Justin's Political Corner

“Scott Prouty.”

The fellow on the other end of the phone call pronounced his name with hesitation. For nearly a fortnight, he and I had been building a long-distance rapport via private tweets, emails, and phone conversations as we discussed how best to make public the secret video he had shot of Mitt Romney talking at a private, $50,000-per-plate fundraiser in Boca Raton, Florida. Now I was almost ready to break the story at Mother Jones. I had verified the video, confirming when and where it had been shot, and my colleagues and I had selected eight clips—including Romney’s now-infamous remarks about the 47 percent of Americans he characterized as “victims” unwilling to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives”—to embed in two articles. We had blurred these clips, at the source’s request, to make it difficult to tell where Romney had uttered these revealing comments, while clearly showing that it was Romney speaking. The goal was to afford the source a modicum of protection.

The source was justifiably worried about repercussions. Once the video was posted, he might lose his job. He might face criminal prosecution or a civil lawsuit. Months earlier, he had anonymously posted a snippet from the video, in which Romney nonchalantly described the work-camp-like living conditions at a Chinese factory he had visited. The source, offended by these comments, had hoped that the short clip would catch fire in the political-media world. But it hadn’t, partly because its context and origins were unknown. The source’s desire to remain in the shadows had hindered his ability to bring the story to the public.

Then James Carter IV, a freelance researcher (and, though I didn’t know it then, the grandson of Jimmy Carter) who had been sending me public documents regarding Romney’s prior business investments, had, at my request, tracked the anonymous poster down. I subsequently persuaded him to send me the full video of the fundraiser and to allow me to release portions of it, under the strict condition that I’d do whatever was possible to keep his identity hidden. He did not want to become the story. He hoped the public would focus only on Romney’s words. And through all this, he had not told me who he was, though he disclosed that he had worked at the fundraiser and insisted that he was no political partisan and had filmed Romney more out of curiosity than as part of a plan to trap the GOP candidate.

I respected his desire for privacy. He was about to commit a courageous and unprecedented act of whistle-blowing. But as we neared publication, I said I had to know his name. Do you really need it? he asked. Yes, I replied, explaining I could not publish the stories without knowing his identity. I vowed I would keep it a secret.

I had waited until the final moments to press him on this. I realized there was a chance that he might decline to identify himself, and the story would die. He asked once more if it was necessary. I said it was and held my breath. There was a long silence. “Scott,” he said. “Scott Prouty.” Thank you, I replied. Then we moved on to other details.

When I got off the phone, I did the obvious: I Googled him. The initial results were worrisome. I found mug shots for two men with that name who had been arrested. But then I located aproclamation (issued by the mayor and town council of Davie, Florida) that the source had mentioned earlier. On September 25, 2005, a car had plunged into a canal along I-75 and sunk into the water. Prouty, then working at motorcycle dealership, rushed to the scene. A tall fellow with a strapping build, Prouty jumped into the water and, using a knife provided by a fellow employee, cut the seatbelt, freed the unconscious woman in the driver’s seat, and handed her to a coworker who revived her with CPR. Prouty, who had noticed there was a child safety seat in the car, kept diving into the dark water in search of a child. But there had been no one else in the car. The proclamation noted that Prouty and two of his coworkers had taken “valiant and swift lifesaving actions in the face of an emergency without thought to their own safety” and declared them “lifesaving heroes.” I also found a local newsletter with a photo of Prouty and his colleagues being honored by the Weston City Commission for their heroism (his name was misspelled “Proudly”). The picture did not match either of the mug shots, and I saw that one of the other Proutys was incarcerated in Wisconsin, while the other seemed to be from a different part of Florida. I was relieved. I would later learn that my source was a college-educated bartender, in his late 30s, who had grown up in the Boston area.

Days later, we published the first article. It went hyper-viral. The 47 percent story quickly became bigger than Prouty and I had expected. Realizing he could not keep hidden the location and date of what was becoming the most notorious fundraiser in modern history, Prouty gave me permission to reveal those details, to remove the blurring from the videos we had posted, and to release the entire video he had sent me. This will make it easier for someone to track you down, I said. If they want to find me, he replied, they will.

And there was this: If Prouty did claim credit, he would immediately become a target of the right, especially during the campaign. He could expect an effort to smear and discredit him.

But it was also natural for Prouty to want to accept the many accolades flowing to the mystery videographer. Why not come forward and enjoy the moment? There might be a financial benefit, or, better yet, an opportunity to enhance his career prospects. He was interested in going back to school or working in public policy. Donations or other assistance might materialize. Some media outlets were looking to make offers.

In the course of our ongoing discussions, I said I would support him, whatever he did. I did point out that were he to reveal himself, he could expect forces on the right to dig up whatever dirt could be found on him, his friends, and his family—or to make stuff up. I had no idea if this was a real concern, but I wanted him to consider the possibility. As he pondered his options, he repeatedly told me that he did not want to distract from the impact of his video. And he meant it.

After the election, the dynamics changed slightly. Prouty no longer had to fret about any possible retribution from a Romney administration. But the fundamentals remained. Going public would bring cheers and perhaps rewards but also place him in the crosshairs. I was frequently asked whether I thought my source would out himself. I answered that I could envision him remaining a ghost for the next 20 years, or deciding to hold a press conference the next day. I got the sense that he was living with a tough choice—and thinking about it—every day.

 wondered if Prouty’s role would remain a secret for as long. But he has now decided to come forward. Not for a big payoff, but to pursue the same passion for social justice that caused him to post that China clip. I’ll let him explain that and his motives—for making the video, for releasing it, and for now stepping out of the shadows. He’s doing so with an hourlong interview on The Ed Show. It’s his story, and I’m glad he’s telling it.

h/t: Mother Jones

Romney’s campaign is clearly hoping to capture more women voters, and more voters who don’t skew conservative on reproductive rights. The new ad is an overt attempt to frame the candidate as a moderate on women’s issues, as the Romney campaign has been attempting to do for the past week. But it covers up at least five of Romney’s most extreme positions on these issues — ones that any voter casting their ballot this election season deserves to know:

1) Romney supported the Blunt amendment.The Blunt Amendment would allow employers to deny contraception to their female employees because of religious objections. That means any woman working for an employer who didn’t support contraception would be denied the right to have her birth control costs covered. When asked if he supported the amendment, Romney said, “Of course.”

2) Romney wants to defund Planned Parenthood. Seventy six percent of the patients who go to Planned Parenthood are seeking affordable contraception options. Low-income women, particularly, rely on the organization to get family planning options that might otherwise be out of their price range. Because the organization uses a sliding scale pay system (PDF), it allows the poorest women to get the most affordable care.

3) Romney would restore co-pays for birth control. By repealing the Affordable Care Act, Romney would get rid of the requirementthat insurance companies off women a variety of birth control options without a co-pay attached. That makes it harder for women to get contraception, especially the most effective kinds, which tend to have the highest up-front costs.

4) Romney supports a ‘personhood amendment.’ Romney once told reporters that be would “absolutely” support a state constitutional amendment defining a fertilized egg as a person. Had it passed, that law would have outlawed some forms of contraception — as well as all abortions and in vitro fertilization.

5) Romney promised to reinstate the “global gag rule.” Romney could cut off family planning services that the United States currently offers to women abroad by using an executive order to reinstate the “global gag rule,” denying funding for any international organization that discusses abortion or provides abortion referrals for their clients. In an op-ed, he promised to do just that.

h/t: Annie-Rose Strasser at Think Progress

In 2009, Mitt Romney, who is now trying to campaign for president as a moderate, lent his star power to an unusual charitable project: celebrating right-wing talk show host Glenn Beck to raise money for an unaccredited Utah-based college, which was founded by acolytes of the late W. Cleon Skousen and promoted the work of this fringe conservative figure. Much-touted by Beck, Skousen was an anti-communist crusader, a purported political philosopher, a historian accused of racist revisionism, and a right-wing conspiracy theorist. He contended that the Founding Fathers were direct descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, claimed that a global cabal of bankers controlled the world from behind the scenes, and wrote a book that referred to the “blessings of slavery.” Skousen, who died in 2006, taught Romney at Brigham Young University.

On May 30, 2009, George Wythe University (named after the first law professor in America, who was a teacher of Thomas Jefferson), held a fundraising gala at the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City. Beck, who was then riding high as a Fox News host, was the special guest, tapped to receive the school’s annual “Statesman Award.” Romney introduced him.

In a video message—obtained by Mother Jones—that was recorded for the event, Romney praised Beck and this school, which the US Department of Justice has called a “diploma mill.” He hailed George Wythe University and its supporters for “building statesmen” and “moving forward the cause of liberty and building men and women of virtue and wisdom, diplomacy, and courage.” He introduced Beck as a “man who is really making an impact in our entire country today.” Romney noted that Beck’s “approach is refreshing” and that he “tries to focus his message on action…on learning the principles of freedom and liberty, on standing up and making your voice heard, on reading and applying the wisdom of our nation’s founders to the challenges of today.” Beck, he asserted, was “a statesman in his own right.” 

At the time of the fundraiser, Beck had established himself as a champion of the far right who peddled extreme and conspiratorial views. In the weeks prior to this event, he had declared that President Barack Obama was “clearly” a socialist who had “surrounded himself with Marxists his whole life,” and Beck had told listeners of his radio show that Obama will “surely take away your gun or take away you ability to shoot a gun.” Yet Beck was a towering figure on the right and a favorite of the emerging tea party movement. It was not odd that Romney, anticipating another presidential run, would seek to win his favor and proclaim him a “statesman.” His endorsement of George Wythe (pronounced “with”) University was more curious.

The school was founded in 1992 by Oliver DeMille, along with two other Skousen associates. DeMille is described in a 2007 university catalog as “a popular keynote speaker, writer, and business consultant” who earned a master’s degree in “Christian Political Science” and a doctorate in religious education at the unaccredited and now-defunct Coral Ridge Baptist University. In 1992, DeMille published an over-the-top tract, The New World Order: Choosing Between Christ and Satan in the Last Days, in which he and his coauthor wrote:

The term “New World Order” means the same thing today—abolishment of Christianity and the adoption of Satan’s plan—whether spoken in lodges and meetings of secret societies or on national television by George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev. This does not mean that Bush or Gorbachev are Satan-worshippers, but they have accepted his plan—that governments should use force to make people live correctly.

The book also noted:

During the coming year the secret combinations and the governments they control will do a number of things to build a Satanic New World Order. President Bush and many Congressmen, who are controlled by the secret societies, will attempt to further this cause and to continue the curtailment of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.

DeMille’s book endorsed an assortment of conservative conspiracy theories, including the notion that the “Establishment” was going to turn the United States into a socialist state, disarm the American military and put it under United Nations control, and merge the country with Mexico, Canada, and other Latin American countries. (According to an official history of GWU, DeMille later considered the publication of this book a mistake.)

In the program for the 2009 Beck-Romney fundraiser, DeMille’s welcome message sounded the alarm: “The figurative redcoats are at our door as threats to our liberty, prosperity, and sovereignty are no longer ideological or symbolic, but very real and immediate.” One way to preserve liberty, he noted, was to donate to George Wythe University.

In a 1962 book, Skousen denounced homosexuality and noted, “Every boy should know that masturbation may be the first step to homosexuality.” In his 1970 book, The Naked Capitalist, Skousen asserted that a sinister “secret society of the London-Wall Street axis”—which included the Council on Foreign Relations—controlled the world and manipulated global events, financing revolutions and aligning itself with “dictatorial forces” to preserve its power. In a 1970 article, Skousen, who was active with the John Birch Society, claimed that criticism of the Mormon church for prohibiting African Americans from its priesthood was nothing but a communist conspiracy against the church. (He also recorded a spoken-word album for the John Birch Society on the dangers of LSD.) In The Five Thousand Year Leap, a supposed history influenced by Mormon theology and published in 1981, Skousen contended that the Constitution is rooted in the bible. (Beck has heavily promoted the book to his listeners and viewers and wrote the introduction to a new edition.)

In 1979, the Mormon church issued a directive distancing itself from an organization started by Skousen. Five years ago, the conservative National Review referred to Skousen as an “all-around nutjob.”

Still, until 2010, George Wythe University taught Skousen’s work as part of its core curricula, alongside such classics as Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and Tom Paine’s Common Sense. Freshmen were assigned The Five Thousand Year Leap and The Making of America, which came close to idealizing slavery, as in a passage in the book quoting a 1934 essay: “If the pickaninnies ran naked it was generally from choice, and when the white boys had to put on shoes and go away to school they were likely to envy the freedom of their colored playmates.” While promoting The Making of America, Skousen called for eliminating a host of federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency; for selling off national parks; for ending the direct election of US senators; and for weakening the separation of church and state.

In a 2007 radio interview, Romney said that he had not read The Making of America, but that it was “worth reading.” Romney cited another Skousen book to explain Mormon theology regarding the second coming of Christ. In another radio interview that year, Romney recalled taking a class at BYU on the Bible taught by Skousen, whom he called “a brilliant man and a wonderful story teller.”

George Wythe University has never been accredited, and for most of its history, its leadership has been comprised of people who earned their academic credentials from other unaccredited schools. (Andrew Groft, a recent president whose degrees came from George Wythe, was caught in a prostitution sting shortly after leaving the school.) For years, the school handed out generous “life experience” credits toward a Ph.D. in a host of different specialties. One of the school’s most famous doctorate recipients is former Michigan congressman Mark Siljander. He served for a couple of years as a George Wythe trustee and earned a Ph.D. in international business from the school after writing a 10-page dissertation and attending no classes. In 2010, Siljander pleaded guilty to charges he had been an unregistered lobbyist for an Islamic charity with terrorist ties. In hissentencing memo, the Department of Justice labeled George Wythe University a “diploma mill.”

Since its inception, the school has suffered financial difficulties. In recent years, it has been plagued with declining enrollment. Shortly before the Beck fundraiser, the university reported that its enrollment was half of what it had been the previous year, with only about 150 students. More recent money troubles have stemmed from ill-advised real estate deals in an effort to build a much larger campus. The high-profile endorsements from Beck and Romney did not do much to place the school on better footing. The gala itself, according to school officials, “failed to net any gains.”

WU has recently closed its doctorate program, and this spring announced that it was abandoning ambitious plans for the new campus. Its main building in Cedar City is for sale, and the school is now operating out of an office suite in Salt Lake City. Enrollment is down to a mere 60 students.

h/t: David Corn and Stephanie Mencimer at Mother Jones

In the psychic make-up of any politician, the phenomenon of compartmentalization is common, but rare is the politician who proudly makes an art of it, as has Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Even as he publicly celebrates his squeaky-clean personal life, Romney lauds his own brutal record as a leveraged buyout specialist and lies with impunity on the stump, often in terms laden with race-baiting code.  

To Romney, it seems, personal morality amounts to a roster of good personal habits (no smoking or drinking, a faithful marriage, generosity and compassion for ailing members of his faith community) that add up to a kind of personal exceptionalism that trumps whatever havoc his business behavior or political policies may wreak on the life of any poor schlub who should should cross his path.

Romney’s sense of morality seems to be based on a kind of fierce individualism, in which he apparently believes himself to be morally superior by dint of his own personal habits, and assumes no responsibility for the fate of those less rigorous in their personal code, should they find an appeal to their baser instincts in the words and actions of the beyond-reproach church leader, dutiful husband and father of five.

It all amounts to a kind of moral bankruptcy, in which the former Massachusetts governor presumes he is entitled to a morally superior reputation for which he has not kept up the payments. It’s not that hard to be good to your family and friends. If true morality is evidenced by how one treats strangers, Romney’s reputation as a moral actor should be under water.

1. The smug non-smoker took big bucks to push smoking on Russians. No one is more satisfied with his Ivory-soap self-image (99.43% pure) than Romney, and one aspect of that is Romney’s evident pride in never having been a smoker. But that didn’t stop him, while CEO of Bain & Company, from seeking a consulting deal, beginning in 1992, with the British American Tobacco company to help the death merchants crack the Russian market after the fall of the Soviet Union.

2. Slams government economic investment despite having taken government contracts. As a presidential candidate, Romney is fond of slamming the Obama administration’s stimulus program, and other government investment in the economy. “Government doesn’t create jobs. It’s the private sector that creates jobs,” Romney said at a South Carolina campaign event in January. The auto industry, he said, should have been left to bottom out in the wake of the Bush crash, instead of being brought back to health by the loans provided by the administration. Never mind that Romney himself got a nice windfall from a government contract, according to Carter and Cherkis:

In March 1993, the American government gave Bain & Co. a $3.9 million contract to advise Boris Yeltsin’s administration on the privatization of the Russian economy, according records detailing the arrangement uncovered by The Huffington Post.

3. Opposes abortion, but invested in company that disposes of aborted fetuses. Just because Mitt Romney would make it illegal to have an abortion doesn’t mean he minds making a profit on other people’s abortions. In 1999, while Mitt Romney was still CEO of Bain Capital (a leveraged-buyout firm spun off from Bain & Co.), the company invested tens of millions of dollars in Stericyle, a medical waste firm that, among the vast array of medical waste services it provides to medical facilities, is the disposal of aborted fetuses. The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein broke the story in January, writing:

Stericycle, a massive medical waste disposal service company, received a $75 million investment from Bain Capital in 1999 and soon became an industry leader. Today, it has more than 485,000 customers worldwide. Its clients include hospitals, blood banks, and pharmaceutical manufacturers. But it has also helped dispose of medical waste from Planned Parenthood and abortion clinics — waste that included aborted fetuses — and that has attracted the ire of the pro-life community and establishment Republicans.

4. Decries corruption in other countries but facilitated it in his own. In his address to the Clinton Global Initiative in September, Romney bemoaned the state of affairs in developing countries, saying, “We see stories of cases where American aid has been diverted to corrupt governments.” But when it comes to good ol’ domestic corruption, Romney seems to be all for it — at least when it’s in his own interest. In fact, it could be argued that he even gave out an award for it.

The 2002 winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, which Romney oversaw, were renowned for their outsized expense. Some of that was incurred before Romney took the helm — he was brought in after reports of rampant overspending and corruption — but not all of it. In 2001, Sports Illustrated reported that the millionaires and billionaires of Utah got some sweetheart deals, at government expense, served up with roses on Romney’s watch.

One example among several given is the nice little land swap that billionaire Earl Holding wrangled out of the National Park Service that netted him a prime parcel and a government-built access road. So it made total sense that he would build a high-end resort on that bucolic expanse. Here’s how Mother Jones’ Tim Murphydescribed the deal:

Snowbasin, the site of the downhill skiing championships in 2002, was one of the more notorious examples of a well-connected Utahn getting a sweetheart deal in the name of the Olympics. Earl Holding, a billionaire oil baron, pressured the Forest Service into giving him title to valuable land in Park Valley in exchange for land of “approximate equal value” elsewhere in the state. But Holding drove a hard bargain; he got Congress to foot the bill for a new—and arguably unnecessary—access road (cost: $15 million), and received more than 10 times the 100 acres that were necessary for the Games. That would allow him to turn what was once protected federal land into a massive, and lucrative, mountain resort.

The government was so instrumental in making the Olympic games happen that Romney created a special award, the “Order of Excellence,” to honor public servants who had helped them pull it off. Among the recipients: John Hoagland, the US Forest Service official responsible for the land transfer of the Snowbasin downhill skiing site.

5. Insults low-income Americans for not paying federal income tax, while not paying federal income tax on almost all of his income. Romney famously described people whose income level (or status as members of the armed forces) exempts them from paying federal income taxes as takers who “see themselves as victims.” In a secretly recorded video, exposed by Mother Jones, of Romney speaking to other rich people at a campaign fundraiser, he described such people, many of whom are elderly and on Social Security, as those “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 that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.”

But Romney doesn’t pay ordinary income tax on his annual income, either; he pays federal capital gains taxes — taxes on paid on investment income at a much lower rate than those paid on salaries and wages (otherwise known as money earned from work). That explains why Romney paid only 14 percent on the gazillions he took in in 2011, while a middle-income person may pay almost double that percentage. Asked by 60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley whether Romney thinks that’s fair, Romney said, why yes. As I recounted Pelley’s interview on September 23:

“Now, you made on your investments last year about $20 million personally, and you paid 14 percent in federal taxes,” Pelley said. “That’s the capital gains rate. Is that fair to the guy who makes $50,000 and paid a higher rate than you did?”

“It is a low rate,” Romney said, “and one of the reasons the capital gains rate is lower is because capital has already been taxed once, at the corporate level — as high as 35 percent.” (Unless your windfall comes from any of the numerous private enterprises that enjoy government subsidies or tax breaks, of course.)

“So you think it is fair,” Pelley said.

“Yeah — I think it’s the right way to encourage economic growth — to get people to invest, to start businesses, to put people to work.”

Actually, there’s scant evidence to suggest that lower capital gains rates have any effect on either job creation or economic growth.

And while he demeaned as moochers regular Americans who pay no income tax because the law exempts them, he sings a different tune when tax law advantages rich guys like him. “I pay all the taxes that are legally required, not a dollar more,” he said, according to Vanity Fair. But if you’re poor and you do the same, in Romney’s moral desert, that makes you a leech on society.

6. Calls for more transparency from his opponent while hiding his own tax returns, squirreling millions offshore and using accounting tricks to lower his tax rate. Romney’s call for the Obama administration to be more forthcoming about everything from the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, to the cross-border gun-tracking program known as Fast and Furious would be more credible if Romney wasn’t such a sneak when it comes to matters pertaining to how he makes all that money. For a guy who hasn’t had a job in 10 years, he sure does rake it in — $20 million last year alone.

As repeatedly noted on this site and throughout the news media, Romney has released only two years of his tax returns and has said he will release no more. “We’ve given you people all you need to know and understand about our financial situation…,” Romney’s wife, Ann, told Good Morning America in August. 

The Romney reticence on all matters of personal finance has only fanned the flames of investigation and speculation, yielding a picture of a tangled web of offshore shell companies, a Swiss bank account, and shady tax-filing tricks. 

Vanity Fair’s Nicholas Shaxon notes that Romney appears to have closed his $3 million Swiss bank account before filing his 2011 tax return, but reports that he still maintains an interest in 12 Bain Capital funds registered in the Cayman Islands, the details of which, Shaxon says, are “hidden behind controversial confidentiality disclaimers.” Of particular interest to reporters has been a Bermuda firm owned by Romney known as Sakaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., which Shaxon writes, is raising eyebrows:

While the Romneys’ spokespeople insist that the couple has paid all the taxes required by law, investments in tax havens such as Bermuda raise many questions, because they are in “jurisdictions where there is virtually no tax and virtually no compliance,” as one Miami-based offshore lawyer put it.

Then there’s the matter of a funky accounting practice known as management fee-waiving, which was all the rage at Bain. Leveraged buyout firms such as Bain collect management fees from the companies they take over (whether or not those companies turn a profit, thanks to the LBO firm’s sage advice). Left to their own devices, those fees would be taxed as ordinary income, at the ordinary-income rates paid on wages and salaries. But if wave the magic waiver wand over them, those fees turn into “investments,” which are taxed as “carried interest” at the lower capital gains rate. Here’s how Nick Confessore, Julie Creswell and David Kocieniewski of the New York Times assess the practice, as used by Bain:

The tax strategy — which is viewed as perfectly legal by some tax experts, aggressive by others and potentially illegal by some — came to light last month when hundreds of pages of Bain’s internal financial documents were made available online. The financial statements show that at least $1 billion in accumulated fees that otherwise would have been taxed as ordinary income for Bain executives had been converted into investments producing capital gains, which are subject to a federal tax of 15 percent, versus a top rate of 35 percent for ordinary income. That means the Bain partners saved more than $200 million in federal income taxes and more than $20 million in Medicare taxes.

(For more on shady Bain practices, read Brian Beutler at TPM and Kris E. Benson at Wonkette.)

Then there’s the matter of Romney’s individual retirement account, which he seems to have converted into an individual tax haven. As the Boston Globe’s Michael Kralish and Beth Healy told it in an August report:

It is one of the most striking elements of Mitt Romney’s financial fortune. He has used the seemingly bland investment vehicle known as an individual retirement account — established by Congress to help average Americans save a modest amount for retirement — to shield at least $20 million and as much as $100 million from initial taxes.

So much for transparency.

7. Painted his opponent as a fibbing child while building an entire campaign on lies. In the first presidential debate between Romney and Obama, the Republican presidential candidate compared the African-American president to his “boys,” who, when they were little, he said, would pile fib upon fib thinking they could fool their dad. It was an audacious tack for the truth-challenged Romney, whose most furious attacks on Obama have been based almost entirely on lies.

The very theme of the first night of the Republican National Convention was built around a deliberate misrepresentation of the president’s words regarding the role of government in building small businesses — a false narrative that Romney repeated often on the campaign trail, alleging that the president had insulted the work of small business owners, saying of their businesses, “You didn’t build that.” (Actually, Obama said they hadn’t built the roads and bridges that brought customers to their doors.) The convention was themed “We built that,” and featured a deceptively edited video of Obama’s inelegant attempt to echo a message originated by Democratic U.S. Senate Elizabeth Warren, Mass., meant to shine a light on all of the infrastructure built by government that is necessary for economic success: roads, bridges, railroads, schools.

8. Claims to have the “best interests of the African American community” in his heart while running a race-baiting campaign. When Romney appeared before the annual conference of the NAACP this summer, he assured its members that, if they knew what was good for them, they would vote for him. (For some reason that didn’t go over all that well.) “I believe that if you understood who I truly am in my heart, and if it were possible to fully communicate what I believe is in the real, enduring best interest of African American families, you would vote for me for president,” Romney told the skeptical crowd.

The speech is remembered mostly for the boos Romney received with his promise to “repeal Obamacare” — boos he surely expected to elicit. Given the context, it’s hard not to read Romney’s very appearance before the crowd as a cynical, race-baiting exercise, performed to reinforce the racial resentment of the white, right-wing Republican base. Part of that context was provided just hours after that appearance by the candidate himself when, at a fundraising event, he referred to the less-than-appreciative audience as a group who wanted “free stuff” from the government.

9. Wears the mantle of protectionist, China-battling job creator after having put thousands of U.S. workers out of jobs and bought into a giant Chinese sweatshop. Romney likes to portray his work at the helm of Bain Capital as a mission of job creation. In truth, Bain exists for no other reason than to extract profits for its investors, and sometimes the best way for a leveraged buyout firm to make a profit is to bankrupt the company. You see, the buyout guys get management fees whether the company wins or loses, so even if you load it up with a crushing level of debt, you still come out a winner. Sometimes Romney’s deals created jobs; other times they put people out of work. ThinkProgress estimates that as many as 6,000 Americans lost their jobs under Bain, which was an early proponent of shipping jobs overseas.

Writing at Bloomberg News, private equity specialist Anthony Luzzatto Gardnerexamined Romney’s record at Bain, concluding that of the 67 major deals the company made during Romney’s tenure, a mere 10 of them accounted for 70 percent of the company’s profits. Of those 10, four ended in bankruptcy, Gardner writes, along with others amid the remaining 57. This kind of “casino capitalism,” as Gardner calls it, is not a recipe for job creation.

Meanwhile in China, Romney and Bain invested in a factory that employed 20,000 young women in deplorable conditions, trapped within the factory complex by barbed wire and guards posted in towers. 

h/t: Adele M. Stan at AlterNet

During a Sunday evening conference call with a group of Iowans, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney warned voters that President Obama wants to force everyone into organized unions. Twice during the 30 minute phone call, Romney raised the spectre of President Obama and Democrats reintroducing the Employee Free Choice Act, which was last introduced in 2009.

EFCA would have introduced “card check” votes in the workplace, making it easier for employees to decide whether or not to unionize. If 50 percent of workers sign a statement of support of organizing, that union would be granted bargaining power with the employer. The bill would strip employers of their ability to force their workers into a full union organizing election if they don’t like the results of a signature campaign.

As it stands, employers can legally force their workers to attend anti-union meetings and one-on-one “discussions” with their superiors ahead of any vote on unionization, an intimidation tactic that succeeds in derailing many unionization efforts. Stricter penalties for failure to negotiate a contract with a new union and for discriminating against any worker who supports a union would have also been included.

But EFCA does not force anyone to do anything. It simply gives workers the ability to more easily organize themselves into a union if a majority of them choose to do so. One study found that “employers threatened to close plants in 57 percent of [union] campaigns and threatened to cut wages and benefits in 47 percent,” while firing pro-union workers 34 percent of the time.

Unions have simply become Republican politicians’ new favorite straw man, with the GOP invoking them to attack everything from teachers’, police officers’ and firefighters’ compensation to the rebounding auto industry.

H/T: Adam Peck at Think Progress Economy

Behind closed doors, Mitt Romney sounds like the leaders of the far-right flank of his party. That’s the central message from a video purportedly taken during a Romney fundraiser earlier this year and posted online by Mother Jones Monday.

The Obama campaign called the clip “shocking.”

In the clip, which was recorded surreptitiously at a Romney fundraiser that “occurred after Romney had clinched the Republican presidential nomination,” according to Mother Jones, Romney tells a room full of donors that people who voted for President Obama — a full 47 percent of the country — are dependent on the government.

“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,” Romney said, according to the Mother Jones transcript. “That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what … These are people who pay no income tax.”

The notion that virtually all Obama voters depend on government handouts has strong support within the right wing of the Republican Party. On Friday, former Family Research Council President Gary Bauer made the idea a highlight of his speech to the Values Voter Summit.

“They will vote for their own perceived interests, which is they don’t want anybody cutting back the size of the checks,” Bauer told TPM at the summit.

Romney has for months claimed publicly that Obama is trying to create an “entitlement society.” He said in August that Obama was trying to “shore up his base” with welfare reforms Romney says will eliminate the work requirement for benefits (it won’t), but he hasn’t gone as far as Bauer in public. The Mother Jones video suggests he has gone that far in private.

“It’s shocking that a candidate for president of the United States would go behind closed doors and declare to a group of wealthy donors that half the American people view themselves as ‘victims,’ entitled to handouts and are unwilling to take ‘personal responsibility’ for their lives,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in a statement. “It’s hard to serve as president for all Americans when you’ve disdainfully written off half the nation.”

h/t: Evan McMorris-Santoro at TPM

Once upon a time, there was a silver-tongued president. His foreign policy must have been seen by enemies of the United States as weak and feckless, because these enemies became emboldened. Mideast terrorists staged a brutal, bloody attack in which innocent Americans were killed. The president’s response could be seen as a display of shameful weakness rather than steely resolve.

I’m referring, of course, to Ronald Reagan and the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, which claimed 241 American lives — and led Reagan to withdraw U.S. forces from Lebanon.

It’s useful to keep this antecedent in mind as opportunistic critics embarrass themselves looking for ways to bash President Obama over the spreading anti-U.S. violence in Egypt, Libya and now Yemen.

I mean, Mitt Romney. Really. U.S. diplomatic posts are attacked abroad, and your first reaction is to issue a statement blasting the president? J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other officials are killed in a commando-style assault on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, and your instinct is to seek not safety for other Americans at risk, not justice for the cold-blooded killers, but political advantage for yourself?

Romney’s rushed statement Tuesday night calling the Obama administration’s response to the violence “disgraceful” was a new low in a campaign already scraping bottom. And Romney’s subsequent decision to double down on the attack, even as Americans mourned the first killing of an ambassador since 1979 and officials began investigating what now looks like a well-planned terrorist attack . . . well, I guess this whole performance says a lot about what kind of man Romney is.

The most charitable explanation is that he’s in a panic over polls that show Obama opening a lead. If this is not the case, then Romney’s ignorance of foreign policy is more profound — and potentially dangerous — than anyone could have suspected.

It’s one thing to pander on domestic issues. When Romney takes every conceivable position on health-care reform, when he promises tax cuts for all and sacrifice for none, when he conjures millions of jobs out of thin air — such reckless promises are written off as campaign rhetoric, nothing more.

But Romney’s tougher-than-thou bluster about the Middle East is no laughing matter, especially his attempt to appear to be more supportive of Israel than is Obama. Since Obama has been as supportive of Israel as any U.S. president, Romney has contorted himself into dangerous positions — practically threatening an attack on Iran’s nuclear program and saying he “can’t imagine” any circumstance in which he would be unable to meet with an Israeli prime minister.

Romney’s belief, apparently, is that such language sounds tough — that the harder he thumps his chest, the stronger he seems. You have to wonder whether he could ever summon the prudence and wisdom to pull back, as Reagan did, when circumstances indicate. You have to wonder whether he realizes that his shoot-from-the-lip attacks, far from projecting strength, sound frantic and weak.

You have to wonder whether he knows there are moments when the guiding principle has to be “America first.” Not “me first.”

h/t: Eugene Robinson at WaPo

Tart-tongued Democratic Rep. Barney Frank mocked Mitt Romney’s claims that his private-sector success makes him the better candidate to revive the economy, deriding the Republican candidate as “Myth Romney” in a speech to the Democratic National Convention on Thursday.

The former president then noted that all Romney and the GOP plan to do is go back to Bush era policies and boost military spending without paying for it:

They convinced me they were honorable people who believed what they said and they’re going to keep every commitment they’ve made. We just got to make sure the American people know what those commitments are — (cheers, applause) — because in order to look like an acceptable, reasonable, moderate alternative to President Obama, they just didn’t say very much about the ideas they’ve offered over the last two years.

They couldn’t because they want to the same old policies that got us in trouble in the first place. They want to cut taxes for high- income Americans, even more than President Bush did. They want to get rid of those pesky financial regulations designed to prevent another crash and prohibit future bailouts.They want to actually increase defense spending over a decade $2 trillion more than the Pentagon has requested without saying what they’ll spend it on. And they want to make enormous cuts in the rest of the budget, especially programs that help the middle class and poor children.

Indeed, Clinton is right. If elected president, Mitt Romney plans to increase military spending by $2.1 trillion and he has not said how he would pay for it.

h/t: Think Progress