Tag Archive for: Mitt Romney

The Obama Campaign, Punching Early and Hard

/0 Comments/in /by

So much political news the past few days, much of it about the anniversary of the raid in which Osama Bin Laden was killed, and I’ve linked to some excellent pieces on that below*. Meantime, I really like how aggressively the #Obama2012 campaign is setting out to define Romney. While the Bin Laden dust-up is getting more coverage, yesterday there was this ad that ended with the line, It’s just what you expect from a guy who had a Swiss bank account, and now today it’s backed up with this infographic I saw on TPM showing Mitt’s foreign investment holdings. One hopes that at least some press people will be asking Romney’s people about these offshore accounts, and keep them on turf they’d rather not have to defend.

Mitt had such lousy opponents in the Republican primary that I detect he and his campaign are ill-prepared for what’s going to hit them in terms of coordinated opposition messages, one layered on top of another.  The copy below is straight from the Obama-Biden website, as is the graphic whose name on the jpeg is “Romney_World Map”. 

Mitt Romney has invested his money around the world, from the Cayman Islands to Ireland to Australia. We don’t know if he’s using these accounts to avoid paying his fair share in taxes, but we do know that in 2010, Romney’s tax rate was a startlingly low 13.9%. This means Romney pays a lower tax rate than many teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other middle-class Americans—even a lower rate than most other millionaires.
If elected, Romney’s proposed tax plan would cut tax rates for the wealthy even further—cutting his own taxes and protecting loopholes that he benefits from. At the same time, he opposes the President’s Buffett Rule, which would require millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share. That’s not right.

Another salutary benefit of this early aggressiveness will be to energize the DEM base, which will be delighted to see the campaign’s determination to play rough–accurate and tough. For sure, there will be people in the press who decry this aggression, but as Josh Marshall has repeatedly pointed out with his bitch-slap theory of politics, if you can make your opponent look weak, or even, in old-fashioned gender terms, “un-man him,” you’re on the way to winning your race. I’m still worried about the enormous amount of Super-Pac spending that is going to be thrown against the president (and other DEMs) but there’s no question which candidate is running the better campaign at this point.

*See this collection of excellent journalism and commentary from the past couple days:

1) David Corn’s excellent tick-tock on the Bin Laden raid and the president’s decision to launch it. PBO is a cool customer. Read this and I think you’ll see what I mean.

2) Rick Ungar’s piece on forbes.com, about what he believes is the bad character revealed by Mitt’s cheap “Jimmy Carter” shot. What’s more, I would add, it undercut his supposed point. It was stupid politics, while revealing a bad heart, at least over this.

3) James Fallows up-close recollection of President Carter’s failed raid to free the American hostages in Iran, and why Romney got the point so wrong.

4) And two pieces, one by Jed Lewison in Daily Kos, and the other by Michael Hirsh in National Journal, about the real politicization of 9/11, including Mitt’s appearance today in lower Manhattan with Rudy Giuliani.

Read more

The Romneys–Completely Clueless

/0 Comments/in /by

The Romneys are completely clueless about how most folks live. Politically, they are as stupid as any campaign I’ve ever seen. Their advisors must want to muzzle them. And that little laugh she gives out with–it just disgusts me.

Late Update: Now there’s a big pushback coming from the Romney camp where they claim “out of context, out of context” about this Ann Romney clip. Well, aside from the fact that they already ran an ad against Pres. Obama where they bragged about the fact that a McCain spokesman’s words were put in Barack’s mouth (talk about out of context), I listened to the whole .52 second clip of Ann Romney today and my reaction is that this is worse than the .12 second segment alone. She begins by talking about her illness, but as I wrote in a blog essay last December–good for her that she can afford equine therapy and expensive horses for her MS, but what about folks who can’t avail themselves of those things, and don’t have the health care and insurance she has. The policies of her husband and his party would make it that much harder for those less fortunate to ever be able to do so.

Read more

From the Annals of Religious Intolerance & Chutzpah

/0 Comments/in /by

Wow, what a toxic mix.

In Gaithersburg, MD, Marcel Guarnizo, a Catholic priest officiating at the funeral of an 85-year old Catholic woman refused communion to Barbara Johnson, the late woman’s daughter, after learning that 51-year old woman is gay. Johnson was a guest Wednesday night on “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.” Appearing on the program, only days ago having buried her mother she explained to O’Donnell that after denying her the sacrament, as Johnson began eulogizing her mother before the congregation, Guarnizo rose from his seat near the altar and left the sanctuary. She added that later he failed to attend the burial or arrange for another priest to be present at the graveside. She was grateful to a funeral director who at the last minute found a willing cleric to officiate over the burial.

The Boston Globe, with research assistance from former Mormon Helen Radkey, reported today that Daniel Pearl, the Wall St. Journal reporter who was murdered in Pakistan in 2002, was posthumously baptized in a Mormon church earlier this year. The revelation is the latest in a litany of similar discoveries made over the past few weeks, including so-called conversions done for the parents of Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, and even Barack Obama’s late mother, Stanley Anne Dunham.

As discussed earlier on this blog, in Hitchens’ Book of Mormonism and  “‘A Crass Attempt at Mass Identity Theft’,” Mormon officials in 1995 had agreed to end this bizarre and unwelcome practice, but they now have told the Globe “it is difficult to police 14 million members worldwide.” And yet, it seems they have also declined to condemn these freelance baptizers. I first read about this issue, also in 1995, when I republished Alex Shoumatoff’s excellent book The Mountain of Names, a study of kinship and the history of the human family.

Read more

Not Shutting Up

/0 Comments/in , /by

Last month, on January 14, I published a blog essay Three Years Ago Today, on my layoff from a publishing house job in 2009. It elicited widespread reaction, measured in sheer numbers of responses on Facebook and Twitter; on this blog, altogether totaling more than 200; in the engaged remarks from many friends and colleagues; and in the new contacts and readers it’s attracted to this website. The essay’s also attracted interest from a website that my friend and author Michael Goldfarb, former NPR correspondent, had referred me to, Over and 50 and Out of Work: Stories of the Great Recession. This a remarkable site and I’m very proud they’ve now published it on their site, among the company of extraordinary people featured on their web pages. You may see it here, and while you’re there, view some of the videos they’ve posted, with personal testimony from individuals like myself. Additionally, a magazine called NY______, or NY Underscore, is running a condensed version of the essay in their upcoming ‘Jobs’ issue. Clearly, the piece has struck a chord with many readers, and at least two web and magazine editors.

I should add that the essay also elicited one remark that wasn’t so kind, which I learned about from a friend. A person I shall not name, though I will say it was someone with a fulltime job, said to this friend, “He should stop talking about getting fired.” This was evidently meant as free advice, as if I should refrain from damaging my chances of regaining employment by being too open about my experience. I felt like a person with a serious illness might feel, who’s told not to speak of their malady in public, to spare those not afflicted the discomfort of learning about it. At first, I was stung by this, as if I’d been told to “Shut up,” and then I realized this person’s reading was so reductionist and witless that they didn’t even register the difference between getting “fired” and being laid off–of being one employee in a group of dozens in a corporation who’re all relieved of their jobs on the same day. After a few days, I laughed about it, and am now just bemused. It reminded me of Mitt Romney’s plea, made on January 11, just a few days before I published the essay, that income inequality and unfair tax burdens on the middle class may be discussed, but only “in quiet rooms.” Clearly, I haven’t entered any quiet rooms, I’m not “shutting up,” and the essay is proving to have an emerging afterlife; that is very gratifying indeed.

Read more

“A Crass Attempt at Mass Identity Theft from the Deceased”

/1 Comment/in /by

Elie Wiesel has plaintively requested that Mitt Romney intervene with the Mormon church to insist that the organization finally end the barbaric and creepy practice of posthumous so-called “conversions” of non-Mormon decedents, including many Holocaust victims. Wiesel was interviewed tonight on “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell,” where he explained that notwithstanding a mid-1990s agreement that was supposed to have ended the practice, a former Mormon researcher–Helen Radkey, who was also interviewed by O’Donnell–had informed Wiesel that the practice has never stopped. Wiesel learned that among those whose have been posthumously ‘claimed’ were the parents of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, and weirdly, breaking with their own practice of claiming the deceased, Wiesel himself, and his wife.

Last October I wrote a blog post, “Hitchens’ Book of Mormon-ism,” after Christopher Hitchens published “Mitt Romney’s Mormon Problem” in Slate. Hitch’s piece, one of his last before he died in December, included a reference to a terrific book that I’d republished in 1995. By Facebook friend Alex Shoumatoff, The Mountain of Names is a superb study of human kinship and genealogy. As I wrote then, the Shoumatoff book’s “title is a direct reference to the bank of names that Mormons, at least until the mid-90s, kept in the rocky innards of a private peak in Utah. . . . In his inimitable way, Hitch tartly dubs this ‘a crass attempt at mass identity theft from the deceased.’” Now we learn that the harvesting of names didn’t end then, and evidently has still not ceased. It’s a pity Hitch isn’t around to inveigh against this all the more.

A theology that envisions its modern day believers accruing some kind of divine credit for baptizing the dead is to me a bizarre and arrogant faith.
Feb. 16 update from a 2007 Newsweek interview with Mitt Romney:

“When asked by NEWSWEEK if he has done baptisms for the dead—in which Mormons find the names of dead people of all faiths and baptize them, as an LDS spokesperson says, to ‘open the door’ to the highest heaven—he looked slightly startled and answered, ‘I have in my life, but I haven’t recently.'”

Read more

Who’s Mitt?

/0 Comments/in /by

Conservative pundits don’t agree among themselves on the question “Who is Mitt Romney? Today, after Mitt’s C-Pac speech, his campaign favored Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, an avid Romney booster all year, with a sit-down with the on-again, off-again frontrunner. She begins her account like a true homer, in unctuous tones:

“Following his very well received CPAC speech, I met with Mitt Romney in a small meeting room in the hotel where thousands of conservatives have gathered.”

She wants readers to believe this privileged access has afforded her deep insight into the pol’s deepest character traits:

“While his critics and much of the media ding him as ‘plastic,’ in person he is warmer and more at ease than the average pol. Most politicians after a big speech will pump you for compliments: ‘How was I? What d’ya think?’ Romney doesn’t do that, perhaps reflective of the fact that he really didn’t live most of his life as a politician and doesn’t crave personal approval as many who’ve spent their lives in public office do.'”

Got that? Mitt “doesn’t crave personal approval.”

But wait, what about David Brooks’s NY Times column this morning? Drawing on The Lonely Crowd, he cites Mitt as a classic example of the “other-directed personality type . . . attuned to what other people want him to be. The other-directed person is a pliable member of a team and yearns for acceptance.”

I favor Brooks’s interpretation, but reading these pieces in succession I chuckled and wondered, “Hey, guys, which Mitt is it?”

Read more