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Thread: Mitt Romney

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    Quote Originally Posted by Boon Mee
    Can't find fault with Romney's statement, can you? Unless of course you're still so imbued with that Liberal White Guilt Syndrome and feel entitled to be a subject of the Nanny State, eh?
    A big percentage of those freeloaders that you revile so much are seniors on Social Security who paid in all their lives. Many are parents of special needs children and working people who are subject to payroll taxes. Many are those hit hard by the economic downturn and trying desperately to find work. This just shows Romney for who he really is - an elite snob who wants to reduce taxes on the richest Americans while increasing taxes on the middle class and poor people.

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    ^^ No. Only the ones who vote for Obama are scroungers. Wealthy people voting for Obama are included in that 47% and are also scroungers. Romney voters on benefits such as Medicare, unemployment, or social security aren't scroungers. Only Romney voters aren't scroungers. I think that's what Romney means. Or does he know what he means?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Humbert View Post
    ^What a moment. Let's all give thanks for Romney's gift for putting his foot in his mouth
    No foot in mouth - Romney's not saying he doesn't care about the 47% as citizens and human beings, just that he won't devote any attention to trying to cull some of their votes. Like 99% of the Black vote will go to Obama.

    Heh, you wanna compare the statements Obama made to donors in 2008, which were leaked out — the famous "bitter clingers" remarks.

    You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
    A Deplorable Bitter Clinger

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    What's really funny is how Booners shrugs the whole issue off as if insulting 47% of the electorate won't have any effect on people's perception of Romney. Wake up and smell the coffee - your man is a total bozo.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Humbert View Post
    What's really funny is how Booners shrugs the whole issue off as if insulting 47% of the electorate won't have any effect on people's perception of Romney. Wake up and smell the coffee - your man is a total bozo.
    B.S. What's insulting about not focusing attention upon the electorate that has already made up its mind they are voting for more entitlements and an increase in Nanny State-ism?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Boon Mee
    You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
    http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/poll/169885266.html?cmpid=15585797

    Obama has an 11 point lead in Pennsylvania.

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    ^
    That's nice.

    All depends on who is doing the polling and how many Democrats/Republicans are weighted in a particular poll. I'm waiting on the one that comes out in November.

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    Oh dear, Romney steps in it again......

    Romney Gaffe Labels Obama Voters 'Victims' - Yahoo! News UK

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    Quote Originally Posted by Humbert View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Boon Mee
    You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
    http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/poll/169885266.html?cmpid=15585797

    Obama has an 11 point lead in Pennsylvania.
    And one important thing that adults ought to think about.

    When industries leave a place. They are gone. There is not anything to replace it unless you're in a large city or metropolitan area.

    Move, or shut up.

    And yes, PA is already for Obama.

    PA is not the focus. other states are.
    ............

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    Quote Originally Posted by buriramboy View Post
    Oh dear, Romney steps in it again......

    Romney Gaffe Labels Obama Voters 'Victims' - Yahoo! News UK
    But that's true. They are victims of their own stupidity.

    If they want to continue to exhibit that profound retarded behavior, they can vote for him again. Obama blew a $10 trillion deficit (accumulated over decades) into a $16 trillion into a $16 trillion one. He inherited an AAA credit rating and turned it into AA.


    The. Bro Gotta. Go.
    Last edited by Boon Mee; 18-09-2012 at 04:04 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Boon Mee View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by buriramboy View Post
    Oh dear, Romney steps in it again......

    Romney Gaffe Labels Obama Voters 'Victims' - Yahoo! News UK
    But that's true. They are victims of their own stupidity.

    If they want to continue to exhibit that profound retarded behavior, they can vote for him again. Obama blew a $10 trillion deficit (accumulated over decades) into a $16 trillion a $10 trillion deficit (accumulated over decades) into a $16 trillion one. He inherited an AAA credit rating and turned it into AA.


    The. Bro Gotta. Go.
    It may well be true, but not really the type of comment you want to be making when running for president.

    Seriously though America should ban all campaigning until 2 months before the election.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Boon Mee
    He inherited an AAA credit rating and turned it into AA.
    Of course that had nothing to do with an obstructionist Republican house.

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    Quote Originally Posted by buriramboy View Post
    It may well be true, but not really the type of comment you want to be making when running for president.
    Perhaps, although Obama has made the same sort of comment and survived:

    "You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

    The Bitter Clingers indeed...

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    Quote Originally Posted by Humbert View Post
    What's really funny is how Booners shrugs the whole issue off as if insulting 47% of the electorate won't have any effect on people's perception of Romney. Wake up and smell the coffee - your man is a total bozo.
    Heh, watch this “campaign-changing gaffe” become a nonstory as soon as the press decides it’s hurting Obama instead of helping him.

    CNBC And Yahoo Finance Readers REALLY Liked Mitt Romney’s Comments.


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    Quote Originally Posted by Humbert View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Boon Mee
    Can't find fault with Romney's statement, can you? Unless of course you're still so imbued with that Liberal White Guilt Syndrome and feel entitled to be a subject of the Nanny State, eh?
    A big percentage of those freeloaders that you revile so much are seniors on Social Security who paid in all their lives. Many are parents of special needs children and working people who are subject to payroll taxes. Many are those hit hard by the economic downturn and trying desperately to find work. This just shows Romney for who he really is - an elite snob who wants to reduce taxes on the richest Americans while increasing taxes on the middle class and poor people.
    The only freeloaders this poster 'reviles' are the ones who abuse the system e.g. the ones who falsely claim disability, receive food stamps when employed etc. On that subject, here's a poll you might be interested in: Romney’s Right: Voters Want Smaller Government.

    “Gallup reports that, by a 54 percent to 39 percent margin, voters think government is trying to do too much, as opposed to not doing enough.”

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    Try to defend as much as you like but apart from the hard right wing this sort of exposé of his natural thinking to the quality of the average american, suffering through the worst recession in 80 years will not help him in swing seats.

    Obama should just stay quite and allow the rich kid to keep digging the hole deeper and deeper. What a bloody clown! Politics 101 FAILED.

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    The guy's a dream candidate from the oppositions point of view I bet.
    They must be busting their guts with laughter every time they open a newspaper.
    [QUOTE]Mitt Romney struggles to keep on track as further video revelations emerge
    Mitt Romney is fighting to keep his presidential ambitions on track, as more revelations from a secretly recorded speech emerged.

    Mitt Romney struggles to keep on track as further video revelations emerge
    Mitt Romney is fighting to keep his presidential ambitions on track, as more revelations from a secretly recorded speech emerged.

    Image 1 of 3
    US Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney plays with five of his grandchildren on his plane Photo: AFP
    By Peter Foster, Jon Swaine in Washington and Alex Spillius8:27PM BST 18 Sep 201293 Comments
    US Election 2012 - live
    Mitt Romney was fighting to keep his presidential ambitions on track after further revelations from a secretly recorded speech showed him dismissing any prospect of Middle East peace, describing Iran's leaders as "crazy people" and offering details on how terrorists could bomb Chicago.
    The new excerpts came hours after Mr Romney was forced to give a hastily scheduled late-night press conference to explain why, at the same event in Florida, he had apparently dismissed half the US electorate as welfare dependents, concluding "My job is not to worry about those people".
    The latest round of secretly recorded tapes raised fresh questions over Mr Romney's already weak foreign policy credentials, and completely over-shadowed attempts by the Republican candidate to 'reset' his US election campaign this week by focusing on policy specifics.
    Asked how he would tackle the quest for Middle East peace if elected, Mr Romney told guests at the $50,000-a-plate fund-raiser in Boca Raton, Florida last May that he would essentially do nothing.
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    "We kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it," he said.
    At the same time, Mr Romney showed a startling weak grasp of the intricacies of Middle East geography and politics, wrongly saying that Syria would border a new Palestinian state and lumping together all the different Palestinian factions into one, accusing them all of seeking to destroy Israel.
    "I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say there's just no way," he said.
    On Iran, Mr Romney raised the threat of an Iranian 'dirty bomb' without apparently realizing that such a device would did not require enriched, fissile material of the kind Iran is accused of processing.
    He offered his thoughts on what could be done with it saying: "If I were Iran, if I were Iran–a crazed fanatic, I'd say let's get a little fissile material to Hezbollah, have them carry it to Chicago or some other place, and then if anything goes wrong, or America starts acting up, we'll just say, "Guess what? Unless you stand down, why, we're going to let off a dirty bomb.
    "I mean this is where we have–where America could be held up and blackmailed by Iran, by the mullahs, by crazy people. So we really don't have any option but to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon," he added.
    In the same speech Mr Romney, has a $250m fortune, joked that he would have a better chance of being elected if his father, who lived in Mexico in his youth, had actually been born to Mexicans. "It would be helpful to be Latino," he said, adding, in a reference to his fortune: "Frankly, I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth."
    With less than 50 days to go until polling day, the fallout from the tapes published by the Mother Jones website dominated the media landscape yesterday. Mr Romney was accused of harping on old social divisions between "makers and takers" with his remark that 47 per cent of Americans "pay no income tax" when experts pointed out that the majority of households did pay payroll taxes – the equivalent of Britain's national insurance.
    Of the 18 per cent of households who paid neither federal income tax nor payroll tax, roughly half were elderly people, who were likely to have paid income tax for years before retiring, and are now a crucial segment of Mr Romney's likely support base.
    Many Conservative commentators, already despairing at Mr Romney's clumsy response to last week's Middle East protests, did not spare him with some describing the footage as "potentially crippling".
    "As a description of America today, Romney's comment is a country-club fantasy. It's what self-satisfied millionaires say to each other. It reinforces every negative view people have about Romney," wrote David Brooks, a leading conservative commentator in the New York Times.
    David Frum, a White House speechwriter for Mr Bush, said: "If you're not running for president of all the country, you won't be elected president of any of it."
    However, others cautioned that Mr Romney's remarks would appear less damaging out on the doorsteps of America than they first appeared in the television studios and on liberal-dominated social media networks.
    Jeffrey Lord, a former Reagan aide and Republican party historian, said the remarks on welfare-dependents would strike a chord with many of America's hard-pressed middle classes.
    "It's still unclear to me what impact this will have," he told The Telegraph, "A lot of the middle class who pay their taxes are going to listen to Romney and say 'yeah, damn right'.
    White House spokesman Jay Carney responded to the Romney comments saying: "When you're president of the United States, you are president of all the people, not just the people who voted for you."
    Mitt Romney struggles to keep on track as further video revelations emerge - Telegraph


    Washington's damning verdict on Mitt Romney's gaffe
    Pundits and commentators on US politics were united in their view that Mitt Romney’s blunder was deeply damaging to his already faltering campaign, with many predicting it will prove to be a fatal blow.


    By Alex Spillius11:45AM BST 18 Sep 2012
    In an article headlined “Mitt Romney just lost the election”, Bloomberg’s Josh Barro wrote: “This is an utter disaster for Romney…Romney already has trouble relating to the public and convincing people he cares about them. Now, he's been caught on video saying that nearly half the country consists of hopeless losers.”
    In remarks secretly recorded at a Florida fundraiser, Mr Romney complained that 47 percent of Americans who pay no income tax were a lost cause for his campaign, as they were “dependent on the government” and believed they were “victims” entitled to live off the state.
    “My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives,” he said, in remarks interpreted by the Daily Beast as telling voters to “drop dead”.
    On Time’s blog Swampland, Michael Crowley wondered if Republicans may be regretting nominating a candidate the party never much enthusiasm for.
    Mark Halperin in his blog called the gaffe “politically devastating because it plays into people’s preconceived notions of Romney as Monty Burns+Thurston Howell”.

    He continued: “And the bigger potential problem is that the right (Limbaugh, Ingraham, Erickson) will love what Romney said and if he walks it back they will savage him as being a weak-kneed and caving to liberals and the media.
    Still, as I see it, Romney’s only chance to try to stem the damage is to do an abject apology, but that really isn’t his style. He’s up to his eyeballs in the Freak Show now.”

    Michael Tomasky in the Daily Beast said the video “shows the candidate at his smug worst”.
    “While you never know with Romney whether he really believes something he says or is just trying to placate the audience before him, in this case it almost doesn’t matter. He’s made himself the avatar of the forces that do believe it,” he adds.
    As the row grows, it won’t help that as Gawker reveals, the fundraiser was held at the estate of hedge fund manager Mark Leder in Boca Raton, who is “notorious for his Caligula-esque parties”.
    It cites a New York Post story about a summer bash at which “guests cavorted nude in a pool and performed sex acts, while scantily clad Russian women danced on platforms. Dancers at the party also twirled flaming torches to booming beats”.
    Gawker adds: “So to review, people who want housing, food, and healthcare: entitled freeloaders. People who want to get HJs in the pool while they watch semi-nude Russian dancers: campaign supporters.”
    Few if any conservative commentators or websites have come to his defence. David Frum remarked on Twitter that: “If you're not running for president of all the country, you won't be elected president of any of it.”
    Fox News leads its website with a story on Joe Biden and Paul Ryan, the vice-presidential candidates, trading jabs in Iowa.
    The National Review Online offered some advice – that he should double down and stoutly defend his comments.
    “If Romney responds to the Mother Jones story by backing off from his basic argument that far too many Americans are dependent upon the government and that this dependency skews their votes, he will weaken his campaign enormously,” it said.
    Washington's damning verdict on Mitt Romney's gaffe - Telegraph
    Last edited by Cujo; 19-09-2012 at 08:51 AM.
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    Romney says in the video his role “is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

    Again, what's wrong with that statement, huh?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Boon Mee View Post
    Romney says in the video his role “is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

    Again, what's wrong with that statement, huh?
    47%?
    Does he really think 47% of Americans don't take personal resposibilty and care for their lives?
    That 47% of mericans are on the dole and don't pay taxes??

    This article is titled
    'The Thick of Mitt Romney'
    Quite apt I thought.
    Mitt Romney: in the thick of it
    As Mitt Romney blunders yet again, what would the veteran Labour Party political strategist do next if he was in charge of the Republican's White House campaign?

    Mitt Romney’s latest gaffe shows his inability to obey a golden rule of campaigning – every word is on the record, like it or not Photo: Reuters
    By Alastair Campbell8:16PM BST 18 Sep 2012111 Comments
    S and M. Two vital ingredients of any political campaign. No, this is not yet another examination of the Fifty Shades phenomenon. S stands for Strategy. M stands for Morale. Both are essential to the success of a campaign, and the lack of a clear S is now inevitably impacting upon M within the Mitt Romney camp, especially as the candidate himself has an unfortunate habit of inflicting damage upon his own cause.
    G is for Gaffe. Gaffe is one of those words barely used outside the media discourse about politics but which is coming to define the Romney campaign, much as “flip-flop” came to define John Kerry, the Democrat nominee who lost to George W Bush in 2004, and as the tactically brilliant but strategically disastrous appointment of Sarah Palin as running mate came to define and dominate John McCain’s doomed attempt to defeat Barack Obama in 2008.
    Mr Romney’s latest G for Gaffe shows his inability to obey another golden rule of campaigning – every word is on the record, like it or not. So when he told a “behind closed doors” fundraising event that “there are 47 per cent who are with him [Obama], who are dependent upon government, who believe 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”, he clearly thought that there was no danger of his words being broadcast beyond the circle of friendship from which he was raising cash.
    When he said “my job is not to worry about these people… I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives”, he was either immune to the political sensitivity of such a statement, or stupid, or naïve, or all of the above. And when he added “these are people who pay no income tax”, he presumably believed his audience was so like-minded that they would not object to the would-be President uttering such a blatant untruth in their presence – and one that, if leaked, would provide ample extra ammunition for the Obama campaign.
    The ammo is now out, courtesy of that staple of modern campaigns, “the secret video”, this time via the wonderfully named Mother Jones magazine website. The Obama campaign, rather more message-disciplined than Romney’s, was quick to capitalise. “It is hard to serve as president for all Americans when you’ve disdainfully written off half the nation,” said campaign manager Jim Messina.
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    That was bang on-message for a campaign designed to show Obama leading America through hard times and Romney as an out-of-touch elitist who got rich by putting people out of work and does not understand the struggles people are facing. Indeed, elsewhere in the secret video is the somewhat startling observation from Mr Romney that his opponents might have some success in portraying him as “an evil bad guy”.
    The Messina quote is similar in style and format to one from the President himself, following Mr Romney’s visit to London, where he sought to capitalise on transient security problems at London 2012 by reminding the world of his own success organising the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City a decade ago. “You might not be ready for diplomacy with Beijing if you can’t visit the Olympics without insulting our closest ally,” said Mr Obama, his comment all the more effective for the smile on his face as he delivered it.
    Mr Romney’s London gaffe, exploited – like everything else to do with the Olympics – by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, set the tone for further problems in Israel and Poland, and so a visit designed to emphasise his foreign policy expertise backfired – a backfiring resurrected when he made a silly attack upon President Obama in the wake of the latest flare-up in the Middle East, and again yesterday when Mother Jones put out a second instalment of the now-not-so-secret video, focusing on Mr Romney’s defeatist and one-sidedly pro-Israel view of the Middle East, his views about Palestinians similar to those he holds about 47 per cent of Americans.
    Then there was the Republican Convention, planned as the week that America would get to know Romney, but remembered by most for Hurricane Isaac forcing a rescheduling of the programme, and a cringe‑making conversation between actor-director Clint Eastwood and a chair. I tweeted at the time that I would love to have been in the room when Mr Romney asked his aides: “Whose idea was that, then?” Likewise, as an Obama sympathiser, I would love to have been in the room when Mr Romney’s team informed him that Mother Jones had got hold of his latest Gaffespeak.
    I wouldn’t mind laying a bet that there would have been much time and energy-wasting speculation about who filmed it, how Mother Jones got it, the mechanics of the disaster; whereas what he needs is someone to remind him that he is one of two contestants in the toughest, longest, most brutal election known to politics, and that means taking greater care to engage his political mind before his campaigning mouth opens.
    One thing leads to another, and then another, and then another, and now because the G for Gaffe narrative is set, a small gaffe will be presented as a big one, and a big one has the capacity to be seismic, and undo the basic strategy at every turn.
    Here we come to Mr Romney’s fundamental problem. The S word. His strategy is not clear. He has allowed a confusion to develop around what might be defined as his political DNA; and the cause of that is the process that led to his nomination, and the state of the party that nominally he leads.
    As governor of Massachusetts, both in tone and some of the policy positions he adopted, he leaned towards the more benign, even liberal, end of the Republican scale. But with the Tea Party movement dominant in the wake of Senator McCain’s defeat, and Fox News acting as a cheerleader for any crazy Right-wing ideas put forward and a denunciator of anything that might appeal to the centre ground, Mr Romney trimmed his political sails to tack to the Right. It helped to get him elected by the Party, but as the rest of the Mother Jones video shows, it has led to him struggling to gain those “disappointed with Obama” voters he needs to win over to knock out the President in swing states.
    Then we come to the L word. Luck. Winners have it. Losers don’t, and the timing of this latest gaffe suggests Mr Romney is running out of it. For the video, filmed in May, emerged within hours of the Romney team admitting their current strategy was failing and was therefore in need of revision. There is nothing wrong with that. Another golden rule – if the campaign isn’t working, adapt.
    But adaptation must have strategy at its heart, and there was no greater clarity to the “new” strategy laid out by his advisers than there had been to the old one. All they said was that the focus so far had been too negative against President Obama – the failure of which Mr Romney admitted in the remarks filmed several months ago – and that they would now use more positive TV spots, and more speeches rooted in policy.
    The question for Mr Romney is whether people will listen. Even before a candidate gets through the door of the undecided, he has to pass a basic competence test. Every time the Gaffometer chalks up another one, the credibility of the candidate falls further. Every time the credibility falls, morale in the camp falls with it, giving heart to your opponents, agony to your team.
    According to some of the US media, the blame game has already begun among his advisers and supporters. With 50 days to go, that is a bad sign for Mr Romney. President Obama is ahead in most of the swing states the Republicans need to take. The polls would be narrow enough to close – with a strong candidate, a clear strategy, a united team, and lots of money.
    Romney scores well on the last of these, but without the first three, it risks being money down the drain.
    Having seen the impact of his comments to them, I suspect that may be how the diners who gathered for the “secret” dinner in Boca Raton, Florida, now see it.
    Alastair Campbell was Tony Blair’s spokesman and strategist for the former prime minister’s three election wins as Labour leader. His latest volume of diaries, 'Burden of Power’, was published earlier this year
    Mitt Romney: in the thick of it - Telegraph
    Last edited by Cujo; 19-09-2012 at 09:18 AM.

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    Mitt Was Right! Palestinians Don’t Want Peace… And They Want Out of Oslo Peace Accords

    Heh, the far left Mother Jones website released video of Mitt Romney telling high dollar donors that the Palestinians “have no interest in establishing peace.”

    He’s right!
    Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas wants out of the Oslo Accords.
    Israel National News reported, via Free Republic:
    Palestinian Authority head, Mahmoud Abbas, proposed cancelling the Oslo Accords with Israel at a weekend meeting of the PA leadership, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) told AFP on Tuesday.
    PLO Executive Committee member Wassel Abu Yusef said Abbas raised the idea of “cancelling the Oslo agreement as well as the associated economic and security arrangements,” at the meeting on Saturday and Sunday.
    Abu Yusef said that “members of the Palestinian leadership had mixed opinions on the issue, and it was decided to postpone any decision until their next meeting,” due to be held after Abbas’s return from the UN General Assembly later this month. “It was the first time the Palestinian leadership put the issue of the Oslo agreement on the table since it was signed in 1993,” Abu Yusef added.
    This sorta puts a damper on that liberal talking point, eh?

  21. #1071
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    He makes Sarah Palin look reasonable.
    US election: Mitt Romney makes basic errors on Middle East
    Mitt Romney has warned that Iran would try and infiltrate an independent Palestinian state in order to threaten Israel via Syria and Jordan, in remarks laden with basic errors about borders and strategic alliances in the Middle East.


    By Alex Spillius, Diplomatic Correspondent1:39PM BST 18 Sep 2012
    In a leaked video, the Republican candidate also said that as president he would treat the Middle East as an “unsolved problem” and make little effort towards a solution.
    “We live with that in China and Taiwan. All right, we have a potentially volatile situation, but we sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it," he said.
    He failed to show any appreciation of the different Palestinian camps, accusing them all of seeking to destroy Israel.
    "I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say there's just no way," he said, adding that Palestinians have "no interest whatsoever in establishing peace, and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish".
    Gaza, the smaller occupied territory, is indeed controlled by the militants of Hamas, who refuse to recognise Israel and have been a major obstacle to peace.

    The West Bank however is controlled by Fatah, which renounces violence and long ago signed up to the so-called “two state” peace process.
    The remarks were recorded secretly at the same fundraising event where Mr Romney dismissed 47 per cent of Americans as welfare dependents whose votes he had no hope of winning. Those comments, released on Monday, are regarded as potentially calamitous to his battle for the White House with Barack Obama.

    A new clip released by Mother Jones features a long answer on the Israel-Palestinian dispute, in which Mr Romney states that a new Palestinian state in the West Bank would border “Syria at one point or Jordan”.
    “Of course the Iranians would want to do through the West Bank exactly what they did through Lebanon and what they did near Gaza. Which is the Iranians would want to bring missiles and armaments in to the West Bank and potentially threaten Israel,” he said.
    In referring to Syria, Mr Romney appeared to be thinking of the Golan Heights, which were seized by Israel from Syria in 1967.
    The area has however never been claimed by the Palestinians and does not border the West Bank, the occupied territory that would form the bulk of an independent Palestinian state. At the nearest point, the Golan Heights and the West Bank are 23 miles apart.
    Mr Romney correctly stated that the new state would share a border with Jordan, but the Hashemite kingdom is an historic ally of the West and in 1994 became the second Arab state to recognise Israel.
    Jordan remains deeply suspicious of Iran’s regional ambitions, and the notion that it would tolerate any infiltration or interference from Tehran is nonsensical to anyone with a passing knowledge of Middle Eastern politics.
    Mr Romney’s factual errors may further erode confidence in his command of foreign policy, after last week’s ill-judged response to anti-US protests in the Middle East.
    Though many American voters may agree that the Middle East is a lost cause, US presidents are expected to push for a solution, as the continuing failure to find peace is regarded as a major cause of instability in the region.
    In July, Mr Romney faced derision at home and in Britain for suggesting on the eve of a visit to London during the Olympics that the host city was ill-prepared.
    US election: Mitt Romney makes basic errors on Middle East - Telegraph

  22. #1072
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    Heh, this speech will resonate as well as or better than the "Empty Chair":

    "For the past three years, all everybody’s been told is “don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.”

    How are you going to do it? In two months before the elections to convince everybody you’ve got to take care of yourself?

    There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent 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. That’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…

    And I mean the president starts off with 48, 49 … he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax.

    So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. So he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that’s what they sell every four years.
    And so my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to convince the five to ten percent in the center that are independents that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not..."

    Kinda resonates pretty good already, eh?


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    Quote Originally Posted by Boon Mee View Post
    Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax.
    But that's just not true.

  24. #1074
    Thailand Expat Boon Mee's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Koojo View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Boon Mee View Post
    These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax.
    But that's just not true.
    Link?

  25. #1075
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    Quote Originally Posted by Boon Mee View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Koojo View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Boon Mee View Post
    These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax.
    But that's just not true.
    Link?
    You expect me to prove it's NOT true.
    You're stating it, how about you provide something (link?) to prove it IS true.

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