Posted by Bob Lord In my first substantive post here, back in January, I described how we were living through the "Atlas Shrugged Upside Down," a society where damaging conservative policies are allowed to proceed to their crazy conclusion. You can read it here: http://www.blogforarizona.com/blog/2012/01/atlas-shrugged-upside-down.html Turns out, I was on point in two respects. First, the … Read more
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
"And then it happened … YEESSS! Amidst the tired rhetoric, empty platitudes and overwrought attacks … "a fistful of awesome" emerged in the night where it spent 12 minutes on the most important night of Mitt Romney's life yelling at a chair. And oh, how the outlaw Josie wailed."
"This is the most joy I've gotten from an old man since Dick Cheney non-fatally shot one in the face."
Video below the fold.
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Tim Dickinson at Rolling Stone has another blockbuster investigative report into Willard "Mittens" Romney and his time at Bain Capital. "The Federal Bailout That Saved Mitt Romney: Government documents prove the candidate's mythology is just that":
Mitt Romney likes to say he won't "apologize" for his success in business. But what he never says is "thank you" – to the American people – for the federal bailout of Bain & Company that made so much of his outsize wealth possible.
According to the candidate's mythology, Romney took leave of his duties at the private equity firm Bain Capital in 1990 and rode in on a white horse to lead a swift restructuring of Bain & Company, preventing the collapse of the consulting firm where his career began. When The Boston Globe reported on the rescue at the time of his Senate run against Ted Kennedy, campaign aides spun Romney as the wizard behind a "long-shot miracle," bragging that he had "saved bank depositors all over the country $30 million when he saved Bain & Company."
In fact, government documents on the bailout obtained by Rolling Stone show that the legend crafted by Romney is basically a lie. The federal records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that Romney's initial rescue attempt at Bain & Company was actually a disaster – leaving the firm so financially strapped that it had "no value as a going concern." Even worse, the federal bailout ultimately engineered by Romney screwed the FDIC – the bank insurance system backed by taxpayers – out of at least $10 million. And in an added insult, Romney rewarded top executives at Bain with hefty bonuses at the very moment that he was demanding his handout from the feds.
Continue reading this richly detailed report. The Federal Bailout That Saved Mitt Romney.
See: Mitt Romney's Federal Bailout: The Documents.
Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone also has a lengthy exposé on Willard "Mittens" Romney and his time at Bain Capital. Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital:
The incredible untold story of the 2012 election so far is that Romney's run has been a shimmering pearl of perfect political hypocrisy, which he's somehow managed to keep hidden, even with thousands of cameras following his every move. And the drama of this rhetorical high-wire act was ratcheted up even further when Romney chose his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin – like himself, a self-righteously anal, thin-lipped, Whitest Kids U Know penny pincher who'd be honored to tell Oliver Twist there's no more soup left. By selecting Ryan, Romney, the hard-charging, chameleonic champion of a disgraced-yet-defiant Wall Street, officially succeeded in moving the battle lines in the 2012 presidential race.
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's nomination acceptance speech for reelection at the Democratic national convention in Philadelphia in 1936 still rings true today. It is what Americans want to hear from President Obama this week. You can read the full transcript here. Franklin D. Roosevelt: Acceptance Speech for the Renomination for the Presidency, Philadelphia, Pa. (Excerpt):
Philadelphia is a good city in which to write American history. This is fitting ground on which to reaffirm the faith of our fathers; to pledge ourselves to restore to the people a wider freedom; to give to 1936 as the founders gave to 1776—an American way of life.
That very word freedom, in itself and of necessity, suggests freedom from some restraining power. In 1776 we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy—from the eighteenth century royalists who held special privileges from the crown. It was to perpetuate their privilege that they governed without the consent of the governed; that they denied the right of free assembly and free speech; that they restricted the worship of God; that they put the average man's property and the average man's life in pawn to the mercenaries of dynastic power; that they regimented the people.
And so it was to win freedom from the tyranny of political autocracy that the American Revolution was fought. That victory gave the business of governing into the hands of the average man, who won the right with his neighbors to make and order his own destiny through his own Government. Political tyranny was wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.
Since that struggle, however, man's inventive genius released new forces in our land which reordered the lives of our people.. The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution—all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free.
For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.
There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.
by David Safier Virtual (online) schools maintain a constant drumbeat for the idea they should get as much in funds as brick-and-mortar schools. Sure, they don't have buildings, utilities expenses or custodial costs, and they maintain 50-to-1 student-to-teacher ratios (in a good year. Sometimes the number skyrockets into the 100-to-1-plus territory), but that doesn't shake … Read more