Some of the misguided lines that have emerged in the reporting on Sunday’s Mitt Romney fundraiser held at the Hamptons estate of Revlon heir Ron Perelman have been bust-a-gut funny.

LA Times reporter Maeve Reston asked one Romney donor, who wouldn’t reveal her name, her take on the presidential race:

I don’t think the common person is getting it…my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies — everybody who’s got the right to vote — they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.

The Romney event she attended had a $50,000 per couple suggested donation. As the wealthy tossers inside nibbled on prosciutto-rolled melon balls and mint chocolate cupcakes, a group of protesters, kept at bay by a line of police shouted things like “It took my father a lifetime to save $50,000” and “Mitt Romney has a Koch problem.” (That evening there was a second Romney fundraiser at the home of Julia and David Koch in Southampton, the suggested contribution at that event was $75,000 per couple.)

A truck bearing Citigroup and Wells Fargo logos with a plastic dog strapped to the roof, circled the neighborhood. Planes streaming banners with anti-Romney insults flew over the heads of the rich Republican revelers.

Overheard at the fundraiser:

“Is there a V.I.P. entrance? We are V.I.P.”

“It’s not helping the economy to pit the people who are the engine of the economy against the people who rely on that engine.”

Oooohh snap! “Take that poor people!” says a would-be “John Galt” who probably inherited his fortune!

Romney’s tax plan would give the richest 0.1% of Americans an average tax cut of $264,000? No wonder he’s so popular with TEH BILLIONAIRZ.

As the Libor conspiracy scandal has proven, beyond the shadow of a doubt, bankers around the globe have been stealing money from every American with a mortgage or a credit card without any of us ever being the wiser. But that’s changed, rather dramatically in the past week, don’t cha think?

And now an investment banker wants to be President… A banker who stashes his secrets in offshore banks.

Do we really want to entrust America to a banker with something to hide?

An essential Bill Moyers essay: “The High Price of ‘Free’ Speech” (AKA ‘Poor People Haven’t Lost Their Voice — They Can’t Afford A Voice’)
 

 
Thank you MorpheusLA!

 
Some people accuse Thurston Howell III Mitt Romney of infuriating vagueness. 

I’m not one of them.
 

 
How does this buffoon keep track of his own “convictions”?

“There’s something to be said for having a Republican who supports civil rights in this broader context, including sexual orientation.”

“Convictions” are confusing things!

Slippery too, like greased eels.

Via reddit/r/politcs

 
Although we are still several months away from the November general election, and this new Bloomberg poll certainly bucks the trend of most of the polls we’ve been seeing lately (which show a much tighter race), it’s interesting to note that its underlying implication is that Thurston Howell III Mitt Romney has gained almost zero ground with likely voters after an entire year of campaigning.

Although this obviously bodes rather poorly for the millionaire Republican presumptive nominee, enthusiasm to re-elect Obama looks tepid, too.

Barack Obama has opened a significant lead over Mitt Romney in a Bloomberg National Poll that reflects the presumed Republican nominee’s weaknesses more than the president’s strengths.

Obama leads Romney 53 percent to 40 percent among likely voters, even as the public gives him low marks on handling the economy and the deficit, and six in 10 say the nation is headed down the wrong track, according to the poll conducted June 15- 18.

The survey shows Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, has yet to repair the damage done to his image during the Republican primary. Thirty-nine percent of Americans view him favorably, about the same as when he announced his presidential candidacy last June, while 48 percent see him unfavorably—a 17-percentage point jump during a nomination fight dominated by attacks ads. A majority of likely voters, 55 percent, view him as more out of touch with average Americans compared with 36 percent who say the president is more out of touch.

Taken together, the results suggest an unsettled political environment for both Obama and Romney five months from the November election, with voters choosing for now to stick with a president they say is flawed rather than backing a challenger they regard as undefined and disconnected.

If this poll is an indication of any sort of trend—and I’m not saying it is, because until more polls confirm its results, it should be viewed as an outlier—then all Obama would need to do to coast to re-election is to keep hammering away at Romney as a vulture capitalist, corporate raider who will most certainly bend tax reform to benefit his own family’s vast fortune and future investment income, as a guy has no idea what the poor and middle class are going through, and portray him as the Grinch who will steal healthcare. (Well, that and praying to fuck for no unforeseen bad news about the economy, scandals, oils spills, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, etc.).

The Romney campaign ads SUCK, they aren’t even SHITTY, and are totally ineffectual at redefining a guy who we’ve all seen daily on our tee-vee sets for the past four years, whereas the Obama campaign has unleashed some hilariously nasty, viciously scathing—but quite true—ads, just excoriating Romney. Some of them are mini-masterpieces of political ridicule.

Nothing quite like the nuclear bomb (”When Mitt Romney Came to Town”) that Newt Gingrich threw in Romney’s face back in January, however, although I am sure that Obama’s own version of this political Kraken will unleashed by say, late August.

Wait for it, it’s coming. They’re just sharpening their knives and Romney’s such a fucking dipshit that he gives them new material to work with on an hourly basis. If this is the Obama campaign’s definition of “lighthearted” I can’t wait to see what they come up when the gloves are really off.

 
Ridicule is a good weapon to wield in a political campaign and one that an undignified buffoon like Thurston Howell III Mitt Romney is particularly vulnerable to.

So far the Obama campaign has been a pathetic, embarrassing shambles, of course, but whoever is producing his web ads is a comedic genius and should be given a raise and a promotion within the campaign organization, pronto!

(Or is it Thurston Howell III Mitt Romney who is the comedy genius?)
 

 
Via Think Progress

 
As if the other guy is? Child, pu-leeeze!

More tepid endorsements of Mitt Romney at Yahoo News

 
Forbes’s Edwin Durgy did the number crunching on the Bain of our existence:

Mitt Romney isn’t the richest person to ever run for President – Ross Perot had him beat by a factor of ten. And if he’s elected, inflation adjustments might favor sprawling plantation owners like Washington and Jefferson, or Kennedy if family assets counted. But there’s no denying that in terms of total dollars a President Romney would be the wealthiest White House occupant ever, and would be even wealthier had he not set aside a trust, now worth $100 million, for his 5 boys. So just how rich is he?

Forbes spent the past month trying to answer that question definitively. The core basis for our valuation comes from Romney himself – specifically, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics disclosure forms, which he filed in August 2007 and August 2011, plus discussions with high-level Romney officials familiar with specific changes to his holdings since that last report. Of course, those disclosures, taken at face value, are about as concrete as a campaign promise, with vague asset ranges (“$1 million to $5 million”) and definitions.

Seeking to remove as much guesswork as possible, we assigned a value to every single asset Mitt and Ann Romney own – 184 in all across the couple’s two blind trusts, IRAs and outright holdings. Our core method: noting the shift in ranges between the 2007 filing, the 2011 filing and now (much of his wealth has been consistently held over the whole period). Comparing which assets changed brackets – or didn’t – with their underlying price fluctuation (or in some cases, a good comparable) over that period, we were able to get better estimates of where each fell in the range. Supplemented by a dozen interviews – from local real estate experts to private equity partners – we get a detailed look at the current state of Mitt’s money, pinpointing his net worth at $230 million, split between 9 different asset classes. Highlights include the sale of nearly all of his individual equities – he sold 71 stocks since his last disclosure – and a big move into cash. He now holds $16 million, up from $1 million in August.

I guess the loot in the off-shore bank accounts and in Switzerland can only be guessed at…

The amazing—even amusing—thing to me is that somewhere north of 40% of likely US voters think that putting a man in charge of the American economy who got obscenely—not to mention ludicrously—wealthy by being one of the most successful corporate raiders and job destroyers in recent memory, is a good idea!

Mitt Romney certainly created a lot of wealth, that’s for sure. FOR HIMSELF.

And $20 million for each of his kids! Think the richest man who would ever be the POTUS is going to advocate raising taxes on his own family’s fortune?

Not a fucking chance that option would be on the table, is there?

We DO live in Idiocracy. How else to parse the notion that 40% of the people who vote would pull the lever for Thurston fucking Howell the IVth???

I realize that it sounds perverse—not to mention terribly, terribly UN-patriotic—but there is a small part of me that hopes for a Romney and GOP victory this year.

Why? Because the man and his party would nail the coffin SHUT on capitalism, that’s why.

Given another four years, the Republicans WILL wreck the place, but good. Bush nearly accomplished it, Romney and crew—for it WILL BE former Bush administration members who would staff a Romney White House—would be sure to finish it off.

What would come next would be… interesting. Not necessary good, but interesting and perhaps necessary.

More details on Romney’s net worth and where he invests: What Mitt Romney Is Really Worth: An Exclusive Analysis Of His Latest Finances (Forbes)
 

Polygamists for Romney

Mitt Romney, who added “teenage gay basher” to his distinguished resume of fucking people over yesterday, unwisely decided to speak out about President Obama’s support for marriage equality.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

“[Below], Romney says that we should not discard 3,000 years of history of one-man-one-woman marriage. Ahem. His own family were ardent polygamists only a century ago - and went to Mexican colonies to escape US federal oppression of their version of marriage (which also goes back a long, long way and still exists across the world). Romney’s great-grandparents were polygamists; one of his his great-great-grandfathers had twelve wives and was murdered by the husband of the twelfth.

For Romney to say that the definition of marriage has remained the same for 3,000 years is disproved by his own family. It’s untrue. False. A lie.

Big love, Mr. Sullivan. This hits it right squarely on the bulls-eye, doesn’t it?

Memo to Mittens: This isn’t going to be an argument that you—you IN PARTICULAR—are going to win.

What’s that epigram from Wittgenstein that’s appropriate here? Ah yes:

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

In other words, zip it, dumbass, before you make a fucking fool of yourself.

Again.

(Are the Republicans deliberately trying to throw the election? If so, WHY?)
 

 
Want to like Mitt Romney even less than you already do? Read on:

Well, it looks like the rich white guy who strapped a shit-scared dog onto the roof of his car and who brags about how he likes to “fire people” has always been that way.

This may have happened when future ruler of men Mitt Romney was just a kid, true, but it’s still really fucking disturbing. If the child is the father to the man, after you read this, ask yourself how many degrees away from being a “Dexter” this Mormon Little Lord Fauntleroy was!

And if you think that’s taking it too far, at the very least, Mitt Romney is a grown-up version of the nastiest, most obnoxious snobby rich kid characters that James Spader played in the 1980s (The millionaire Republican governor’s son who bullies Duckie. Tell me that young Mittens is not straight out of a John Hughes film).

Now he wants to be the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth!

Five eye witnesses, four of them on record here. This isn’t a hit job, it’s Mitt Romney’s actual biography. Looking at how Romney’s predatory Bain Capital made its money by sucking prosperous businesses dry, firing workers and selling off the assets, I don’ think this over-privileged fuck has changed all that much.

Be prepared to fucking barf.

Via The Washington Post:

Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another. Four of them — Friedemann, now a dentist; Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer; Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor; and David Seed, a retired principal — spoke on the record. Another former student who witnessed the incident asked not to be named. The men have differing political affiliations, although they mostly lean Democratic. Buford volunteered for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008. Seed, a registered independent, has served as a Republican county chairman in Michigan. All of them said that politics in no way colored their recollections.

“It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said. “What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.”

“It was a hack job,” recalled Maxwell, a childhood friend of Romney who was in the dorm room when the incident occurred. “It was vicious.”

“He was just easy pickins,” said Friedemann, then the student prefect, or student authority leader of Stevens Hall, expressing remorse about his failure to stop it.

The incident transpired in a flash, and Friedemann said Romney then led his cheering schoolmates back to his bay-windowed room in Stevens Hall.

Friedemann, guilt ridden, made a point of not talking about it with his friend and waited to see what form of discipline would befall Romney at the famously strict institution. Nothing happened.

Romney is now the presumed Republican presidential nominee. His campaign spokeswoman said the former Massachusetts governor has no recollection of the incident.

I guess he’s got an Etch-A-Sketch memory, too!

Who the fuck forgets an incident like this?

Of course there’s also the matter of how the biggest homophobes often turn out to be repressed closet-cases themselves… Just sayin’.

Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow, and Stephen Colbert are going to have a field day with this, to say nothing of Bill Maher. Cue the vicious SNL skits and Funny or Die videos about THIS INCIDENT and, I hope, one of those great Taiwanese computer animations, too.

This is just the first page of four. Read the rest at The Washington Post, if you can stomach more.
 

 

 
There’s an absolutely hilarious plan afoot to royally fuck with Mitt Romney that’s rapidly gaining traction on the popular social content aggregator site reddit. Has the reddit community figured out a surefire way to defeat Mitt Romney, even in red states?

Maybe so!

Democrats should pay close attention here. The Republicans may have the Koch Brothers and Karl Rove in their corner, but this is surely more deviously creative than anything a reichwinger could ever come up with.

Even more powerful than money? Well, you tell me.

It goes something like this: Presumed Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, responding to a survey earlier this year from the Morality in Media group’s “War on Illegal Pornography” campaign, indicated that as president, he would call for “strict enforcement of our nation’s obscenity laws.”

Now the merry pranksters of reddit /r/politics want to organize banner campaigns across various online porn sites to advertise Romney’s stance on pornography.

What better way to turn off potential Republican male voters in pr0n-crazy red states. Even the 20-something males who are the most impervious to politics might decide to register to vote over this issue. Hit ‘em where they live…ten plus hours a day!

Here’s a representative sampling of the reddit community’s reaction to the proposed stunt:

This November, don’t let Romney kill your boner forever.

These ads would be going against “The one little trick to get a 9 inch dick”, it doesn’t really matter how easy to pick apart it is.

Taking out ads on porn sites is a marvelous idea - it would likely result in subconsciously associating an orgasm with whatever the message of the ad is.

I seriously LOL’d at this. My room mates had to ask what was so funny. They think it’s awesome, too.

I’m going to start stockpiling porn.

Nobody votes for a boner killer.

I’d think that porn websites would be advertising this freely on their own.

Hi, I run fastjizz.com—if somebody wants to design us a 300x250 i’ll throw it on our homepage for a week!

Where do I donate?

‘Romney can take my porn from my warm sticky hand…’

Nice try, Obama. That said, I’d pitch in a few bucks.

“This November,when you go to the polls, think of your pole.”

This must be done

I work at an ad:tech company, specifically in the business of placing banner ads across the web. If someone is seriously interested in getting these run, I can help.

So he wasn’t happy just pissing off women huh? This is going to be the biggest landslide in the last 50 years.

The hypocritical, angry, white males who feed the tea party have finally painted themselves into a corner. They have to appear to disdain porn for their morally prudish wives, when in fact the porn industry caters almost exclusively to (such) men.

The Republicans have already lost the female voters. This could cleave quite a few males from the GOP fold, too!

Available at Typotees

Too, too good.

In the last few sentences, Stewart connects the dots in a way that even logic-leaping Glenn Beck himself (remember him?) would admire… and perhaps wholeheartedly agree with!
 

 
Fox News’ Shep Smith reacts to Mitt Romney’s reaction to Newt’s departure from the race the way a sane person should…

Dangerous Minds pal Taylor Jessen writes:

“A clip that needs no context, really. Soon to be a shirt, a dance remix, and possibly a new political party. Shep Smith is, for a moment, a bona fide deer in the mind-numbingest of headlights.”

Genius.
 

 
AS IF they needed any encouragement, Mitt Romney’s cynical hiring of openly gay Richard Grenell to sharpen his foreign policy message (and provide some cover for all of the anti-gay stuff Mittens has pledged to support) has “let the dogs out” of the Christian Right.

With Grenell stepping down before he even got started, now anti-gay rights activists like the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, Gary Bauer and hateful jackass Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association are crowing about their success in pressuring Romney to get rid of him.

You can, of course, easily make the argument that Republicans, on the whole, are hardly a bunch you could describe as “gay-friendly,” so there becomes the secondary side-issue of why tin-earred pol Romney felt that stirring up a hornet’s nest like this—the prominent hiring of an openly gay man—would benefit him politically with the mouth-breathing GOP base. It’s fucking ridiculous on the face of it, but in doing so, Romney has inadvertently exposed the men behind the curtain who are REALLY pulling his strings: Some of the most extreme Christianist bigots in America!

Last week Bryan Fischer declared that if Mitt Romney wants to win in November, he’d “better start listening to me.” Most of the rest of the week, Fischer discussed firing Grenell and lashed Romney repeatedly for having the audacity to hire an openly gay man as his foreign policy and national security spokesman. Coincidence that Grenell stepped down? I should think not.

Andrew Sullivan writes at The Daily Beast

“It’s sometimes hard to explain to outsiders what level of principle is required to withstand the personal cost of being an out gay Republican. I’ve only ever been a gay conservative (never a Republican), and back in the 1990s, it was brutal living in the gay world and challenging liberal assumptions. I cannot imagine the social isolation of Grenell in Los Angeles today, doing what he did. And his reward for such loyalty, sincerity and pugnacity? Vilification. I mean: what do Republicans call a gay man with neoconservative passion, a committed relationship and personal courage? A faggot.”

The Stonewall Democrats had this to say:

Mitt Romney sat silently and let the bigoted wing of his party control his personnel choices. Either Mitt Romney is a coward who is afraid to stand up to the anti-LGBT bullies in his party, or he is fine with an America where LGBT people can have a career only if they’re willing to work quietly from the confines of the closet. Gay Republicans should be outraged and must demand that the organizations that represent them refuse to support Mitt Romney’s presidential aspirations in any way.”

The Human Rights Campaign’s statement:

From the moment Richard Grennell signed on as Mitt Romney’s Foreign Policy and National Security Spokesman, he faced a torrent of unfounded criticism from the far right. Not once did the Romney campaign condemn these attacks and support Grennell. Mitt Romney capitulating to the demands of extremist anti-gay groups is nothing new. He has donated to the rabidly anti-gay National Organization for Marriage and the Massachusetts Family Institute. He has even signed a NOM vow that binds him to appoint only anti-gay judges and establish a McCarthy-era commission to investigate the activities of those who support LGBT equality. The fact that Grennell is gone so quickly after a right-wing uproar is a troubling harbinger of the kind of power that anti-gay forces would have in a Romney White House.

Michelangelo Signorile makes an important point on Huffington Post:

Actually, I believe this is a big win for progressives and for gay journalists and commentators as well. We drew out the conservative leaders in addition to Fischer, like Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, Gary Bauer and other commentators on National Review and Daily Caller, by bringing forth and continually highlighting the true facts about Grenell, which, to most Americans, are completely acceptable, but which, in the eyes of the evangelical right, make him a radical homosexual. As I wrote in a post last week, Grenell isn’t just gay, like some other gay Republicans who stay quiet about their homosexuality. He’s a gay man who very publicly expressed that he wants to get married to another man and who believes President Obama isn’t adequate on LGBT rights.

Why is it this a win? Because Grenell was being used for cover by a candidate with abhorrently anti-gay positions, a man who has promised to “propose and promote” a federal marriage amendment if elected president. I don’t buy the argument made by some that it was a measure of progress that Romney hired a gay man as his foreign policy spokesperson when he’s using that gay man to make himself appear moderate to independents while he’s promising the GOP base that he’ll make gay people into second class citizens. Actual progress in the GOP will come when their presidential candidates stop bowing to bigots and refuse to sign their extremist pledges. Otherwise, it’s all window dressing.

He’s 100% correct on this matter. During the second hour of Fischer’s radio show yesterday, the news broke about Grenell’s resignation from the Romney campaign. Watch as a gleeful Fischer declares it a “huge win” for Christian conservatives because A) they forced Romney’s hand to get rid of Grenell and B) they taught him what his boundaries are!

Elect Mitt Romney and get THIS GUY, too:
 

 
Via Joe.My.God./Right Wing Watch

 
How did this not exactly subtle wingnut dog whistle escape national attention and widespread mockery? It’s been around since the end of February!

Unfucking believable. I won’t describe this, you just have to hit play and let it wash all over you. The cynicism is epic. Breath-taking, even.

Wow! Just.. wow. If this isn’t a flat -out admission by Romney and the Republicans that they are courting the DUMBEST SHITHEADS IN AMERICA to vote for him, I don’t know what would be…

An endorsement from Ted Nugent, perhaps?

He’s Mitt Romney and he EVEN ADMITS to paying for this paranoid fantasy…

Who the fuck came up with this? Alex Jones?
 

 
Via Daily Kos

 
Former Labor secretary Robert Reich explains why the “magic” of private equity is really a magic trick and one that’s being played on you and me.

The top YouTube comment, from “tapolna,” sums it up quite nicely:

The irony of all this is that Romney made his millions exploiting a system that fired workers, and reduced benefits for the remaining workers, all at the expense of taxpayers, us!

Then he wants us to vote for him!

But the tragedy is that some us will ACTUALLY VOTE FOR HIM.