Tag Archives: Mitt Romney

CPAC2013: Keep F*cking That Chicken

Posted on by

On Bill Maher’s New Rules segment this week, he talked about a “relatively small group of very shrill people [who are] devoted to — and succeeding at — convincing us that this is a much more conservative and religious nation than it is.”

Maher goes on to explain that CPAC is merely an extension of such devotion:

…

Maher discusses his term Shit Kicker Inflation ”the phenomenon of all things conservative being portrayed as way bigger than they really are” with the following examples:

  • ONE MILLION MOMS: the number of followers that One Million Moms has on Twitter: 2,258. 
  • THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE: just as there aren’t a million moms in One Million Moms, there is no “league” in The Catholic League. It’s one guy with a fax machine.
  • OBAMACARE: as an idea, it’s unpopular. But ask voters about the elements in it, they’re all very popular. It’s like saying “I hate pizza! I love tomato sauce and melted cheese on dough, but pizza? I hate that shit.”
  • GUNS: gun ownership is actually DOWN in this country… way down. And yet the NRA, with just 4 million members, has a stranglehold on the gun policies in a nation of 300 million.
  • CPAC2013: Among the featured speakers at CPAC this year include Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Rick Santorum, Wayne LaPierre, Donald Trump, and Sarah Palin… a virtual who’s who of what the fuck.

Here are some highlights from a few of CPAC’s featured who’s who of WTF:

Sarah Palin: ”We’re not here to rebrand a party [but to] put on a fresh coat of rhetorical paint.” Then she said: “More background checks? Dandy idea, Mr. President. Should’ve started with yours.” Fresh birther paint!

Next, she dazzled the audience with a boob joke followed by heroically (according to crowd reaction?) drinking from a Big Gulp. Wolverines!

“Outside the ballroom afterward, CPAC attendees raved about the stunt. “Hilarious.” “I thought that was awesome.” “I loved that.” One woman I spoke to said the moment “just really symbolized American freedom.” A man named Tomas told me that Palin holding up the Big Gulp “gave a new look to the Statue of Liberty.” Whether or not anyone, including Palin, realized that Mayor Bloomberg’s soda restrictions wouldn’t even have affected Big Gulps is not clear.” – Dan Amira




Freedumb!

…

Donald Trump: “Behold, the scene at Donald Trump’s CPAC speech this morning in the main ballroom. Empty seats were everywhere, although it’s not entirely Trump’s fault. He was given an 8:45 a.m. speaking slot, the very first of the day. Many CPAC attendees aren’t even out of bed yet. Still, Trump was invited not because of his conservative bona fides (he’s donated more money over the years to Democrats than to Republicans), but because he’s supposedly a crowd-pleasing draw.”

Pre-speech:

Post-speech:

These empty seats are Totally False.

Photos via ‘flunky’ Dan Amira

…

Mitt Romney: “‘It’s up to us to make sure that we learn from our mistakes — and my mistakes,’ Romney told the crowd Friday. [...] Romney’s re-emergence at CPAC comes after months spent almost entirely out of public view. People close to him say he consumes large volumes of news every day on his iPad and on Fox News. He stews as he reads the coverage of the various budget showdowns in Congress, frustrated that the president has pursued what he sees as an aggressively liberal agenda that won’t solve the country’s economic problems.”

So to Mitt Romney, “learning from his mistakes” includes continuing to bravely watch Fox and continuing to bravely label the President’s insistence on a balanced approach to deficit reduction (spending cuts alongside closing loopholes and subsidies for the wealthy) an “aggressively liberal agenda.” Sure. Apparently the only mistakes Mitt made with his CPAC speech were omitting some birther jokes and not drinking from a Big Gulp.

Let’s be honest: the theme “America’s Future: The Next Generation of Conservatives” really doesn’t describe CPAC. This annual gathering of wingnuts could be more efficiently labeled “Keep F*cking That Chicken.”

Related: Keep F*cking That Chicken

God Save Us from the next generation of conservatives.

More schadenfreude for the 47 percent

Posted on by

inothernews:

  • In one final slap the President
  • and Paul Ryan
  • and John Boehner just raised Mitt Romney’s taxes.

No doubt Tagg Romney will now tell us that his dad actually wanted to pay higher taxes.

Here’s to a new year without Mitt Romney!

Charles Pierce on Romney: “He does not want. He expects.”

Posted on by

“He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire… to run. If he could have found someone else to take his place… he would have been ecstatic to step aside…(Willard) is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them. He loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention.” — Tagg Romney to The Boston Globe on his father’s presidential aspirations.

Charles Pierce: “This is not a man who tolerates disappointment well, not because he burns with ambition and avarice — although he profited for years from very effective simulacrums of ambition and avarice –but, rather, because he rarely has experienced disappointment in his life. He does not want. He expects. [...]

“Look at that sunset out there. That’s his sunset. He paid for it and it belongs to him. He didn’t want it. He expected it. He deserved it. And he got it. Cosmic justice was done. The universe is in balance again and he’s where he belongs, on top, far distant from The Help, who pestered him so rudely over the past five years.

“The presidency was like that sunset. It was something he deserved, because he was rich and well-born, and his job is not to want, because that implies that you might not get the prize — which, my dear young man, simply is not done — but to deserve. He only wants what is his due, which is pretty much everything… But Willard Romney didn’t “want” to be president for any of these reasons, or for any reasons outside the fact that the office was his by right and by birth. That came shining through long before the “47 percent” comment emerged to define him…The president saw the job as something you had to earn, and people caught on, and that pretty much made all the difference. So Tagg was telling the truth. His old man never wanted the job. But he deserved it. And he may never understand why the country so publicly disagreed.”

What’s easier: Understanding the Mitt Romney Olympics period or the Higgs boson?

Posted on by

“While he was in Utah getting the luge runs in shape, Romney was also still getting a six-figure salary for being a Bain “executive.” Perhaps for Mitt, that was just the going-away equivalent of a monogrammed briefcase. Although it does sort of take the steam out of his principled refusal to accept any money from the Olympics until his turnaround was successfully completed. So to summarize: Romney was at Bain after 1999, but not necessarily in the sense of occupying physical space. He was employed by folks in Utah, but not in the sense of the people who made out his paycheck. If we ever manage to really get our heads around Higgs boson, perhaps we will also be able to understand the Mitt Romney Olympics period.” —
Gail Collins (via azspot)

“Most Americans figure if you are the chairman, CEO and president of a company that you are responsible for what that company does.” — President Obama


image: demnewswire

“What was good for Bain Capital definitely wasn’t good for America.”

Posted on by

Paul Krugman remarks on why the ultimate purpose of corporations would never be good for America:

“Consider one of Mr. Romney’s most famous remarks: “Corporations are people, my friend.” When the audience jeered, he elaborated: “Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets.” This is undoubtedly true, once you take into account the pockets of, say, partners at Bain Capital (who, I hasten to add, are, indeed, people). But one of the main points of outsourcing is to ensure that as little as possible of what corporations earn goes into the pockets of the people who actually work for those corporations.

“…if Bain got involved with your company, one way or another, the odds were pretty good that even if your job survived you ended up with lower pay and diminished benefits.”

“Why, for example, do many large companies now outsource cleaning and security to outside contractors? Surely the answer is, in large part, that outside contractors can hire cheap labor that isn’t represented by the union and can’t participate in the company health and retirement plans. And, sure enough, recent academic research finds that outsourced janitors and guards receive substantially lower wages and worse benefits than their in-house counterparts.

“Just to be clear, outsourcing is only one source of the huge disconnect between a tiny elite and ordinary American workers, a disconnect that has been growing for more than 30 years. And Bain, in turn, was only one player in the growth of outsourcing. So Mitt Romney didn’t personally, single-handedly, destroy the middle-class society we used to have. He was, however, an enthusiastic and very well remunerated participant in the process of destruction; if Bain got involved with your company, one way or another, the odds were pretty good that even if your job survived you ended up with lower pay and diminished benefits.

“In short, what was good for Bain Capital definitely wasn’t good for America. And, as I said at the beginning, the Obama campaign has every right to point that out.”

A corporation’s ONLY purpose is to maximize profits for the owners, by any means necessary.

Integrity and honesty: put up or shut up

Posted on by

“There is no whining in politics. Stop demanding an apology, release your tax returns.”— GOP strategist John Weaver (via: think4yourself)


image: con-tem-plate

“I brought up a lot of stuff in the debate that doesn’t matter today.” — Texas Gov. Rick Perry, when asked about his consistent calls for Mitt Romney to reveal his income tax records during the Republican debates earlier this year. Perry, who made his remarks during a brief interview after stumping for Romney in Elko, Nevada, was quick to change the subject to Barack Obama’s college records and economic issues.  (via: think4yourself)

Video: Romney sings: OFA ad

Posted on by

Mitt Romney sings America the Beautiful (warning: Romney sings), accompanied by facts from his long career as a vulture capitalist and plutocratic elitist:


…
Romney will eat America.

Class warfare: people who sign the front of a paycheck vs. people who sign the back

Posted on by

“Romney types, of course, are the ones who sign the front of the paycheck, and the Obama types are the one who have spent their entire lives signing the back of them.” — Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin, slamming Obama supporters and “implying that they too do not understand how private equity works because they have not been employers themselves.” (via reallyfoxnews)

It’s funny because a majority of the low information dullards who watch Fox Entertainment and worship hatemongers like Malkin have also been signing the “back of a paycheck” their entire lives.

To have been an “employee” instead of an “employer” your entire life is suddenly something to be ashamed of — that’s now a legitimate rightwing insult? Sorry, working / middle class employees: the conservative elite (your Betters) would like to inform you that you have no right to say shit about shit. Just shut up and vote for Mitt Romney.

Keep going, rightwingnutjobs… you’re doing great!

Mitt Romney’s Bain Bullshit

Posted on by

Brian Beutler discusses how “Romney wants full political inoculation from anything Bain did between early 1999 and 2002″ when he claims to have left the company:

“For Romney to be truly off the hook politically for the stuff Bain was doing, he’d have to claim not lack of control, but lack of knowledge. And that’s just not going to wash with anyone. He could try going the “I didn’t have even the slightest idea what the company I technically still owned was doing” route, but he’d be marking himself as either dishonest or incompetent.

“And yet that’s really his only out. Just a guess, but if, hypothetically speaking, he’d learned during the 1999-2002 stretch that Bain had made a practice of poisoning the water supply in a Midwestern factory town, he’d have severed all ties, legal and otherwise, with the company.

“But that didn’t happen. More likely, Bain went on doing what it had always done, and with Romney’s tacit stamp of approval. So he owns it.”

Romney has either been lying to voters or he lied to investors and / or the SEC.

Read more at the Huffington Post: 

Mitt Romney apparently thinks he has black voters all figured out

Posted on by

After being booed at the NAACP convention yesterday, Romney scurried off to a fund-raiser in Hamilton, Montana where he decided to finally respond: “Remind them of this: If they want more stuff from government, tell them to go vote for the other guy, more free stuff. But don’t forget, nothing is really free.”

What Mitt lacks in a spine (or a grown man’s testicles) he more than makes up for in dog-whistling for rich, white donors in Montana.

Tommy Christopher: ”This will probably help Romney with certain segments of the Republican base, but the broader electorate may well react negatively to the contemptuous attitude he displays toward people who support health care reform, who simply want the insurance that they pay for to actually cover them and their loved ones when they need it to. It will also give the press, and the former Massachusetts Governor’s opponents, a chance to remind independent voters that Mitt Romney actually does give different speeches to different audiences. To his donors, people who favor government health care reform with an individual mandate are freeloaders, while he tells the people of several years ago that government health care reform with an individual mandate eliminates the freeloader.” 

Steve Benen: ”In fact, this was entirely predictable — the far-right Republican presidential candidate spoke to the NAACP and effectively proclaimed, “Vote for me and I’ll make sure 7 million African Americans lose their health insurance.” What kind of campaign pitch is that? For crying out loud, of course Romney got booed. At the risk of being overly cynical, I can’t help but wonder if Romney did this on purpose precisely so he would be booed. [...] Indeed, if I had to guess, I’d say Romney will now position himself as something of a victim — he appeared in good faith, the argument goes, but that mean ol’ NAACP audience booed him for standing by his beliefs. It’ll be nonsense, but it’s likely to become the Republican talking point.”

callmeclinton: Responses to Romney’s NAACP speech, in which he announced, “If you want a president who will make things better in the African-American community, you are looking at him.”
callmeclinton: Responses to Romney’s NAACP speech, in which he announced, “If you want a president who will make things better in the African-American community, you are looking at him.”

Mitt Romney: If you want a president who will make things better in the African-American community, you are looking at him.
Black people: what
White people: what
Mexican people: what
Asian people: what
Young children: what
My cat: what
The large rock in my backyard: what
Time: what
Space: what
Light: what
Literally the entire universe: what
via: deadcrackerstorage

Mitt Romney’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad NAACP speech

Posted on by

Think Progress reports that Mitt Romney’s speech at the NAACP this morning was a failure:

“The crowd booed Romney when he called for the full repeal of Obamacare and audibly laughed when he suggested he would be a better president than Obama for the African-American community. Also notable was what was left unsaid. Romney failed to address voting rights, which is a major theme of this NAACP gathering. ThinkProgress was on the scene and talked to some NAACP members after Romney’s speech to get their thoughts. James Waters said some of Romney’s comments were “patronizing,” while Joe Brown argued that Romney “made a serious misjudgment relating to the health care reform.” Allytra Perryman went even further: “I don’t think he has any way to even remotely relate to the everyday citizen, let alone African-American citizens.””

…

He also told the crowd he’d repeal “Obamacare” and was justifiably booed for that remark: 

…

Keep going, Mitt — you’re doing great!