Talk Elections

Well, they sure are desperate to change the subject.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/romney-backer-wishes-obama-would-learn-how-to-be (http://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/romney-backer-wishes-obama-would-learn-how-to-be)

In a brutal campaign conference call Tuesday organized by Mitt Romney's campaign, several of the candidate's surrogates went after President Obama with fiery attacks accusing him of socialism, and being un-American.

"I wish this president would learn how to be an American," said former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu said toward the beginning of the call. Asked later to explain his comment, Sununu said he was referring to Obama's economic philosophy, and apologized for not being clearer.

Sununu also said that by asserting Romney had committed a felony, the Obama campaign was inviting an investigation into its own "Chicago-style" politics. He concluded the call by calling Obama's campaign "clearly and unequivocally liars."

Among the other jabs at Obama were Kyle Koehler, an Ohio tool manufacturer, accusing the president of supporting socialism, and Renee Amoore, a Pennsylvania small business advocate, delivering a passionate diatribe about how her shared race with the president wouldn't win her support.

"Well, I've been black for a long time and he won't get my vote," Amoore said.

I do think we could start to see Obama's harsh attacks start to backfire. If Romney can spin it as an attack on the American way, they can make Obama look like a sort of foreign entity that doesn't understand America.

Yeah.......good luck with that.

We'll see. It's not too far from the truth. But leave it to Romney to screw it up.

You'll notice that Obama's approval ratings have slowly been slipping over the course of the week.

Of course. Because lying to the SEC and having bank accounts at Cayman Islands is as American as baseball and apple pie.

Well you know what they say about handing idiots a rope.

I'll never understand why some people think that an informed criticism of aspects of our capitalist system is the equivalent of pure attacks on capitalism and America itself. Sure, Romney can spin the attacks as such and they might be effective, but we need to keep things in perspective. If Romney is making millions of dollars and still pays a lower tax rate than people with modest means, or if Bain Capital is responsible for sending thousands upon thousands of jobs offshore, then I don't think anybody has to simply accept that as the way things are. Sure they're not illegal, but that doesn't mean people have to assume that they're right or ethical.

Px is just trying so hard, bless him, first with a thread that McCain once thought Palin was a better candidate, and now that Mittens has some intemperate supporters.  At this rate, Mittens should drop out within weeks, if not days. How can he stand this kind of pressure? He is going to decompose into nothing just like the wicked witch of the west in the Wizard of Oz when subjected to water boarding.  :)

Oh yeah, you don't know how hard it was to make Sununu go out there and tell to the press that Obama is a un-American pot-smoker.
The power of my telepathy sometimes scares me. Maybe I should change my nick to Professor X.

They backfire if they have no merit. But truth is an absolute defense against libel and slander.

We can all trust that the Obama campaign has people who can do financial analysis. I am sure that they have examined what happens to companies that Bain Capital takes over.  It's fairly easy to see if those who take over drain assets or load a newly-acquire company with horrible debt. 

Nobody can be an executive without leaving a trail of disgruntled ex-subordinates... and some people know what went on.  Most firms offer severance packages to executives who are rewarded for keeping their lips zipped. Such is not usually done with foremen and clerks. Some decide to talk and can show where the skeletons are. 

To be sure there are turnabout specialists who take over a struggling company, fire incompetent executives, sell off unproductive assets (let us say the office in Vail that doubles as a ski lodge because some top executive loves to ski), pare away unproductive activity (if you can't make a profit out of operations in Florida you might as well abandon them), and trim the workforce to make a leaner and more effective (if usually smaller) firm or sell it off to someone who can manage things better. These are necessary for the competent operation of business. 

Obama's approvals have been flat to trending very slightly upward on Gallup for the past few news cycles, and undulating on Rasmussen.

Good for him. This is going to be a nasty campaign and Romney needs to call down the attack dogs on obama and the heavily disliked progressive types who vote for him.

So how is this going off the rails while an Obama ad criticizing Romney's investments as anti-American is considered "Brilliant".   Sununu finally punched back - good for him.  With the schizophrenia in the media these days the MSM won't be talking about Bain in a day or two, in part due to Sununu. As Debbie Wasserman said, stop whining.

To a great extent, I'm sure you're right. But until Romney releases his tax returns from before 2010, that issue is guaranteed to recur at intervals.

yeah, but by the third or fourth time it begins to look like Obama is searching for a distraction.

Or like Romney is really scared of us finding out the truth about him. If he's smart he'll release more returns ASAP, endure whatever drama comes out of that, then start pushing back about how Obama is focusing on his taxes as a distraction. I don't see how not releasing his taxes works out to be a plus for Romney, politically.

As opposed to the thirty-three votes so far in the Republican House of Representatives to repeal Obamacare?

Yeah, but no one on Earth has faith in Congress. Some people still have faith in Obama, for whatever reason. BHO has way more to lose than Congress does.

Well, Sununu quickly apologized, so he seems to think he did something wrong.

Disliked by people who will, obviously, not be voting for Obama anyway, if they so heavily dislike the 'types who vote for him'.

News flash for you:  Outsourcing American jobs and hiding your millions in offshore accounts to avoid paying your fair share of taxes is absolutely 'un-American' (as much as I hate that McCarthyite term), whereas aggressive campaigning against your opponent has been part of the American political sphere for about two hundred years.  Deal with it.

33 ≠ 2

What's ironic is that the conservative Republican who called Obama's Americanism into question was born in Cuba to parents who were immigrants from the Middle East. So basically John Sununu was born in a Communist haven to terrorist parents. OMG!

So Boehner  was lying about it being the thirty-third time?

“If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen,”

The American Dream, presented by Barack Obama.

In any case, if you read my post you would understand that my point was 1) Sununu's statement was good politics and 2) Politics is rough and his statement isn't "going over the rails". I never said aggressive campaigning was un-american. So yeah, deal with it.

Because negative attacks generally effect both peoples favorability/approval ratings.

Clearly the Obama campaign, and especially Obama himself, are worried about the totally amateurish and incompetent way that Obama has been handling the economy, therefore, they have been willing to say and do anything to distract voters attention away from this fact, even to the extent of committing libel to save Obama's sorry butt. 

Spin it all you want but this is just an attempt at bringing back the whole "Obama is a Kenyan muslim" bullsh**t. Obama has done nothing that would be considered outside the American mainstream. Trying to say you are talking about the economy is complete bullsh**t and another example of using code words to get a point across.

That's very true. The issue that Romney has is that they might not vote for him either. Good attack ads will convince them to do so.

If anything, Romney's greatest problem is that he is being heavily outspent.

Sununu is one of the worst.

"Hiding" money abroad and not reporting the income on your tax returns is fraud. "Depositing" money abroad and reporting the income on your tax returns is not. Do you have any evidence that any money was "hidden?"

Real Americans jam their opponents phones.

When did Castro seize power? And, when was John Sununu born? But, why let minor details like facts get in the way of a good story?

Hey, you're the one who complained that Sununu's attack is being seen as unfair while Obama's is apparently not.  Sununu's statement is being seen as a gaffe because it was hilariously ironic; the Obama campaign's aggressive strategy is appropriately American, whereas the elements of Romney's business and financial activity being focused on are not.  But the gaffe also served the double whammy of inadvertently playing into the sinister insinuations against the president that have been so popular in the GOP.

Until Romney releases his tax returns, we'll never know, will we?  He's obviously hiding something though; that much is obvious from his continuing stubborn obfuscations on the subject.

But what is indisputable is that Romney has been exploiting loopholes to avoid paying the taxes he otherwise should.  Which, while legal, is of course unethical, unfair, and yes, un-American.

You obviously missed his point, which was to poke fun at right-wingers' habit of taking Obama's exotic background and distorting it into all kinds of imaginative lies.

Well, is anybody really surprised that Big Sky Boob is unfamiliar with the concept of irony?

If failing to repatriate money back to the US is "un-American" as Joe says, then almost every multinational corporation that is US based is un-American, since they all keep money abroad in foreign subsidiaries - including in particular Obama's favorite corporation GE, which paid no US taxes at all.

Interest and other such passive income  by the way earned and kept offshore in a foreign corporate subsidiary is taxed in the US as "subpart F" income as it is referred to in the trade. Only income from the active running of a business is not taxed, and the reason Mittens' income was not taxed is that it was in an IRA account, and it would not be taxed in the US anyway.

Income of individuals is taxed in the US no matter where it is earned or kept, subject to a $70,000 per year exclusion for income earned abroad as opposed to passive Subpart F income if one is a resident abroad (not just going on a gig for a week to make some money abroad). To the extent of my knowledge of international taxation law, there just is no "there" there - not even legal tax avoidance by Mittens.

It is all sound and fury signifying nothing. Thank you.

Except that it keeps front and center the simple fact that Romney is the class enemy.  Of course whether this will penetrate the skulls of white working class voters is debatable, but it is the essential information service being provided.

OK all you accusatory conspiracy theorists, show us ONE piece of hard evidence of your senseless accusations against Romney.

You can't, because none exist.

Well, there is the demonstrable fact that either he or somebody else fudged how long he was at Bain for some odd reason.

I also enjoy the fact that somebody whose display name compares Barack Obama to Richard Nixon is calling others accusatory conspiracy theorists.

Still no proof of anything I see.

Winfield, why are you complimenting Obama like that?

I love your sense of humor.  :)

Winfield is right. There is no evidence that Romney lied.

Apart of course from those 142 documents signed by him as CEO and President of Bain during that period and his sworn testimony when he ran for governor of Massachusets.

Obama and the Democrats lied about Romney's time at Bain.

Just ask John King and David Gergen from CNN, two of the most knowledgeable and astute political commentators in America today.

You obviously haven't heard tale of my admiration of Richard Nixon then.

So you think I really am complimenting Obama then.

So maybe Obama doesn't come up to Nixons' standards?  :) 

Is he meeting with Brezhnev, negotiating SALT? Opening the doors to China? Don't think so.

Excluding Watergate, you make a good point about Nixon.  :)

Mittens was in Utah running the Olympics rather than "at Bain," and not involved with it, despite apparently holding a title for a period, although I have yet to see a story that clearly explains it. In due course, Mittens will of course. He has to.

You mean some of the most idiotic establishment politicos? Gotcha.

Ya wanna go toe to toe with King or Gergen on political developments?

My friend, they'd eat ya alive.

It's kind of funny that the original subject of this thread was Sununu...

David Gergen has admitted himself that he was on Bain's payroll, so his opinion ain't worth much.

I guess I have to explain it to you again: even if Obama Romney published his college transcript, his thesis, his articles in the Harvard Law Review all his tax returns we would only be privy to the monies he "deposited" aboard and dutifully reported on his taxes. We would still be unaware of any money he has "hidden" abroad. If you have any evidence he has "hidden" money abroad by all means post it.


It makes no sense to say availing to provisions of the tax code constitutes a failure to pay the taxes that would be due if that provision of the tax code did not exist.  It is entirely "legal," "ethical," "fair" and, yes, "American" to deduct your home mortgage interest from your tax returns even if your taxes would be higher if that provision did not exist in the tax codes.

Warren Buffett has repeated claimed that he "should" pay more taxes than are due under the current tax regime. Nevertheless, he continues to minimize his taxes due by availing himself to the current provisions. While his actions are hypocritical as Hell, I don't believe that he is being "unethical," "unfair" or "Un-American."