Romney has said, Anybody could have decided to finish bin Laden. Even [Jimmy] Carter. This again was a mistaken concept. President Obama didn’t just decide [one day to kill bin Laden]. The operation to end the life of bin Laden necessitated multiple points of decision by him. I know from operations I have been involved with on a smaller scale.
They are very intricate. You don’t just give the order and wait in your office for commanders to come three months later and say it’s done. No. This kind of operation, which is accident prone, hands on operation, one has to make one decision after the other […] It took courage and cool headedness and leadership. Anyone who says it was an easy thing to decide, doesn’t understand what he’s talking about. [Such comments] show a total lack of understanding of what this kind of operation means.
Romney chose to criticize President Obama for seeking to cut a bloated Defense Department and for not being bellicose enough in the Middle East, two assertions with which I cannot agree. Defense and war spending has grown 137% since 2001. That kind of growth is not sustainable. Adm. Michael Mullen stated earlier this year that the biggest threat to our national security is our debt. If debt is our gravest threat, adding to the debt by expanding military spending further threatens our national security.
“The president has not signed one new free-trade agreement in the past four years. I will reverse that failure.”
- Barack Obama signed the biggest free-trade agreement since 1994.
- He’s responsible for 1/5th of all U.S. free-trade agreements.
But Mitt Romney “will not let [his] campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”
I always thought it was a one-two punch [by the Obama campaign]. Punch one was Thursday night. Punch two would be in the foreign policy debate. To cast Romney as naïf, an empty suit on foreign policy, and tie him to Bush—as a puppet of the bow-tied hawks of the Bush administration. … This intervening event was gravy.
Pratt practiced plural marriage and had twelve wives, thirty children, and 266 grandchildren. In 2011, Pratt’s living descendants were estimated at between thirty and fifty thousand. His first wife, Thankful Halsey Pratt, died following childbirth in March 1837. Pratt married his second wife, a widow, Mary Ann Frost Sterns, within two months of his first wife’s death, perhaps causing Joseph Smith to condemn “marrying in five or six weeks, or even in two or three months, after the death of their companion.” Pratt persuaded Mary Ann to share his bed during his imprisonment in a Richmond, Missouri, jail; but after Pratt began practicing polygamy they became estranged, and Mary Ann finally divorced him in 1853. According to authors Terryl L. Givens and Matthew J. Grow, Pratt was often “dour and humorless,” with an “antisocial bent,” and he could be remarkably insensitive in his relationships with his wives.
One of Pratt’s great-great-grandsons is Mitt Romney, former Massachusetts governor (2003-2007) and 2012 Republican nominee for the U.S. presidency.
Ted Kennedy tribute from the Democratic National Convention, including some choice footage of Kennedy debating Mitt Romney.
A Facebook compendium of thoroughly documented facts and fact checks about Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.
I don’t really like Facebook and I don’t really use Facebook. But I’ve noticed that it’s the place where crazy, uninformed right-wingers spread around their nonsense without consequence. Among these people are relatives of mine. It’s embarrassing. I suspect I’m not alone.
While I think it’s unlikely that I’ll change their minds, I do think it’s possible to keep them from saying crazing things. Well, I think it’s possible to keep them from saying so many crazy things. If nothing else, maybe some will follow my example and seek to backup their crazy assertions with proof.
So I’ve been regularly posting factual data from mainstream, centrist and right-wing sources and backing them up with ample evidence and links. If you’d like to do the same on Facebook, please feel free to reshare these links and copy the excerpts knowing that they are all legit.
I won’t make a fool of you. But then again, you don’t have to take my word for it…which is the whole point.
- Romney says Obama “threw our Isreali friends under the bus.” The Israeli President and Defense Minister disagree. http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/277073772394723
- The Washington Post says “the Romney campaign isn’t adhering to the minimum standards required for a real policy conversation.” http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/456729131016645
- The Washington Post says, “The mainstream media were not to blame for John McCain’s loss; Barack Obama’s more effective campaign and the financial crisis were.”
http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/337577179668425 - Foreign Policy Magazine points out that Republicans initiated, and Paul Ryan voted for, the military cuts Romney blames on Obama. http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/263132427138560
- CBS Evening News quotes Standard and Poor’s report, specifically blaming the Republican Congress, of which Paul Ryan is an influential member, for the U.S. credit downgrade. http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/429891933714104
- The American Conservative says there’s nothing small government about Romney/Ryan.
http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/345191155571668 - America’s top ranking military officer contradicts Romney’s statements about Iran. http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/349624315126710
- The Weekly Standard criticizes Romney for “failing even to mention, in his acceptance speech, a war we’re fighting and our young men and women who are fighting it?” http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/487416077935198
- The American Conservative says, “Mitt Romney has no intention of saying anything that his audience doesn’t want to hear,” and calls his convention speech “infantilizing.”
http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/280386948742003 - Barack Obama is very popular in Poland, where Mitt Romney claims Obama “abandoned our friends.” http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/358354654241069
- Fortune magazine quotes Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor as saying, “The assumption was that, um, the, the, ah, again — I probably can’t speak to that in an exact way so I better just not,” when pressed about the falsehoods in Paul Ryan’s attacks.
http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/411765985539727 - Romney says Obama will raise taxes on small businesses. PolitiFact verifies that Obama has cut taxes for small businesses 17 times so far. http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/10151854681265283
- PolitiFact and tax data disprove Romney’s assertion than raising taxes on millionaires raises taxes on small business. http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/10151854646455283
- Romney says Obama went on an “apology tour”. PolitiFact proves this to be false. http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/158151710975220
- Mitt Romney cites Steve jobs as an example for the Republican party. Jobs offered to help Obama’s reelection campaign before he died. http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/428647627177248
- The New York Times says Republicans and Romney “have offered precious little of substance but a lot of bromides meant to convey profundity and take passive-aggressive digs at President Obama.” http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/198580320272920
- A former Bain colleage of Romney’s says, “I believed he was making a mistake by framing himself as a job creator. That was not his or Bain’s or the industry’s primary objective. The objective of the LBO business is maximizing returns for investors.” The Guardian points out that the Republican congress “regularly blocked any and all job creation measures ever since Obama’s stimulus bill.” http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/225684797557300
- The Congressional Budget Office shows that Bush’s tax cuts are largely responsible for both the the growing U.S. debt and deficit. http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151853918845283&set=a.40017285282.62164.717105282&type=1
- The York Times show that Paul Ryan criticized Obama for not using a debt reduction plan that Ryan, himself, opposed. http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/496744383688897
- Politico shows that Paul Ryan “consistently and loyally voted to increase the debt. He did not take political risks or buck his party to combat “our exploding deficits” then. Instead, he voted for 65 different pieces of legislation to expand the debt.”
http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/193430504123967 - The New York Time writes that Chris Christie “said his state needed his austere discipline of slashed budgets, canceled public projects and broken public unions, but did not mention that New Jersey now has a higher unemployment rate than when he took over, and never had the revenue boom he promised from tax cuts.” http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/475879322437092
- Rick Santorum attacks Obama on welfare reform, despite the attack being widely discredited.
http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/434546076596523 - A representative of the Romney campaign says, “”We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/337885672970902
- Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman says, “We already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president. Once again, health reform — his only major change to government — was modeled on Republican plans, indeed plans coming from the Heritage Foundation.” http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/441360942574278
The 50 most powerful Republicans on foreign policy: Sheldon Adelson
With more than $20 million in donations, Sheldon Adelson almost single-handedly bankrolled Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign this year. The staunch pro-Israel hawk, who opposes any land concessions to the Palestinians, has since hopped on board the Romney money train and gotten behind a high-profile effort to convince Jewish voters to vote Republican, even traveling on the candidate’s recent trip to Israel. Not one to mince words, at a recent major fundraiser Adelson reportedly referred to the president as a “crybaby” who should be in diapers. The Las Vegas mogul has also attracted some unwanted attention with his controversial casino interests in Macau, including a federal investigation into allegations that his employees made illegal payments to Chinese officials. Adelson has pledged up to $100 million to the effort to defeat Obama, which should be more than enough incentive for the Romney campaign to keep him happy.
Mr. Romney ought to square with the American people and release his taxes like any other candidate.
There is always this underlying sentiment in Italian public opinion that when you are in politics you don’t serve the public good, you serve your personal interest. Many will see Romney’s role in this as confirmation and it will be interpreted in a very cynical way.
Carlo Alberto Carnevale-Maffè, a professor of strategy at Bocconi University’s School of Management in Milan.
Bain Capital, under Romney as chief executive officer, made about $1 billion in a leveraged buyout 12 years ago that remains controversial in Italy to this day. Bain was part of a group that bought a telephone-directory company from the Italian government and then sold it about two years later, at the peak of the technology bubble, for about 25 times what it paid.
Bain funneled profits through subsidiaries in Luxembourg, a common corporate strategy for avoiding income taxes in other European countries, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg News.
The buyer, Italy’s biggest telephone company, now has a total market value less than what it paid Bain and other investors for the directory business.
[..]
Romney himself probably earned more than $50 million, and possibly as much as $60 million from the Italian directory sale of Seat Pagine Gialle SpA, according to a person familiar with the matter. The deal turned into one of the biggest windfalls of his tenure.
- JACK DONAGHY: Those jokes you wrote for my Mitt Romney fundraiser, they were top-notch.
- LIZ LEMON: Those weren't jokes! That was an appeal for a return to common sense and decency.
- JACK DONAGHY: Well, they got big laughs.
I’m very looking forward to a Republican being back in office. When you’re rich, you want a Republican in office.
Slovak Foreign Minister Chides Romney on Missile Defense
People have moved on,” said Miroslav Lajcak, the minister of foreign affairs and deputy prime minister, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “We are in a different situation now. We are discussing a different project. I see no reason to revisit discussions from three years back.
I have listened to Mitt Romney’s stump speech countless times. A standard refrain is to run down Europe – not a hard case to make at the moment – and that includes us.
Not once have I heard him praise Britain or extol the special relationship he now belatedly trumpets. He even reprised his dislike of the NHS shortly before leaving for these shores of benighted, yellow-toothed natives who spend half their lives waiting in hospital, having tried as governor of Massachusetts to ensure that everyone in his state, as in Britain, had access to health care. His current pledge to “revive” ties between the US and Britain sounds suspiciously like a talking point drummed up in a policy meeting and designed to differentiate himself from President Barack Obama for domestic purposes.
Yet there isn’t much currently wrong with the transatlantic alliance, as last summer’s exultant state visit by Obama showed.
