparate snippets of information contained in his federal and Massachusetts financial disclosure forms, his 2010 tax returns, and SEC filings, the nature of those investments has been obfuscated by design.

When he disclosed his finances to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics in 2007, Romney took care to publish the underlying holdings of many funds he invested with—after disclosing his $1 million-plus stake in “GS 2002 Exchange Place Fund LP,” for instance, he listed six pages of individual equities the fund held, from Panera Bread Co. to Tribune Co. But when it came to the Bain investments, he simply listed the value of his investments in odd-sounding entities like “Sankaty High Yield Partners II LP” with no indication of what was inside. In an accompanying note, he claimed that he had tried and failed to get the information: “The filer has requested information about the underlying holdings of these funds and values and income amounts for these underlying holdings. However, the fund managers have informed the filer in writing that this information is confidential and proprietary, and has declined to provide such information.”

That information—for Sankaty and 20 other funds—is now available here, in the form of 48 documents totaling more than 950 pages. They consist predominantly of confidential internal audited financial statements from 2008, 2009, and 2010, as well as investor letters from the same period, for Bain entities that Romney has previously disclosed owning an interest it. Owing to the timeframe—during and after the catastrophic economic meltdown of 2008—some of the investments show substantial losses. One limited partnership had even entered into liquidation as of October 2008 after failing to meet certain payments owed to partners. Others show astronomical gains.

The documents are exceedingly complicated. We don’t pretend to be qualified to decode them in full, which is why we are posting them here for readers to help evaluate—please leave your thoughts in the discussion below. We asked an attorney who specializes in complex offshore corporate transactions, including ones involving Cayman Island entities, to review them and help us understand them. (We also asked the Romney campaign. It hasn’t responded yet.)

The full set of Gawker’s “Bain File” documents can be read here.

Here’s what Gawker has found so far.

Equity Swaps, AIVs, and Mitt Romney’s Other Tax-Dodging Tricks
Mitt Romney’s Endless ‘Retirement’ Package
How Mitt Romney Puts His Money Where Obama’s Mouth Is
Derivatives, Short Sales, and Mitt Romney’s Other Exotic Financial Instruments
Mitt Romney Is the National Enquirer’s Banker

After THIS, how the hell is Mitt Romney going to be able to continue stonewalling on his MIA tax returns? Maybe he should just release them right now to, uh, I dunno, change the topic from how Paul Ryan wants old people to starve and die and for women who have been raped to give birth to the rapist’s baby ‘cos that’s what Jesus told him to do?

The idea that these documents are, currently, as I type this, being analyzed by crowd-sourcing is either a fortunate or very unfortunate fact of political life in 2012!

Depends on who you are, I guess. Mitt Romney must be going fucking insane right about now.
 

 

Image via Billionaires for Wealthcare

Although Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and Congressional Republicans as a whole are trying to take the offense on Medicare by painting Obamacare as siphoning off funds from Medicare that will materially harm seniors—it worked like a charm in the 2010 midterm elections—an article that appeared this morning on Talking Points Memo about Romney and Ryan’s actual intentions re: Medicare is getting a lot of attention.

As has been noted repeatedly, that strategy requires Romney and Ryan to disavow Medicare reforms the GOP recently endorsed overwhelmingly as a part of the party’s budget, which Ryan authored.

[Good luck with that one, boys]

From “Mitt’s Medicare Strategy: Don’t Tell Seniors Truth”:

All along Romney has been claiming that he and Paul Ryan won’t change Medicare for existing beneficiaries — only for the people who will get old in the “future.”

[Like nearly all of us, yeah?]

Now Romney’s own advisers and campaign surrogates are saying that this ain’t so.

As outlined in a memo the campaign released Saturday, Romney plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act in its entirety, and thus to spend over $700 billion more on the program in the coming decade than the government would spend if the health care law stands.

That commitment would leave Medicare poised for insolvency in 2016, years before he proposes to phase in the voucher system. Which means Romney would have two options: find new Medicare cuts or taxes to extend the life of the program, or preside over its demise.

On Fox News Sunday, Romney adviser Ed Gillespie tried to address the conundrum. “There are other reforms as well. As you know Governor Romney supports increasing over time bringing the Medicare eligibility age in line with the Social Security retirement age.”

But raising the Medicare eligibility age is a benefit cut, and implementing the increase before 2016 would violate Romney’s pledge to leave the program unchanged for people between ages 55 and 65.

Avik Roy, an outside health care adviser to the Romney campaign, admits that committing to billions of dollars in higher Medicare spending in the near-term will make it difficult for Romney to achieve its separate goal of reducing overall federal spending to modern lows. But he notes that Romney could make up the difference elsewhere in the budget or, by “mak[ing] other changes to the Medicare program, such as increased means-testing, that don’t alter the program’s basic structure.”

Further means-testing of Medicare would amount to a benefit cut to current seniors.

These admissions rest on top of the fact that by repealing the Affordable Care Act, Romney would wipe out new Medicare benefits included in the law. Repeal would result in higher payments to doctors and hospitals, and the restoration of overpayments to insurers participating in Medicare advantage. But for beneficiaries, it would re-open the Medicare prescription drug donut hole and eliminate coverage for preventive services and annual checkups that the ACA created.

Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan would cost senior citizens an additional $6400 or more a year out of pocket! Did you hear that Republican retirees? Considering that Paul Ryan’s “voucher” amounts to “Here’s a coupon for your old age, go fuck yourself oldster and please hurry up and die” HOW IN THE WORLD—at a time in history where far fewer than half of the American population has anywhere NEAR the amount of savings they’ll need to retire on—-can the Republicans think running on a platform that essentially says to senior citizens: “Let them eat Advil!” is anything but a very, very bad idea?!?

A “wheelchair army” would come to Washington, DC and kill them all if Paul Ryan’s plan were put into place. Every damned one of them. You have to shake your head in amazement at people who are anywhere near retirement age who would vote Republican. It’s beyond idiocy.

I had a friend who died when he was 94 years old. How in the hell would, say, even a spry 84-year-old, just come up with another $6k a year? How the fuck would you do it at that age? Get a job as a greeter at Home Depot? Flip some burgers at McDonald’s? Slot machines? The fucking lottery? Pulling it out of your ass? INVESTING IN WALL STREET???

It’s preposterous… and it’s pretty much what the Republicans have in store for you. For YOUR old age! Nope, it’s not an abstraction, dumbshit Fox News viewers and “low information voters,” (LIV) it’s your “golden years” that Mitt is talkin’ ‘bout!

The Democrats, if they play their cards right politically (which they never, ever do, but might it happen by accident?) could inflict some major damage to the Republicans this election if they’d run a few commercials with a wheezing 90-year-old dealing with bill collectors, having to choose between food and his prescriptions and being told “We’re sorry sir, your coverage won’t pay for dialysis anymore” by a kindly-faced nurse who smiles as she shuts the door in his face.

The same actor in all of them. Maybe it’s a couple. Yes! It’s a couple, even better.

Remember those famous Taster’s Choice coffee commercials with the serialized narrative of the flirting good looking yuppie neighbors back in the 90s? Now imagine the flipside of that: That same couple is old, retired and the 83-year-old husband husband is eating Ramen noodles so they can keep the lights on in their apartment.

An elderly man staring straight ahead has tears running down his face. CAMERA PULLS OUT, REVEALING his wife, asleep in a medical bed in their living room with IV drips and heart monitors beeping softly in the background.  He is holding his sleeping wife’s hand.

The camera sees collection notices in his hands. The top one, which the camera lingers on long enough to read indicates that their gas and electricity is about to be shut off

The man, sobbing, lays his head on sleeping wife’s body.

The lights in their apartment sputter and go off.

The heart monitor stops beeping.

 
A terrific older essay by Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce on how fucking insane Republican Party has become (it appeared in the magazine’s May 2012 issue) has been resurrected on reddit/r/politics. I must have missed this one when it went around the first time, but it has not dated in the least since then (if anything it’s more true with each passing day). A gem, courtesy of one of the very best political writers in America today:

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Republican party, root and branch, from its deepest grass roots to its highest levels, has become completely demented. This does not mean that it is incapable of winning elections; on the contrary, the 2010 midterms, as well as the statewide elections around the country, ushered in a class of politicians so thoroughly dedicated to turning nonsense into public policy that future historians are going to marvel at our ability to survive what we wrought upon ourselves. It is now impossible to become an elected Republican politician in this country if, for example, you believe in the overwhelming scientific consensus that exists behind the concept of anthropogenic global warming. Just recently, birth control, an issue most people thought pretty well had been settled in the 1960s, became yet another litmus test for Republican candidates, as did the Keystone XL pipeline, to which every Republican presidential candidate pledged unyielding fealty despite the fact that several prairie Republicans and an army of conservative farmers and ranchers are scared to death of the thing.

In Washington, there is no leadership anymore, no “Republican establishment” to which anyone can appeal. The ferocious strength of faith-based know-nothingism in the party’s base has resulted in a stubborn refusal to adopt even those ideas — like an individual mandate for health care, or cap-and-trade as an energy policy — that began as Republican ideas.

In the states, we have seen a staggering overreach on the part of Republican governors in the Midwest regarding labor rights, wildly restrictive voter-ID laws aimed at solving a problem that doesn’t exist, immigration statutes that are leaving lettuce to rot in the fields because nobody’s left to pick it, and a welter of preposterous antiabortion statutes. And behind all of that, a party base that has constructed its own private history, its own private language, its own private logic, and its own wholly rounded private universe.

That’s how Sarah Palin can tell people that Barack Obama wants to bring us “back to days before the Civil War” because Obama once hugged Derrick Bell, a law professor at Harvard. That’s how an insurance-friendly health-care bill can be declared to be socialism when it’s not being called the first step toward fascism. That’s how Mitt Romney came to tie himself in a bowline trying to run for president, even though he was the only real candidate in a field of crackpot poseurs, and even though he was running the only real campaign as opposed to tent revivals, exercises in brand maintenance, and extended book tours. Too late did Romney realize that the path to the nomination led through an alternate reality.

This was a development long in the making, and one of which we may well never see the end. It began with the vicious, truthless campaigns run by the National Conservative Political Action Committee in the late 1970s. This initiated the creation of a conservative network that was outside the formal party structure. To this was added independently financed think tanks, Christian colleges and (later) Christian academies and organized home schooling, and conservative boot camps that produced young people, and young candidates, whose primary allegiance was to conservative ideology and not to the Republican party. Eventually, as was proven by the failed candidacies of Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle, which helped lose the Republicans a golden chance at controlling the Senate as well in 2010, these people cared less about whether the party succeeded than they did that their ideology was kept pure and their private universe invulnerable. In trying to control the uncontrollable and to appease the insatiable, forcibly locked in with itself, like the Beales in Grey Gardens, the party gradually lost its mind.

That last sentence is quite simply… prose perfection. Pierce deserves a Pulitzer prize based on that line alone*.

He concludes:

The Democratic party has an obligation to beat the Republican party so badly, over and over again, that rationality once again becomes a quality to be desired. It must be done by persuading the country of this simple fact. It cannot be done by reasoning with the Republicans, because the next two generations of them are too far gone.

The whole thing is most definitely worth your time. While you are there, you should bookmark the Esquire Politics blog, it’s an essential daily read for political junkies.

His post this morning about Harry Reid and why he’s letting it rip so hard on Mitt Romney is also a must read.

Let’s Stop Being Upset with Harry Reid Already (Esquire Politics)

(*If it were up to me, I’d award a Pulitzer to Charles P. Pierce, if for no other reason, his snarling use of an all-purpose, southern-fried epithet my grandmother used to employ with great disdain: “dipshit doodlebug.”)