Symmetry required it: 2012 american general election thread #2

romney's just taking the wide-eyed NO NO THIS ISN'T NEWS AT ALL tip

When M.Bachmann started talking about half the country not having "skin in the game" in the debates I couldn't figure out they were going with it. Attacking low taxes? Seems like some real dead ender fuck the poor stuff that should never spill out of a real politician's mouth.

― Listen to this, dad (President Keyes), Tuesday, September 18, 2012 6:42 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYqF_BtIwAU

lol pierce
--mookieproof

When did Pierce start doing slam poetry?

lol eastwood - 'if someone's dumb enough to ask me to go to a political convention and say something they're gonna have to take what they get' http://wonkette.com/484604/mitt-romney-is-an-idiot-explains-clint-eastwood

In a 4-2 ruling, the justices ordered the lower court to block the law unless Pennsylvania can prove it is currently providing “liberal access” to photo identification cards and that there “will be no voter disenfranchisement” on Election Day. The two dissenters opposed the voter ID law and wanted the Supreme Court to issue an injunction itself.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/09/pennsylvania_supreme_court_voter_id_decision.php

It didn't take long for a commenter to say what I was thinking: "But we're trying to PREVENT liberal access to voting!"

tbh i see the most egregious 'gaffe' (ugh that word) with the 47% speech is not its misleading ideas about taxation but the way he defines party affiliation with income levels. i mean, come on willard, i get that you are speaking direct to the oligarchy but wow.

on cavuto he said he wasn't talking about "the elderly or the military" re 47% but just the mindset of people who like not paying taxes and getting free shit, who would then logically vote for obama...as all Romney has to offer the world is tax cuts. which is whaaaaaa

basically he's just grinning and feinting, hoping enough of us remember the economy's still bad and he's still white.

those freeloaders can't appreciate romney because they already have what he wants to give the rich

Yeah leaving aside all the dishonesty and confusion about what the 47% means, shouldn't Republicans be ecstatic if half the population pays no taxes? They're halfway to paradise.

Not if the 47% still want services. The gov't isn't quite drowned in the bathtub yet.

Whether or not there is a valid substantive point behind all of Romney's misrepresentations, it's just so bizarre to see him rail against a sense of "entitlement" and then reportedly hold himself up as an example of a self-made man. It's just so myopic - it's unbelievable.

my biggest takeaway from romney's speech at the 2008 GOP convention is that his speech seemed the most divorced from reality of the prime-timers, that he was just spewing keywords and fantasies with no logical through-line. I figured if he got the nom now he'd tighten his game but man, guess not.

croup, you watched Cavuto?

yeah it was pretty brief and cavuto seemed like a high school freshman stuttering through written questions - actually said shit like "w-w-w-what do you think about that?" romney really just beamed and repeated his talking points, admitting that the elderly and the military are good people

in a sense, he's just throwing this on the pile of issues where he's said one thing and then the other, before noting people need jobs.

Neil Cavuto is like one of a late seventies TV child star growed up.

oh almost forgot - romney pointed out that a lot of elderly people DO pay taxes...really gonna shore up that base of rich elderly people who hate poor elderly people

he also brought up the brand new tape revealing obama likes "redistribution" twice - apparently some audio of him in 1998 where O says "I am for redistribution, in the sense of everyone getting a fair chance." Everybody's got tapes, ya see.

Yeah leaving aside all the dishonesty and confusion about what the 47% means, shouldn't Republicans be ecstatic if half the population pays no taxes? They're halfway to paradise.

No, they think the pissants are getting away with something(which they HATE) and resent people asking virtuous hardworking successful entrepreneurs to be punished with more taxes.

Remember, these are children who rail against the idea of progressive taxation, who can only process shit in the most simplistic thick-headed/first-order manner possible and thus a flat tax and massive national sales tax are the only things that make sense and could ever be fair.

Actual quote from Romney on Cavuto: "I do believe we should have enough jobs and enough take home pay to allow people to pay taxes. I think people would like to be paying taxes."

Antle:

Liberals believe they have found the smoking gun that will doom Mitt Romney’s presidential aspirations forever: a video in which the Republican presidential nominee says that 47 percent of Americans will stick with Barack Obama because they “are dependent on government” and “believe … that they are victims.”

At the very least, liberals hope this will be Romney’s “bitter clingers” to guns and religion moment.

“I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives,” Romney said of the dreaded 47 percent.

The problem is that Romney isn’t basing that figure on dependency on government programs. He’s using the rough percentage of people who pay no federal income tax.

There are two reasons the percentage of Americans who don’t write checks to the IRS has spiked in recent years: the bad economy, which Romney pledges to ameliorate, and Republican tax cuts, which Romney plans to continue.

When Ronald Reagan signed into law the Tax Reform Act of 1986, he boasted, “Millions of the working poor will be dropped from the tax rolls altogether, and families will get a long-overdue break with lower rates and an almost doubled personal exemption.”

Both the initial Reagan tax cuts of 1981 and indexing income taxes to inflation in 1985 had a similar effect.
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In the 1990s, the Republican-controlled Gingrich Congress passed a $500 per child tax credit that also wiped out the income tax liability of many low- to moderate-income households.

“Fully 93 percent of the tax relief in our bill goes to taxpayers with annual incomes under $100,000, 76 percent goes to taxpayers with incomes under $75,000,” then-House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Archer, a Texas Republican, said at the time. “If ever there was a tax plan for America’s forgotten middle class, this is it.”

George W. Bush expanded the child tax credit as president and also signed into law tax cuts that reduced the bottom marginal income tax rate from 15 percent to 10 percent. Both moves increased the percentage of people not paying income tax.

Far from enabling the growth of government, tax relief for the working poor and middle class has made it possible to enact across-the-board tax cuts that apply even to upper-income earners.

Ignoring the rising payroll tax burden of the last few decades while dismissing many of those who have borne it as deadbeats could well have the opposite effect.

There is little evidence that the people who have stopped paying income tax as a result of Republicans’ policies have moved leftward politically.

Today married parents of children, the kind of people who benefit from the child tax credit, are actually Romney’s strongest supporters.

In 2008, Obama carried voters making from $100,000 to $150,000 and $150,000 to $200,000, albeit by smaller margins than the electorate as a whole.

The percentage of Americans paying federal income taxes was far lower when Calvin Coolidge was president than when LBJ was implementing the Great Society.

READ MY LIPS: YOU'LL PAY TAXES

he also brought up the brand new tape revealing obama likes "redistribution" twice - apparently some audio of him in 1998 where O says "I am for redistribution, in the sense of everyone getting a fair chance." Everybody's got tapes, ya see.

― da croupier, Tuesday, September 18, 2012 4:32 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh man BUSTED

"I am for redistribution, in the sense of everyone getting a fair chance."

Damning stuff.

the full, horrible, game-changing, almost 15-year-old quote:

I think the trick is figuring out how do we structure government systems that pool resources, and hence facilitate some redistribution, because I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level, to make sure that everybody has a shot.

Obama camp already making Joe The Plumber jokes in response.

Said at a Loyola University conference when he was a State Senator. No word on if Bill Ayers was there.

I remember getting a bad feeling in 2008 the morning that recording surfaced--it seemed so perfectly timed to all the inane Joe the Plumber stuff, and, as I've mentioned before, I kept waiting for the roof to cave in. As it happened, it wasn't even a one-day story.

so this was posted a month ago and nobody cared but if you make fun of americans its a big deal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEkDYkuuPD4

nobody even cared here a month ago when i posted that clip. i thought it would be a big deal! like, in general.

just be glad everyone got into the band eventually

Rachel Maddow talked a little bit about the provenance of the clips last night, and how they'd been around in one form or another for a few months, but the conclusion was that since they couldn't be pinned to specific location or date the media sort of glossed over them. Once the person who shot the video got in touch with Mother Jones and credibility could be established, their profile was upped exponentially.

Mitt Romney won't do "SNL," says "Letterman hates me," "View" is "high risk"

In the just-released secret video of Romney answering questions at a May fundraiser, Romney was about his potential TV appearances. "Letterman," he said, "hates me because I've been on Leno more than him. They're very jealous of one another, as you know." He said he wouldn't do "Saturday Night Live" because it "has the potential of looking slapstick, and not presidential." As for "The View," he views that show as "high risk" because there's only one conservative.

lol

weird, Romney's kind of been positioning himself as an expert in things that look slapstick and not presidential.

This just furthers my impression that Mitt Romney is the least self-aware person in America.

This just furthers my impression that Mitt Romney is the least self-aware intelligent person in America.

Okay, I now see that this redistribution clip is different than the redistribution clip they unearthed in '08 (which I think was a radio call-in show). And someone was holding this in reserve, waiting for just the right moment?

"IF COMPLETELY FUCKED, BREAK GLASS"

"Redistribution" (scary commie scare quotes) is just what Obama has said all along, which is that the rich should pay more in taxes. Anyone who thinks this is anywhere near the O_o of the Romney tape is delusional.

this is not really uncharacteristic or an unusual thing for Romney, he's been fucking up with these kinds of tone-deaf gaffes literally since day 1 of his campaign. to wit:

The choice of the Bittersweet Farm for his announcement is an interesting one for Mr. Romney, who regularly argues for a smaller federal government that spends less. The rolling green hills of the farm were preserved in recent years in part with $1 million in federal money, according to a recent report in Seacoast Online.

A spokesman for Mr. Romney’s campaign told John Harwood of The New York Times: “I don’t think it’s fair to call it a federally subsidized backdrop. It’s a nice farm in New Hampshire, a landmark.”

this clown is so doomed

― metally ill (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, June 2, 2011 8:09 PM

that is the one thing he's got going for him here, just shrugging it off and hoping that whoever the heck is still on Team Romney is desensitized to his nonsensical bullshit

If I cared about tell all political campaign books I'd be excited about the one about the Romney campaign.

http://a.abcnews.com/images/Politics/ap_mitt_romney_ll_120806_wg.jpg

"If I cared about tell all political campaign books I'd be excited about the one about my campaign."

tbh i see the most egregious 'gaffe' (ugh that word)

the use of 'gaffe' over the past 48 hours is crazy to me, like they're talking about it like he slipped up on the stairs up to the platform rather than cogently expressed his disdain for american voters

tbh i think avoiding letterman/snl/the view is romney's wisest recent political decision

apropos of nothing but
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_makiy4e0MJ1qdmmiqo1_500.gif
he's saying,

LET'S DESTROY THE ENVIRONMENT

and Toontown

Speaking of which, Obama's on Letterman tonight to do the second half of Jay Pharoah's "Hey, take a look at my secret weapon" routine.

wish obama could bring this up in a debate, but then it would look like he was being mean to money-sucking bible hicks:

Of the 22 states that went to McCain in 2008, 86 percent received more federal spending than they paid in taxes in 2010. In contrast, 55 percent of the states that went to Obama received more federal spending than they paid in taxes. Republican states, on average, received $1.46 in federal spending for every tax dollar paid; Democratic states, on average, received $1.16.