Mitt Romney couldn’t substantially distinguish his economic policies from former President George W. Bush’s during an interview with NBC’s Brian Williams on Wednesday, saying only that he would “take action to get America on track to have a balanced budget.” Bush increased the national debt by trillions of dollars. Rather than detailing specific differences with…
Category: Election 2012
CHART: One GOP Super-PAC Has Raised More Money Than Every Democratic Super-PAC Combined
Rarely a day passes without a reminder that, in 2012, Republicans are steamrolling the competition in the dash for super-PAC cash. According to a new analysis by the Sunlight Foundation, GOP-aligned super-PACs have raised $227 million for the 2012 elections, while their Democratic counterparts have raised $77 million—a nearly 3-to-1 advantage. Not startled? Then consider…
Bain, Bain, Go Away
Mitt Romney doesn’t have much to say about his days at Bain Capital, his taxes, his offshore bank accounts, or his time as governor of Massachusetts. Here’s a round-up of some of the things that have been said and reported. Why does Bain matter? Romney has made his success in business the centerpiece…
Romney Bundler A Registered Foreign Agent For Hong Kong
Newly released lobbyist bundler disclosure records filed by the Mitt Romney campaign show that Tom Loeffler raised at least $17,500 in bundled contributions for the campaign over the first six months of 2012. Loeffler, a former Republican U.S. Representative from Texas and a lobbyist at Akin Gump represents a wide array domestic clients including USAA,…
The debate we should be having over ‘you didn’t build that’
Let’s try to extract the smart conversation from the contretemps over President Obama’s comments on the debt entrepreneurs owe to society. There are two questions worth thinking about here: 1) What do entrepreneurs owe the society that created the conditions necessary for their success? 2) What level of public investment is consistent with the maximum…
Web Quiz Tells You Which Presidential Candidate Best Fits Your Worldview
Take one guy with an abiding interest in politics, another guy with website-building skills and throw in the shared desire to get people more engaged in the political process, and you have the ingredients for an interactive site called ISideWith.com. The site’s purpose is to show you which presidential candidate’s views most align with yours…
MN GOP Evasiveness On Voter Photo ID Leads To Court Challenge
Several groups will tell the Minnesota Supreme Court on Tuesday that language for a proposed constitutional amendment voters will see on the ballot in November is misleading. An UpTake video review of how Republicans drafted and answered questions about the “voter photo ID” amendment indicates they did not want the ballot language to be very detailed…
Music publisher uses DMCA to take down Romney ad of Obama crooning
A YouTube video produced by the Romney for President campaign got hit by a takedown request on Monday, highlighting the challenges that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act can pose for free speech. For days, President Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney have been trading barbs over Romney’s role in layoffs initiated by Bain Capital…
Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital Timeline
Since his first run for office in 1994, Mitt Romney has been dogged by charges that the private equity firm he founded profited from outsourcing and shuttered companies. But over the last two weeks, new documents emerged to call into question the GOP presidential candidate’s narrative about his time at the company. At issue are…
Mitt Romneys painfully bad week
Thursday morning, the Obama campaign released a tough ad attacking the record of downsizing and outsourcing at Romney’s old firm, Bain Capital. The Romney campaign reacted with outrage. That same day, it announced a multimillion-dollar purchase of airtime for an ad that bluntly accused President Obama of lying. In support of the ad, Romney’s team…
Romney – “Not a felon”
Where have we heard that before? Today on CNN Romney adviser Ed Gillespie said that Mitt Romney had to respond because of the accusations over Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital, “to make sure people understood that he’s not a felon.” Not a felon, not a crook, or not a witch, something about Romney’s story just…
Romneys Top Six I Know I Am But So Are You Moments
Mitt Romney has a way of deflecting criticism that is uniquely his. Where most politicians tend to pivot to another topic if they don’t like what someone is accusing them of, Romney takes an I’m-rubber-you’re-glue approach to attacks, accepting them as true but then simultaneously making the same accusation of his opponent. Just today, the…
Justice Department, Texas Face Off In Court Over Voter ID Law
The Justice Department and the state of Texas faced off at trial Monday over the state’s new voter identification law, which the Obama administration claims violates the federal Voting Rights Act. In opening arguments before a three-judge panel in federal district court in Washington, D.C., a lawyer for Texas argued that the photo ID requirement…
Congressional GOP Planning Rollback Of Individual Health Law Provisions
As the House Rules Committee schedules a hearing on the bill to repeal the full 2010 health law, Republican members and staff examine how to target individual provisions through budget reconciliation. Politico Pro: Gaming Out Repeal By Reconciliation If Mitt Romney wins the White House and Republicans take back total control of Congress in November,…
Democrats Lead House Ad Spending
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and its allies have made their plans known early this year, plopping down millions of dollars in advertising reservations in markets across the country months before those advertisements will air. The DCCC has reserved a total of $46 million across dozens of media markets around the country for ads that…
Republican Michigan Governor Vetoes GOP Voter Suppression Law
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder (R) bucked his fellow Republicans on Tuesday by vetoing a voter ID law crafted by GOP members of the state legislature, the Detroit Free Press reports: Among the bills vetoed was one requiring photo ID for first voter registration or to obtain an absentee ballot, a requirement that African-American activists claimed…
Three Controversial Bain Decisions That Happened Before Romney Left
The Romney campaign has deflected criticism of the former governor’s business record as head of Bain Capital by insisting that he cannot be held responsible for its actions following his departure in February of 1999. However, SEC documents unearthed by Mother Jones directly contradict the campaign’s assertion that Romney broke all ties with Bain after…
Want to read the over 300 lies Romney has told in the past few months?
For those who are watching the 2012 presidential race closely, Mitt Romney’s penchant for falsehoods is hard to miss. Michael Cohen summarized the issue nicely this week in a piece for The Guardian: Granted, presidential candidates are no strangers to disingenuous or overstated claims; it’s pretty much endemic to the business. But Romney is doing something very different…
Flawed Voter Purge Underway In Georgia
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that after a state-level investigation, Fulton County, Georgia identified at least 2,400 voters it believed to be registered to vote at vacant lots. Like with the Florida purge, county elections officials began sending letters to those voters to determine whether they lived at those address. Unfortunately, as with Florida, they ran…
Heritage Foundation ‘Expert’ Cannot Cite Voter Fraud
The one example of the sort of fraud these strict voter ID laws allegedly aim to stop that Darling could site was conservative filmmaker and convicted law-breaker James O’Keefe. O’Keefe’s approach was to break a law intentionally to prove how easy it is to break a law and to then claim that the law is…