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romney's poor...
A day that was supposed to see Mitt Romney reboot his faltering presidential campaign ended in disarray last night, after he was caught telling a room full of wealthy donors “my job is not to worry” about attempting to appeal to poor people.
Hidden camera footage of the event, said to be a dinner attended by 30 of the Republican candidate's biggest fundraisers, saw him dismiss 47 per cent of Americans as freeloaders who "pay no income tax" and behave like "victims".
Speaking in what appeared to be a hotel function room, Romney claimed that the overwhelming majority of voters who support Barack Obama's do so because they are "dependent" on government and "believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing".
"There are 47 per cent of the people who will vote for the President no matter what, all right?" he said. "There are 47 per cent who are with him, who are dependant upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it."
"They will vote for this President no matter what," he continued. "These are people who pay no income tax... My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."
- By Gus Leonisky at 18 Sep 2012 - 4:15pm
- Gus Leonisky's blog
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you-name-it and no-matter-what...
US presidential nominee Mitt Romney faces a new campaign storm after the release of a secretly filmed video in which he tells rich donors that nearly half of Americans are dependent "victims" who do not pay tax.
Excerpts of video, posted by the Mother Jones website, show Mr Romney tell a closed-door private fundraiser that 47 per cent of Americans will vote for president Barack Obama "no matter what".
"There are 47 per cent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-09-18/romney-lashes-victims-in-secretly-filmed-speech-to-rich-donors/4266772?WT.svl=news2
and twenty one dollars...
Mr. Romney’s vision of the country, in other words, is a fantasy. He believes that 47 percent of Americans “are dependent upon government . . . believe the government has a responsibility to care for them . . . that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.” This is dramatically out of touch with how hard most middle-class people work and how hard they find it to make ends meet. Half of all American households — households, not individuals — earn $50,000 or less, and the official poverty line for a family of four is a meager $23,021.
read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mitt-romneys-47-percent-fantasy/2012/09/18/1728482a-01aa-11e2-b257-e1c2b3548a4a_print.html
he stands on a heap of capital sins...
From Gerard HendersonLife has seldom been more difficult for a politician in a Western democracy during peacetime. Take the United States Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, for example. Until last week, a principal criticism of Romney was that he stood for nothing.
Then footage emerged, via the left-wing journal Mother Jones, of a private address Romney gave at a fund-raiser in Florida in May. The Republican candidate was shown criticising the extent of welfare dependency in America and querying whether the Palestinians have an interest in establishing peace with Israel. Now Romney is accused of lacking empathy at home and not being a peacemaker abroad.
Sure, Romney's message was expressed in a clumsy manner. Moreover, he forgot the modern rule of politics that no event can ever be regarded as truly confidential. Yet Romney's essential problem is that he said what should not be said. According to, that is, the left-liberal consensus that prevails in much of the contemporary Western media.
There has been an explosion in the growth of entitlement payments in the US - along with most of Western Europe. According to the American Enterprise Institute economist Nicholas Eberstadt, in 1960 US government transfers to individuals totalled $US24 billion (in current dollars). After adjusting for inflation and population growth, entitlement transfers to individuals have grown 72 per cent in half a century.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/media-response-to-inconvenient-truths-reveals-hidden-agenda-20120924-26hcx.html#ixzz27RhgX4b2
I am going to go to the deep end of the pool here... If everyone was efficient, eager to work at the speed of light, working their arse off, doing things that really made economies of the world going crackers, making money beyond their dreams, slaving under the sun... well, let me say this: the earth would have vanished long ago... and there would bugger all for anyone to do... Yes without the lazy bums on welfare, without the sick and the humgry, this planet would have been long ravaged by a mega-horde of hard working capitalists to the extend that it would be scorched earth and shoot on sight anyone that approaches one's hole in the ground policies... Of course there are abuse of the welfare system... But aren't there far bigger abuses and rorts of the money market, huge fiddles in the banking system and of massive corruption of the trading system and aren't there stupid way some employers treat their employees?... I could give you a gazimillion examples of capitalism sins.
At the moment, the US presidential elections are a choice between sinners and the one who sits on top of the highest mountain of "capital" sins, despite his religious apron, is Mitt...
Go get a life Hr Henderson... Don't bame the media for Romney's crap...
a win for mother jones...
TODAY WE ARE happy to announce a monumental legal victory for Mother Jones: A judge in Idaho has ruled in our favor on all claims in a defamation case filed by a major Republican donor, Frank VanderSloot, and his company, Melaleuca Inc. In a decision issued Tuesday, the court found that Mother Jonesdid not defame VanderSloot or Melaleuca because "all of the statements at issue are non-actionable truth or substantial truth." The court also found that the statements were protected as fair comment under the First Amendment.
This is the culmination of a lengthy, expensive legal saga that began three years ago when the 2012 presidential primaries were in full swing. On February 6, 2012, we published an article about VanderSloot after it emerged that his company, Melaleuca, and its subsidiaries had given $1 million to Mitt Romney's super-PAC. The piece noted that VanderSloot had gone to unusual lengths to oppose gay rights in Idaho, and that Melaleuca had run into trouble with regulators.
VanderSloot's lawyers sent us a letter complaining about the article. We reviewed their concerns and posted a correction about a few details. So far, not an uncommon scenario; it's something every newsroom deals with from time to time.
But that September, we broke the story of Romney's 47 percent comments, which some have argued cost the GOP the White House. Four months later, VanderSloot—who was also one of Gov. Romney's national finance chairs—filed a defamation lawsuit against Mother Jones as well as Stephanie Mencimer, the reporter of the article, and Monika personally (for her tweet about the piece).
People have asked us whether we think these two things were connected, and the honest answer is that we have no idea. What we do know is that the take-no-prisoners legal assault from VanderSloot and Melaleuca has consumed a good part of the past two and a half years and has cost millions (yes, millions) in legal fees. In the course of the litigation, VanderSloot sued a former small-town Idaho newspaper reporter whose confrontation with him we mentioned in our article. His lawyers asked a judge to let them rifle through the internal records of the Obama campaign. They deposed a representative of the campaign in pursuit of a baseless theory that Mother Jones conspired with Obama's team to defame VanderSloot. They tried to get one of our lawyers disqualified because his firm had once done work for Melaleuca. They intrusively questioned our employees—our reporter was grilled about whether she had attended a Super Bowl party the night she finalized the article.
read more: http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/10/mother-jones-vandersloot-melaleuca-lawsuit