Mitt Romney, high school bully?

[Politico]

Barack Obama was snorting cocaine as an adult yet Mitt Romney is being attacked for something that may or may not have happened? And if this John Lauber was really a homosexual, he'd probably be dead by now given what happened to most homosexuals his age in the '80s and '90s (e.g., Freddie Mercury, Liberace, Rock Hudson, etc.)

[Politico]

"The Washington Post can’t be bothered to worry about Barack Obama’s college years, college transcripts, communist friends, cocaine use, or cop-killing plotters in whose living room he first launched his major political career, but they can get in the really way back machine to 1965 and Mitt Romney’s high school years.

Mitt Romney cut a hippy’s hair at his preparatory high school. A day after Barack Obama caved on gay marriage, the Washington Post “coincidentally” says Mitt Romney cut the hair of a boy who “was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality.”

Let’s leave out the fact that the kid who got his haircut was subsequently thrown out of school for smoking one cigarette, but we’re to believe that the assailants of his hair, witnessed by many, were ignored. Oh, and the guy who got is hair cut never, ever, ever mentioned it, including to family, and died in 2004 so it can’t be verified. But a handful of students who now probably support Barack Obama have a crystal clear memory of events from 50 years ago. The people who were adults at the time of the incident and still alive have no memory of it, but remember Romney and said he was never a disciplinary problem."

what a joke of a story

Bingo.

Perhaps it's time for somebody to start recalling the time that Barack Obama smoked crack?

If they want ugly, they'll get uglier than they can dish out.

[Politico]

BTW, anybody remember the fake Bush AWOL letter?

[Politico]

Barack Obama was snorting cocaine as an adult yet Mitt Romney is being attacked for something that may or may not have happened? And if this John Lauber was really a homosexual, he'd probably be dead by now given what happened to most homosexuals his age in the '80s and '90s (e.g., Freddie Mercury, Liberace, Rock Hudson, etc.)

Ummm.....what?

Almost every gay person I know who were born during the Baby Boom (i.e., 1946-1964) died of AIDS in the '80s or '90s. The only exception is one who was born in the early '60s.

[Politico]

Barack Obama was snorting cocaine as an adult yet Mitt Romney is being attacked for something that may or may not have happened? And if this John Lauber was really a homosexual, he'd probably be dead by now given what happened to most homosexuals his age in the '80s and '90s (e.g., Freddie Mercury, Liberace, Rock Hudson, etc.)

I am fairly anti-homosexual but I think you should be banned for this.

We're supposed to ignore history, and ban people who bring it up? OK...

[Politico]

And if this John Lauber was really a homosexual, he'd probably be dead by now given what happened to most homosexuals his age in the '80s and '90s (e.g., Freddie Mercury, Liberace, Rock Hudson, etc.)

...

You are assuming this story is fabricated, because you find it highly unlikely that a gay guy would have lived to 60?  Do you have statistical evidence for this or do you think creating a list of 4 dead gay dudes is sufficient?

You'll be happy to know, I guess, that he died at 56 of liver cancer.

edit: a little late on the draw there.

Of course I am not happy to know that he is dead. I presumed he was the source of this story, and would be giving interviews, much like the allegations from the guy who supposedly wrote that fake AWOL letter regarding Bush. Now I am hearing this guy never even brought it up to a soul, which is odd. It is the sort of thing everybody would share with their friends and family.

This whole thing reeks just like the fake Bush AWOL letter did. The political timing cannot be ignored.

AIDS destroyed a whole generation of gay men. Are people, especially informed people on here, really not aware of this? It is common knowledge, I thought, even amongst young people today.

[Politico]

Michael Stipe, Elton John, and Barney Frank can't possibly be gay. They would have died of AIDS by now

Ever hear of a qualifier? As in, "this is probably the case"? I did not make any absolute statements. And I did jump the gun because I thought this guy was alive, well, and the key source of the story.

[Politico]

Of course I am not happy to know that he is dead. I presumed he was the source of this story. Now I am hearing he never even brought it up.

This whole thing reeks just like the fake Bush AWOL letter did. The political timing cannot be ignored.

I really doubt that this is turn-around since the gay marriage story, considering that would literally be an overnight fabrication.  I think this is a pretty unfalsifiable story (in the scientific sense), but there are points of suspicion -- Romney pretty much non-denied this, and not remembering something like this is pretty un-charming; and the independent verification doesn't really scream snow-job.  Like I said, unfalsifiable, but...

Is somebody innocent unless proven guilty, or guilty unless proven innocent? This story is neither verifiable nor falsifiable.

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No, I am assuming somebody sat on this story, and thought it would be convenient to claim the guy was "presumed" gay now that gay marriage is a hot issue. Surely everybody on here can take off the partisan blinders and see that the timing is not coincidental...

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That would be a wild guess for anybody, especially when you factor in all of the Roy Cohns of the world and such, but I am quite confident it is over 50% for those who were born before 1960 and were sexually active before 1980. A potential proxy may be comparing the number of open/closeted gay celebrities born before 1960 who died of AIDS compared to those who are still alive.  Obviously there is a whole list of the departed. In comparison, somebody ringed off two names that fit the criteria, and I am not sure we can consider Barney Frank a celebrity per se, and it is my understanding that Elton John was not sexually active in a gay way until the late 1980s.

Another thing to consider is that most people no longer die of AIDS in America. They take excruciatingly debilitating medication to keep their HIV from causing AIDS. For most of them, their ticker goes, or they die of cancer, before they officially develop AIDS. It's really bad, and it's awful the type of things people go through. The numbers are quite misleading. Ask people who are involved in this area of health care.

[Politico]

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Are you writing a novel or something?  This is all quite creative I must say.

Come on, Torie. It's ing awful what happened, and what is happening. It's not as bad, obviously, but it's still bad. I lost a cousin in 1987. I've talked to folks in health care, and they've told me about the side effects many folks have with the medications of the past twenty years, and how many people eventually just have one of their organs give out, or watch cancer take over. And, myself, I think it's awful how many people have no idea what they're leading themselves into without knowing the full threat. It's not diabetes. It's more like multiple sclerosis now. A painful, painful condition that nobody should have to endure.

[Politico]

Is somebody innocent unless proven guilty, or guilty unless proven innocent?

What about "it's unfalsifiable" makes you presume I think Romney should be assumed guilty?  Do I think he probably did it?  Yes.  Do I accept unfalsifiable claims because they seem intuitively likely?  No; that's obviously your racket.

I believe somebody is innocent unless proven guilty. I know things work differently in some places, but I thought that's how it worked in America.

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Then you're overestimating the importance of our posts on here, not to mention over-analyzing them. This place is first and foremost about quantitative election results, and secondly about entertainment and becoming better informed. IMHO, anyway. It certainly does not constitute anything becoming political football. This place is not important enough for that.

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Like I said, the best we can do is come up with a proxy to help answer your question. I suggested gay/closeted celebrities born before 1960 and sexually active before 1980. You are free to come up with a better proxy.

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If forced to give a hypothesis, 60% +/- 15%.

Another thing to consider is that most people no longer die of AIDS in America. They take excruciatingly debilitating medication to keep their HIV from causing AIDS. For most of them, their ticker goes, or they die of cancer, before they officially develop AIDS. It's really bad, and it's awful the type of things people go through. The numbers are quite misleading. Ask people who are involved in this area of health care.

Or you could, you know, find statistics instead of making these anecdotal leaps you're making.
[/quote]

I would love to use statistics, but when somebody dies of a heart attack or cancer their death is classified as death due to heart disease or cancer regardless of the HIV status of the deceased. The only way to even know what's really going on is to talk to health care service providers, including doctors, who are involved with treating HIV patients.

[Politico]

I believe somebody is innocent unless proven guilty. I know things work differently in some places, but I thought that's how it worked in America.

I am failing to understand why you think I disagree with you.  I said it's unfalsifiable and I didn't mean that positively.  However, my personal sense of judgment is not the same as the legal system's sense of judgment.  I get to be a bit more actuarial, you know?

Everybody is entitled to their own opinions, but nobody is entitled to their own facts. The fact of the matter is that this story is both unverifiable and unfalsifiable. Some people will believe something that can never be proven nor disproved. I choose to not believe something that is not proven and cannot be proven, especially when political timing is all so convenient.

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I am not being inconsistent. We are merely having a communication breakdown, and it's probably my fault because I am exhausted and have a lot on the go.

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Like I said, the best we can use is a proxy to give us an idea of how devastating it was to a whole generation of gay men before medications became readily available. Everybody knows that homosexuals tend to dominate the arts. And clearly a whole generation of homosexuals in the arts were devastated by a deadly disease. Now perhaps it hit homosexuals in the arts harder than homosexuals outside of the arts, but I still believe it's a pretty good proxy after you downgrade the figures by 20 or 30 points in order to give a conservative guess.

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No, I am suggesting that 60% +/- 15% of homosexual men born between 1940-1960 who were sexually active before 1980 became victims of AIDS/HIV.

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When somebody with HIV dies of a heart attack, they are added to national statistics as being casualties of heart disease, not AIDS. When somebody with HIV dies of cancer, they are added to national statistics as being casualties of cancer, not AIDS. If somebody with HIV never develops AIDS, they cannot be listed as having died of complications from AIDS. The medications of the past twenty years are largely preventing HIV from causing AIDS in most cases, but they are only prolonging an inevitable death, although by a considerable amount (on average, they are probably adding 10-15 years compared to if one went without treatment). Eventually the heart goes, or cancer develops, and takes out the victim. The bottomline: It's not diabetes, even if most everybody wants to pretend it is.

[Politico]

There really is something wrong with you isn't there?

There's something wrong with all of us, I'm sure. I mean, this is an uber geeky obsession of ours (i.e., election results...watching returns on Election Day sometimes gives me more of a high than the Super Bowl).

As for other stuff in this thread, I am just saying it like it is. Maybe it will save somebody's life/health.

[Politico]

I choose to not believe something that is not proven and cannot be proven, especially when political timing is all so convenient.

The most enigmatic quote from the second wife:

She said when Gingrich admitted to a six-year affair with a Congressional aide, he asked her if she would share him with the other woman, Callista, who is now married to Gingrich.

"And I just stared at him and he said, 'Callista doesn't care what I do,'" Marianne Gingrich told ABC News. "He wanted an open marriage and I refused."

Marianne described her "shock" at Gingrich's behavior, including how she says she learned he conducted his affair with Callista "in my bedroom in our apartment in Washington."

"He always called me at night," she recalled, "and always ended with 'I love you.' Well, she was listening."

Source: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/exclusive-gingrich-lacks-moral-character-president-wife/story?id=15392899#.Txjbj4FnSuI

So what DOES he do that Callista doesn't care about him doing? Or, perhaps more aptly, WHO does he do that Callista doesn't care about?

Can you say, "Monica Lewinsky: Republican Edition"?

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/182731/march-12-2007/newt-gingrich-s-extramarital-affair

Ron Paul was right about Newt's SERIAL HYPOCRISY...

Flip-flopping. Guilty as charged. What do you expect from a Romney supporter?

Seriously, though, are we comparing something that may or may not have happened nearly 50 years ago when Romney was a teenager to something Newt Gingrich did not once, but twice, and maybe even more times? Gingrich has confessed to cheating twice. It's not a stretch to imagine him saying, "Callista doesn't care what I do," but you are right: I can neither prove nor disprove he said that. There are exceptions to every rule, as they say

[Politico]

There really is something wrong with you isn't there?

There's something wrong with all of us, I'm sure. I mean, this is an uber geeky obsession of ours (i.e., election results...watching returns on Election Day sometimes gives me more of a high than the Super Bowl).

As for other stuff in this thread, I am just saying it like it is. Maybe it will save somebody's life/health.

On point 1... sure.

Point 2... you're talking out of ... well, you get my point. I just need to understand the EXACT point you're making... you doubt the guy is really gay, because at his age... he should have died of AIDS?

Absolutely not. Nobody should die of AIDS. I never said or indicated any such thing. I simply doubted the guy was really gay because:

1) Use of the qualified "presumed"

2) The timing of the release of this story

3) Because if he was really gay, the likelihood of him being alive and gay is probably lower than being dead by virtue of the fact that AIDS wiped out most homosexuals of his generation (i.e., those born in the '40s).

As previously noted, I assumed he was alive and the key source of this story. Alas, he is not alive. Apparently he died in 2004. Apparently he never spoke of this incident to a single soul, which leaves one to wonder if it is really true.

In any case, Romney has not been a teenager for nearly half a century. And even what he is accused of is fairly mild by 1960s standards, especially if one removes the "presumed homosexual" aspect that is so politically convenient at this moment in time. When Romney was a teenager, I STRONGLY doubt that he EVER thought of ANYBODY as being a homosexual. I mean, we are talking about a guy who grew up in the '50s and early '60s. I just do not buy that Romney picked on a guy cause he presumed he was a homosexual. It's a rather absurd notion, really, given the era he grew up in. It would be a different story if we were talking about the late '60s-onward.

[Politico]

At least 7% of men have sex with men (MSM) which gives us 2,450,000 sexually active gay men

Here's your failed assumption. The real figure before 1980 was probably 1-3% (e.g., even Elton John wasn't having sex with men before 1980). One just needs to look at the levels of gay bars and bathhouses in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City to realize the figure was nowhere near 7%. Those joints were large and profitable, but not THAT large and profitable.

[Politico]

I'm also not clear on why irregular recreational cocaine use, which might be dumb but is unlikely to directly affect others, is being treated as worse than severe bullying here.

Go tell the families of victims of the Mexican drug cartels that the cocaine market does not directly affect others. It's ignorant to believe the current cocaine market, or the one back when Obama was doing cocaine, does not impact anybody other than consumers/producers.

FYI: I believe all drugs should be legalized in order to curb the gangsters.

[Politico]

I'm also not clear on why irregular recreational cocaine use, which might be dumb but is unlikely to directly affect others, is being treated as worse than severe bullying here.

Go tell the families of victims of the Mexican drug cartels that the cocaine market does not directly affect others. It's ignorant to believe the current cocaine market, or the one back when Obama was doing cocaine, does not impact anybody other than consumers/producers.

FYI: I believe all drugs should be legalized in order to curb the gangsters.

Shouldn't you be a Gary Johnson supporter?

My stance is no different from Milton Friedman's, who supported Ronald Reagan in the same fashion that I am supporting Mitt Romney.

I do not need to agree with my candidate of choice on every issue. In fact, I never have with anybody.

[Politico]

I'm also not clear on why irregular recreational cocaine use, which might be dumb but is unlikely to directly affect others, is being treated as worse than severe bullying here.

Go tell the families of victims of the Mexican drug cartels that the cocaine market does not directly affect others. It's ignorant to believe the current cocaine market, or the one back when Obama was doing cocaine, does not impact anybody other than consumers/producers.

FYI: I believe all drugs should be legalized in order to curb the gangsters.

"Does not directly affect others" is NOT what I said.  I know of the Mexican drug cartels and have researched this issue.  I said it is "unlikely" to directly affect someone else, which is absolutely true, unless you mean that in the marginal sense.  However, I still think it is ridiculous to claim that the marginal effect of purchasing a small amount of cocaine is "obviously" worse than the effect of directly bullying someone.

Please do not extend your inattentiveness to analysis to reading my posts.  Thanks.

I apologize for any misunderstanding, but you said that "recreational cocaine use" is "unlikely to directly affect others." I am sorry, but you do realize how cocaine is bought and sold, right (i.e., how the market currently works)? Every time someone buys cocaine, the cost of the cocaine they bought reflects the costs involved in getting the cocaine to them (along with a profit margin, of course). Part of those costs include extreme violence among warring drug producers (e.g., gangsters like Pablo Escobar in Obama's era, and the Mexican drug cartels today). There are few cocaine producers who are NOT involved in violence, and there are few recreational cocaine users who did not pay for their cocaine. In other words, recreational cocaine use is LIKELY to directly affect others in a violent, harmful way. Of course, the only remedy to ending the violence is by ending the black market via legalization. But that will not happen anytime soon.

[Politico]

BTW, anybody remember the fake Bush AWOL letter?

No, but I remember the REAL Bush AWOL letter.

The one that was printed off MS Word in 1970-something, before Microsoft even existed? LOL

[Politico]

I'll add that AIDS did probably kill most *openly* gay men - the reason being is that getting AIDS was essentially a forced outing...

True. Maybe this aspect is clouding my judgment. Things were more closeted back then, and most openly gay men ended up being outed by the disease. I probably know gay men who are older than 50 and still alive, but just do not know they are gay.

Politico's '50% of sexually active gays died of AIDS' claim is quite fun.

There were 76,546,000 people born between 1940 and 1962 (18 years before 1980), of which 39,038,000 were men and approx 35,000,000 survived to 1980. At least 7% of men have sex with men (MSM) which gives us 2,450,000 sexually active gay men (and regardless of what shams some of them were living in, you can be damned sure they were having sex)

So we are looking, if Politico isn't talking out of his ass (which of course he is) at some 1.225million gay deaths from AIDS; that's excluding those born before 1940 and after 1962.

A total of 600,000 people in the USA have died from HIV/AIDS related complications, of which 300,000 involved MSM. Based on figures from 2007, that includes those born as late as say 1989. So if we add all them into the mix we have a potential adult population of 20.1 million MSM of all ages, all born before, during and after HIV/AIDS was first identified set against deaths of 600,000.

Deaths from HIV/AIDS related complications - 0.29%. Even if you take just 1% rather than 7% of the population, you still have deaths at about 2%.

That's actually more dubious than Politico's claim, since he is correct that HIV deaths were highly concentrated among men born between those years, and also in the period when the disease was most deadly (late 70s to late 80s) cause of death was very frequently misdiagnosed.  AIDS did kill a *massive* amount of gay men, although claiming a figure as high as 50 or 60% is pretty unlikely.

Maybe giving a range of 45-75% was wrong. But I am almost certain the number is not lower than 33%.

[Politico]

The winning argument here is that Mittens was in F'ing High School, and we all did stuff there to one degree or another, and folks grow up. After you "win," you let go. It's really easy.

Yes. Let's get back to this. The whole AIDS thing is what it is, and there's no point talking about it anymore. I've said my part.