Romney Versus the Automakers and the Truth

Throughout this presidential campaign Mitt Romney's dishonesty has been shocking. Many say they have never seen a candidate so willing to lie and make up stories out of thin air.  Sadly, too often the media has aided Romney by lacking to call him what he is: a liar.  Perhaps some of Romney's most incredible lies have involved the auto industry - an industry that Romney was willing to utterly collapse and die.  As noted yesterday, both Chrysler and General Motors have felt compelled to speak out because Romney is running ads and making statements that simply are not true.  And Romney knows they are untrue.  The man simply cares nothing about the truth.  His sole values seem to be amazing more money and power for himself.  Literally not else matters, especially honesty and telling the truth.  I am honestly coming to believe the man is a sociopath.  A column in the New York Times looks at Romney's lies about the auto industry.  Here are excerpts:

When General Motors tells a presidential campaign that it is engaging in “cynical campaign politics at its worst,” that’s a pretty good signal that the campaign has crossed a red line and ought to pull back. Not Mitt Romney’s campaign. Having broadcast an outrageously deceitful ad attacking the auto bailout, the campaign ignored the howls from carmakers and came back with more. 

Mr. Romney apparently plans to end his race as he began it: playing lowest-common-denominator politics, saying anything necessary to achieve power and blithely deceiving voters desperate for clarity and truth. 

This started months ago when he realized that his very public 2008 stance against the successful and wildly popular government bailout of G.M. and Chrysler was hurting him in the valuable states of Ohio and Michigan. In February, he wrote an essay for The Detroit News calling the bailout “crony capitalism on a grand scale” because unions benefited and insisting that Detroit would have been better off to refuse federal money.

When that tactic didn’t work, he began insisting at the debates that his plan for Detroit wasn’t really that different from President Obama’s. (Except for the niggling detail of the $80 billion federal investment.) 

That was quickly discredited, so Mr. Romney began telling rallies last week that Chrysler was considering moving its production to China. Chrysler loudly denounced it as “fantasies,” saying it was only considering increasing production in China for sale in China, without moving a single American job. 

The Romney campaign ignored the company, following up with an instantly notorious ad saying President Obama “sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China.”  

Nearly 1.5 million people are working as a direct result of the bailout. Ohio’s unemployment rate is well below the national average. G.M.’s American sales continue to increase, and Chrysler said this week that its third-quarter net income rose 80 percent. These companies haven’t just bounced back from the bottom; they are accelerating. 

What Mr. Romney cannot admit is that all this is a direct result of the government investment he would have rejected. It’s bad enough to be wrong on the policy. It takes an especially dishonest candidate to simply turn up the volume on a lie and keep repeating it..  .  .  .  .  Mr. Romney is providing a grim preview of what kind of president he would be.

What I find deeply disturbing is that Romney claims to be a deeply religious man.  Yet he lies with impunity.  As with the Christofascists and the Catholic Church hierarchy, the truth simply doesn't matter.   No wonder the younger generations are fleeing organized religion in record numbers.  Increasingly, being a Christian or in Romney's case, Mormon, is synonymous with being a liar.

Chrysler CEO Pushes Back on Romney Lies - GM Joins Push Back

UPDATED:  Not only has Mitt Romney been lying about Chrysler, he's also been lying about events and job lay offs at General Motors.  Here are highlights from Politico as GM calls out Romney for his lies:

Via the Detroit Free Press, Mitt Romney's auto bailout Ohio radio ad is prompting some pushback from General Motors:

“We've clearly entered some parallel universe during these last few days,” GM spokesman Greg Martin said. “No amount of campaign politics at its cynical worst will diminish our record of creating jobs in the U.S. and repatriating profits back to this country.”

The ad's contention about the jobs lost under GM is what Martin pushed back on — the ad says the company cut 15,000 jobs "under President Obama" but is going to double China production. The majority of those job losses, the Free Press says, took place ahead of the restructuring through the bailout.

The spot implies the auto bailout, which is popular in parts of the Midwest, was a mistake. As the Atlantic's Molly Ball notes, the messaging from Romney has been blurry on this subject — he has called the bailout bad while also saying it was his initial idea to call for a bakruptcy process.

I have been active in politics for many years and I truly do not believe that I've ever seen any politician more willing to simply outright lie than Mitt Romney.  It's one thing to different on interpretations of data or policies.  It is something totally different to just flat out lie.  Yet that is precisely what Mitt Romney is doing in an ad that claims that Chrysler is planning to move jobs manufacturing Jeeps to China.  It's simply not true, but that means nothing to Romney and his morally bankrupt campaign.  Politico reports on Chrysler's push back against Romney's baldfaced lie.  Here are highlights:

The Toledo Blade reports on the latest turn of the screw in the auto-related debate that has overshadowed the final week of the race in Ohio:

Chrysler Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne circulated an email to Chrysler Group LLC employees today strongly restating the automaker's promise that it will not move existing U.S. production of Jeeps to China.

In the email, Mr. Marchionne said he felt obligated to again address the company's production plans over continuing "public debate."

The note did not directly reference politics or the presidential election, but Chrysler's plans for Jeep have become a major political talking point over the past week, especially in Ohio. Speaking in Defiance last week, Republican candidate Mitt Romney seized on a misrepresentation of a Bloomberg story, suggesting that Chrysler was considering moving existing Jeep production to China.

Romney has stuck with the Jeep-related line of attack against Obama, though in a modified form that only implies — rather than stating explicitly — that Chrysler might move jobs from Ohio to China. It's a decision that has puzzled Republicans both in and outside Ohio: after letting Obama dominate the auto-bailout debate on the airwaves for months, Romney has re-engaged the auto fight at the last minute on less-than-firm footing, with an attack that now has Chrysler weighing in against him.

Frankly, it is to a point where if I were talking to Romney face to face and he said it was raining outside, I'd want to go look out the window and confirm it before I took the statement as true.  The man is a pathological liar.  We cannot afford putting such a totally dishonest man in the White House.

Dwight Eisenhower's Granddaughter Endorses Obama

It seems that more and more former moderate Republicans are throwing up their hands in disgust and simply walking away from the GOP which seemingly now requires that one be a far right religious extremist, a white supremacist, a self-centered and greed driven scrooge,  or have had a lobotomy to be a party member.  As I have noted many times I and my family of moderate Rockefeller Republicans left the GOP years ago in light of the party's growing insanity and outright nastiness.  Now, Susan Eisenhower (pictured at right), granddaughter of the late President Dwight Eisenhower, has formally announced that she is endorsing Barack Obama for reelection (and that she has left the GOP).  Here are highlights from her website on her decision to back Obama:

Four years ago, I left the Republican Party of which I was a lifelong member and became an independent. Not long after, I supported Barack Obama in the 2008 election for president. I made this decision determined to look at the issues not as a Republican or a Democrat, but as an American.

It is through that lens that I consider my choice in the 2012 election. Like many other voters who crossed party lines to vote for Barack Obama in the last election, I have watched the 2012 campaign carefully and listened closely to what the candidates have said. I believe that President Obama should be re-elected.

Obama was elected and took office, building on a number of stabilization programs initiated by the Bush administration. He took many other vital steps that reestablished our economic footing, including saving America’s automobile industry.

In the last four years, and despite the global downturn, America has come back from the brink. While pain is still being felt in far too many sectors of the economy, from a macroeconomic standpoint the situation in the United States is better than it is among our allies. According to the International Monetary Fund, today the United States is poised for 3 percent growth, which would make our economy the strongest of the other richest economies, including Canada and Germany.

Other influential studies, cited in a recent column by Fareed Zakaria, show that debt in the U.S. financial sector, relative to GDP, has declined to levels not seen since before the 2000 bubble. And consumer confidence is now at its highest levels since September 2007. The housing market is also slowly coming back. While there is still an enormous amount to do to assure a recovery, the president deserves credit for a steady hand during this dangerous and unpredictable time.

The Obama Administration has also been responsible for decimating the top leadership of al-Qaeda and introducing biting sanctions on Iran. Today the president has significant experience in managing foreign relations, experience that GOP candidate Mitt Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, do not have.

As a result of this campaign I am more confused than ever about what Mitt Romney stands for. I know little of his core beliefs, if he even has any. No one seems to agree on what they are, and that’s why I do not want to take a chance on finding out.

Given Romney’s shifting positions, he can only be judged by the people with whom he surrounds himself. Many of them espouse yesterday’s thinking on national defense and security, female/family reproductive rights, and the interplay of government and independent private enterprise. In this context, Barack Obama represents the future, not that past.

Barack Obama’s record as president has not been perfect, and there have been frustrations for all of us during this time. Nevertheless, I believe that he deserves four more years in the White House. If the voters on November 6 give him that chance, we should expect and demand, if necessary, that members of both parties work closely with him to find a way to avert the “fiscal cliff” and other pressing and possibly destabilizing problems.

Would that more rational conservatives would recognize the systemic sickness of today's GOP.  Only by repeated  crushing electoral defeats will the GOP perhaps as a party find a way to exorcise itself of the religious extremists, jingoistic nationalists and shape shifting corporate vultures who now hold sway.

Exposing More Romney Lies About the Auto Industry

Mitt Romney continues to spin lies about both what he wrote in his November 18, 2008, op-ed in the New York Times and what Barack Obama has done to revive the U.S. auto industry.  Signs like this need to not only blanket the Mid-West by every state.  An Obama ad adds this:

When the auto industry faced collapse, Mitt Romney turned his back. Even the conservative Detroit News criticized Romney for his 'wrong-headedness' on the bailout. And now, after Romney's false claim of Jeep outsourcing to China, Chrysler itself has refuted Romney's lie. The truth? Jeep is adding jobs in Ohio.

 Here are highlights from Chrysler's statement:

Let’s set the record straight: Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China. It’s simply reviewing the opportunities to return Jeep output to China for the world’s largest auto market. U.S. Jeep assembly lines will continue to stay in operation. A careful and unbiased reading of the Bloomberg take would have saved unnecessary fantasies and extravagant comments. 

What Mitt Romney Really Said About Allowing Detroit to Go Bankrupt

During last night's debate, Mitt Romney again tried to rewrite history in terms of what he said about allowing General Motors and Chrysler go bankrupt back in 2008.  Like almost everything the man says, last mights song and dance did not reflect reality.  Here are highlights from Romney's actual op-ed in the New York Times on November 18, 2008 which was captioned "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt":

IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed. 

Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check. 

I have several prescriptions for Detroit’s automakers. 

First, their huge disadvantage in costs relative to foreign brands must be eliminated. That means new labor agreements to align pay and benefits to match those of workers at competitors like BMW, Honda, Nissan and Toyota. Furthermore, retiree benefits must be reduced so that the total burden per auto for domestic makers is not higher than that of foreign producers.

Second, management as is must go. New faces should be recruited from unrelated industries — from companies widely respected for excellence in marketing, innovation, creativity and labor relations. 

Starving research and development is like eating the seed corn.  

I believe the federal government should invest substantially more in basic research — on new energy sources, fuel-economy technology, materials science and the like — that will ultimately benefit the automotive industry, along with many others.  . . . .But don’t ask Washington to give shareholders and bondholders a free pass — they bet on management and they lost.

The federal government should provide guarantees for post-bankruptcy financing and assure car buyers that their warranties are not at risk.  In a managed bankruptcy, the federal government would propel newly competitive and viable automakers, rather than seal their fate with a bailout check. 

Of course, as Romney - a vulture capitalist himself - well knew at the time given the collapse of the financial markets, financing during a bankruptcy of either automaker such has he proposed was non-existent.  Giving "post bankruptcy financing" to companies that had collapsed and had ceased to operate would have been too little, too late and many millions of Americans would have found themselves unemployed.  In short, Romney's plan would have been a disaster and GM and Chrysler would be out of business had his approach been pursued.  So once again. last night we heard Romney suffering from "romnesia" and rewriting his own words.  Thankfully, Bush and Obama rejected Romney's plan.  The American people need to remember what Romney proposed for Detroit and reject Romney on November 6th.

Cleveland Plain Dealer Endorses Obama

Another newspaper - this time in the key state of Ohio - has endorsed Barack Obama for president over Mitt Romney.  One of the recurring themes that also figured in the Salt Lake City tribune's endorsement of Obama is Romney's constant changes of position which leave one wondering who is the man and what does he really believe?  Or more importantly, what would he actually do if elected.   Indeed, here's the telling language on this issue:

But which Romney would they elect? The rather liberal one who ran for the Senate in 1994? The pragmatic governor? The sharply conservative candidate of this year's GOP primaries? The reborn moderate of recent weeks? .  .  .  .  . Romney's frequent changes raise questions about his core principles and make his lack of policy details all the more troubling. They make you wonder if he would stand up to the more extreme elements in his own party . . . . 

But it is not just Romney's chameleon like behavior that caused the Plain Dealer to endorse Obama.  There is also the record of what Obama has actually accomplished - despite Republican obstructionism - and the lack of certainty to any of Romney's proposals.  Here are other highlights from the endorsement:

Today, we recommend President Obama's re-election. He has led the nation back from the brink of depression. Ohio in particular has benefited from his bold decision to revive the domestic auto industry. Because of his determination to fulfill a decades-old dream of Democrats, 30 million more Americans will soon have health insurance. His Race to the Top initiative seeded many of the education reforms embodied in Cleveland's Transformation Plan. He ended the war in Iraq and refocused the battle to disrupt al-Qaida and its terrorist allies. He ordered the risky attack inside Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden.
  
The nation needs to get more people back to work. It needs to get its financial house in order, reform its tax code and streamline -- though not gut -- regulation in order to reassure business and speed recovery. It needs to invest in infrastructure, education and job training. It needs to expand exports and engage the world.

Not only do we still believe this president can do those things, we think he can do it with policies most likely to lift Ohio and Ohioans. Obama's leadership has made a difference when it mattered most. His stimulus package helped avert an even worse economic collapse and initiated investments in education, manufacturing and green energy that should yet pay dividends. His commitment to a balanced path toward deficit reduction won't please the most zealous members of either party, but it makes sense for the nation.

Romney's tendency to bluster on foreign policy provides more cause for doubt. With tens of thousands of young Americans still in harm's way in Afghanistan, the United States cannot afford to be drawn into new wars without clear national interests at stake or to sap its resources in further open-ended conflicts. The Benghazi killings reveal the risks of an "Arab Spring" in which terrorists have gained new weaponry and new freedom to operate. But these challenges require inventive diplomacy and international engagement, not slogans or swagger.  Obama has shown that he favors engagement over bluster, and practical solutions over easy bromides. That's what the country needs. 

Obama told the companies [GM and Chrysler] to restructure using the Bankruptcy Court and set conditions for government financing: GM's chairman had to go. Excess plants and dealerships had to close. Chrysler had to be bought out by Fiat. Contracts had to be renegotiated.

It was unpopular but gutsy. And it worked. Ohioans today are making cars in Lordstown and Toledo. They're making parts and steel for Ford, Honda and other automakers. They're back on the job.
That's leadership that deserves a chance to finish the job. Re-elect President Obama.

Again, I am mystified as to how anyone who is not motivated solely by racism, religious fanaticism, greed and aversion to taxes, and/or motivated by anti-gay and anti-minority bigotry can support Mitt Romney.

Salt Lake City Tribune Endorses Obama

It is more than a little bit interesting that in states where he is best known - i.e., Massachusetts where he was governor, and Utah where he worked to save the Olympic Games - Mitt Romney is not overly popular.  Indeed, in Massachusetts, Obama is leading him by double digits.  Now, the Salt Lake City Tribune has come out and formally endorsed Barack Obama for re-election over Romney.  That those who know him best are running in the other direction ought to make some folks open their eyes.  Or at least stop chugging down the Kool-Aid quite so rapidly.  Among the reasons cited for rejecting Romney are his countless position changes and his refusal to offer meaningful specifics of any of his supposed plans if elected.  Here are highlights from the Tribune's endorsement of Obama:

 

Nowhere has Mitt Romney’s pursuit of the presidency been more warmly welcomed or closely followed than here in Utah. The Republican nominee’s political and religious pedigrees, his adeptly bipartisan governorship of a Democratic state, and his head for business and the bottom line all inspire admiration and hope in our largely Mormon, Republican, business-friendly state.

But it was Romney’s singular role in rescuing Utah’s organization of the 2002 Olympics from a cesspool of scandal . . . .  Romney managed to save the state from ignominy, turning the extravaganza into a showcase for the matchless landscapes, volunteerism and efficiency that told the world what is best and most beautiful about Utah and its people.

Sadly, it is not the only Romney, as his campaign for the White House has made abundantly clear, first in his servile courtship of the tea party in order to win the nomination, and now as the party’s shape-shifting nominee. From his embrace of the party’s radical right wing, to subsequent portrayals of himself as a moderate champion of the middle class, Romney has raised the most frequently asked question of the campaign: "Who is this guy, really, and what in the world does he truly believe?"

The evidence suggests no clear answer, or at least one that would survive Romney’s next speech or sound bite. Politicians routinely tailor their words to suit an audience. Romney, though, is shameless, lavishing vastly diverse audiences with words, any words, they would trade their votes to hear.

More troubling, Romney has repeatedly refused to share specifics of his radical plan to simultaneously reduce the debt, get rid of Obamacare (or, as he now says, only part of it), make a voucher program of Medicare, slash taxes and spending, and thereby create millions of new jobs.

If this portrait of a Romney willing to say anything to get elected seems harsh, we need only revisit his branding of 47 percent of Americans as freeloaders who pay no taxes, yet feel victimized and entitled to government assistance. His job, he told a group of wealthy donors, "is not to worry about those people.

And what of the president Romney would replace? For four years, President Barack Obama has attempted, with varying degrees of success, to pull the nation out of its worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression, a deepening crisis he inherited the day he took office.

In the first months of his presidency, Obama acted decisively to stimulate the economy. His leadership was essential to passage of the badly needed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Though Republicans criticize the stimulus for failing to create jobs, it clearly helped stop the hemorrhaging of public sector jobs. The Utah Legislature used hundreds of millions in stimulus funds to plug holes in the state’s budget.

The president also acted wisely to bail out the auto industry, which has since come roaring back. Romney, in so many words, said the carmakers should sink if they can’t swim.

Obama’s foreign policy record is perhaps his strongest suit, especially compared to Romney’s bellicose posture toward Russia and China and his inflammatory rhetoric regarding Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

In considering which candidate to endorse, The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board had hoped that Romney would exhibit the same talents for organization, pragmatic problem solving and inspired leadership that he displayed here more than a decade ago. Instead, we have watched him morph into a friend of the far right, then tack toward the center with breathtaking aplomb. Through a pair of presidential debates, Romney’s domestic agenda remains bereft of detail and worthy of mistrust.

Therefore, our endorsement must go to the incumbent, a competent leader who, against tough odds, has guided the country through catastrophe and set a course that, while rocky, is pointing toward a brighter day. The president has earned a second term. Romney, in whatever guise, does not deserve a first.

OUCH!!!  Candidly, the Tribune's reasoning ought to make sense to every rational voter who cares about the nation and the common good.  Sadly, many cannot see what the Tribune so well describes and I have to wonder what motivates this blindness.  Is it racism? Is it greed and a desire to pay less in taxes no matter the consequence to the nation or others? Is it religious extremism and bigotry that cannot accept a president who see all of us as citizens whether we be black or white, gay or straight, Christian or non-Christian, etc.?   Is it the fear that white privilege is slowly fading away?  Whatever it is, I do not believe it stems from anything good or honorable. 

Romney Told 31 Myths In 41 Minutes During Tuesday's Debate

I've already vented about Mitt Romney's blatant dishonesty during the second presidential debate on Tuesday night, but it is important to focus on just how incredibly dishonest the man really is and how dangerous he is to the future of average Americans.  A piece at Think Progress looks at 31 different myths and untruths Romney told in the 41 minutes that he was speaking during the debate.  Romney makes the sleaziest used car salesman look honest.  It's frightening.  Here is a sampling of the lies that struck me the most (make sure you read the full piece): 

During the first presidential debate in Denver, Colorado Romney managed to tell 27 myths in his 38 minutes of speaking time. But at his second encounter with Obama in New York, the GOP presidential candidate — who has run a post-truth campaign from day one — outdid himself and crammed 31 myths in 41 minutes:

1) “I want to make sure we keep our Pell grant program growing. We’re also going to have our loan program, so that people are able to afford school.” Paul Ryan’s budget could cut Pell Grants for nearly 1 million college students and even Romney’s white paper on education, “A Chance for Every Child,” suggests that he “would reverse the growth in Pell Grant funding.” It says: “A Romney Administration will refocus Pell Grant dollars on the students that need them most and place the program on a responsible long-term path that avoids future funding cliffs and last-minute funding patches.”

2) “I put out a five-point plan that gets America 12 million new jobs in four years and rising take-home pay.” The Washington Post’s in-house fact checker tore Romney’s claim that he will create 12 million jobs to shreds. The Post wrote that the “‘new math’” in Romney’s plan “doesn’t add up.” In awarding the claim four Pinocchios — the most untrue possible rating, the Post expressed incredulity at the fact Romney would personally stand behind such a flawed, baseless claim.

10) “And I will not — I will not under any circumstances, reduce the share that’s being paid by the highest income taxpayers. And I will not, under any circumstances increase taxes on the middle-class.” As the Tax Policy Center concluded, Romney’s plan can’t both exempt middle class families from tax cuts and remain revenue neutral. “He’s promised all these things and he can’t do them all. In order for him to cover the cost of his tax cut without adding to the deficit, he’d have to find a way to raise taxes on middle income people or people making less than $200,000 a year,” the Center found.


11) “But your rate comes down and the burden also comes down on you for one more reason, and that is every middle-income taxpayer no longer will pay any tax on interest, dividends or capital gains. No tax on your savings. That makes life a lot easier.” This would actually help very few Americans. Nearly three-fourths of households that make $200,000 or less annually would get literally nothing from Romney’s tax cut, due to the simple fact that most of those households have no capital gains income. To be exact, 73.9 percent of the households upon which Romney “focused” his tax cut will see zero benefit from it.

17) “So when you say that I wanted to take the auto industry bankrupt, you actually did. And — and I think it’s important to know that that was a process that was necessary to get those companies back on their feet, so they could start hiring more people. That was precisely what I recommend and ultimately what happened.” This is false. As Buisnessweek explains: Romney “opposed any use of taxpayer dollars to bail out the automakers, advice that President George W. Bush and Obama ignored. GM and Chrysler went through managed bankruptcies after Bush, at the end of his presidency, and later Obama provided federal funds.” “Without federal funds, GM and Chyrsler would not have survived. As former Bush aide Tony Fratto explained, “It wasn’t just that there wasn’t credit available; a lot of private equity had cash, they just weren’t giving it away.”

18) “He said that by now middle-income families would have a reduction in their health insurance premiums by $2,500 a year. It’s gone up by $2,500 a year.” Premiums have increased, though at a lower rate than before. And while the Affordable Care Act’s most important cost contentment strategies have yet to be implemented, the law is already lowering costs. 16 million seniors have received preventive benefits without deductibles or co-pays and are saving at least $3.9 billion on prescription drugs. Millions of young adults now have insurance coverage and are staying on their parent’s health care plan, insurers that spend too many premium dollars on administrative spending have refunded consumers, and states have successfully rejected dramatic premium increases.


20) “The kids of those that came here illegally, those kids, I think, should have a pathway to become a permanent resident of the United States and military service, for instance, is one way they would have that kind of pathway to become a permanent resident.” But Romney has promised to end President Obama’s deferred action directive, which saves some young undocumented immigrants from deportation, though he would not take away visas from people who had already received them. He has also promised to veto the DREAM Act.

21) “Now, when the president ran for office, he said that he’d put in place, in his first year, a piece of legislation — he’d file a bill in his first year that would reform our — our immigration system… He didn’t do it. He had a Democrat House and Democrat Senate, supermajority in both houses.” Senate Republicans repeatedly prevented Obama’s immigration reform efforts. The GOP actually blocked the DREAM Act from securing 60 votes to pass cloture, denying hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants a path to legal status if they enrolled in college or joined the military. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) even said on the Senate floor that young people lobbying his office had wasted their time.

22) “Any investments I have over the last eight years have been managed by a blind trust. And I understand they do include investments outside the United States, including in — in Chinese companies.” Romney’s blind trust is not very blind, and includes investments in a company owned by Romney’s son.

You get the drift:  if Mitt Romney's lips are moving, the safest assumption is to assume that he's lying.  I'd put the man right up there with Tony Perkins and most of the anti-gay professional Christian set who have lied so often that they no longer know how to tell the truth.

Obama Launches Campaign "Betting on America" - Meanwhile, Romney Defends His Tax Havens

With auto sales increasing in June, Barack Obama seeks to capitalize on his efforts to save the U. S. auto industry while Mitt Romney said that Detroit should be allowed to go bankrupt.  One would hope that Obama also hits home on just how out of touch Romney - with many overseas bank accounts and tax haven investments - is when it comes to the needs of everyday Americans who go sleepless at night worrying about how they are going to pay their bills and keep a roof over their families or pay for medical costs.  Between his many homes, hidden bank accounts, and plans to tear down a seaside mansion to build a larger one Romney seems to think the the Gilded Age has returned.   Meanwhile, he wants to repeal Obamacare and deny health care insurance to some 30 million Americans.  Personally, Romney strikes me as totally incapable of having empathy for others.  To him, everything is a calculated question of "what's in it for me."  Merely doing the right thing because it IS the right thing never crosses his mind.  Yes, many politicians can't be trusted, but Romney seems not only as untrustworthy but uncaring to boot. The Washington Post looks at Obama's rust belt campaign swing.  Here are highlights:

The 2010 Republican electoral rout in the industrial Rust Belt was decisive and complete, with the GOP sweeping the gubernatorial and Senate races in the key presidential battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan. In the aftermath, Democratic prospects for 2012, particularly President Obama’s, seemed bleak.

But less than two years later, the dynamics have changed. Things are looking up for the president, and the best evidence may be three Senate Democrats who will head into the final sprint of this year’s campaign as clear favorites, having weathered the worst of the tea party storm in the region.

Obama is helped by the better-than-average employment picture in Ohio and Pennsylvania, both of which recorded rates of 7.3 percent in May, while the national level remained at 8.2 percent. Michigan’s unemployment rate in May was 8.5 percent.

On the bus tour his campaign is calling “Betting on America,” Obama spent his first day emphasizing gains in manufacturing and his administration’s bailout of the American auto industry, hoping to appeal to workers in heavily union areas. The title is an unsubtle jab at Romney, who has faced questions about offshore personal bank accounts and investments by Bain Capital, made during his time as head of the firm, in companies that eventually outsourced jobs abroad.

“When the American auto industry was on the brink of collapse. . .Governor Romney said we should just let Detroit go bankrupt,” Obama told a crowd of 500 supporters in this manufacturing town just south of Toledo. “I refused to turn my back on communities like this one. . . And three years later, the American auto industry is coming roaring back.”

 Obama is paying special attention to Ohio where he kicked off his 2012 campaign with a speech in Columbus in May and delivered a major address on the economy in Cleveland last month. Ohio has voted for the winning candidate in 10 consecutive presidential elections and no Republican has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio. Consequently, both campaigns are spending heavily here in advertising dollars and manpower hours.

A pair of polls released last week gave Obama an edge in both Ohio and Pennsylvania: 47 percent to 38 percent in Ohio, and 45 percent to 39 percent in Pennsylvania, according the Quinnipiac Poll. 

Eugene Robinson has a column in the Washington Post that underscores Romney's out of touch nature when it comes the rest of us.  Here are excerpts:

Most Americans, for example, do not have an individual retirement account valued at between $20 million and $101 million, as Romney stated last year in a financial disclosure report.

When Romney was running Bain and building up his IRA, the maximum annual contribution permitted by the tax code was $2,000. So how did Romney’s IRA get so huge? He won’t say. It’s possible that he rolled over some money that was originally in a 401(k) retirement plan of the kind offered by many employers. But annual 401(k) contributions were then capped at $30,000, including an employer match — in Romney’s world, chump change.

Then there’s the question of a Bermuda-based company that Romney and his wife, Ann, own, Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd. According to the Associated Press, the company has been part of Romney’s portfolio for nearly 15 years, but it was not mentioned in any state or federal disclosure reports. It surfaced in Romney’s 2010 tax returns, which he reluctantly released earlier this year.

Channeling private-equity and hedge-fund investments through offshore firms in places such as Bermuda and the Caymans can allow investors to avoid a tax on what is known as “unrelated business income.”

[O]ne of the sources of anger and anxiety in this country — on the left and the right — is the sense that there are two sets of rules, one for the rich and powerful and one for everybody else. I don’t think voters want a “regular guy” as president; they want someone who is exceptional. But there is a point at which opportunism begins to shade into rapacity.

In making and managing his money, Romney appears to take every possible, conceivable, imaginable inch that the law arguably allows. That’s good finance. But I doubt it’s good politics.

Auto Nostalgia - Lost Brands

Perhaps I'm dating myself, but I find it a bit sad to have seen recently the demise of several auto brands that I grew up with: Oldsmobile, Pontiac and Mercury. Especially the last brand since that is what my parents drove throughout my childhood and teens and it was in Mercury models like the 1966 Monterey "breezeway" pictured at left that I learned to drive (the other was a 1968 Colony Park wagon). Amazingly, the 1966 originally sold for about $2900. By today's standards, they were two ton land yachts, but with five children in the family and SUV's not invented, we needed those huge cars. The New York Times has a piece on Mercury's demise and here are some highlights:
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LAST month was the end of the line for yet another American automotive brand. Assembly plants produced the final vehicles to carry the Mercury nameplate, an unceremonious end for a marque that had been introduced in 1939 as an upscale companion for basic Fords — but more recently allowed to atrophy to little more than a selection of lightly modified Ford sedans and S.U.V.’s.
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Still, Mercury leaves behind a history peppered with compelling and even innovative cars that at once conveyed a clear message: based on Fords, but better. Depending on the year and the car, better could have meant any combination of bigger, more stylish, more powerful or more luxurious. Pairing Mercury with the Lincoln franchise after World War II underscored the theme of what is today called entry-level luxury.
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From the mid-1960s, full-size Mercurys adopted Lincoln-influenced designs and ran with Ford’s top engines. On TV, the top cop of the original “Hawaii Five-O” series, Steve McGarrett, cracked crimes in a black ’68 Park Lane.
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In 2003, Mercury revived the Marauder moniker for a performance-tuned Grand Marquis, but sold just 11,000 over two years. By then, the boundary between Ford and Mercury vehicles had all but vanished. That line, though, was still clear when Gary Davis he bought a new 1970 Mercury Marauder X-100, a full-size coupe with a 429 cubic-inch V-8, for $5,100. He still owns it.

GOP Lemmings

Eugene Robinson's column in today's Washington Post looks at the mentality - or one might say lack of thought process - of the Senate Republicans who seem hell bent to hasten the demise of the Big Three automakers and the demise of the larger U.S. economy as well. Their motivation? Revenge on the pro-Democrat United Auto Workers' union and helping the foreign owned automakers with plants in their own home states. I'm not necessarily a fan of the UAW, but at some point one needs to put down the Kool-Aid and look at the larger picture of what's going on. True, that's hard for the today's GOP - remember John McCain stating that the economy was fundamentally sound even as the bottom was falling out on Wall Street. The GOP has run the economy into the ground and wildly expanded the national debt , but the Senate Republicans apparently do not believe they have yet wrought sufficient financial destruction. Here are some column highlights:

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Despite the popular belief, lemmings don't really hurl themselves off cliffs to reduce their numbers. That sort of behavior is seen only among Republicans in the Senate, who gave us a demonstration when they torpedoed legislation to bail out the auto industry.

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It may be that General Motors, Chrysler and Ford are lumbering, Jurassic beasts that deserve their looming extinction. But only a free-market fundamentalist, a lunatic or a Senate Republican -- perhaps that's redundant -- would conclude that now is the moment to hasten Detroit's demise.

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To recap: We're in the midst of a global financial crisis. The housing bubble has burst and prices have collapsed. The economy has been in recession for a year. Unemployment has risen to 6.7 percent, and if "marginally attached" workers are included -- those who have given up even looking for jobs -- along with those who want to work full time but are forced to accept fewer hours, the rate is 12.5 percent.

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[I]t would be insanity to throw hundreds of thousands of auto company employees, and maybe a few million others in the supply and sales chains, out of work -- leaving them and their families at the mercy of an economy that has no replacement jobs for them. Public funds would end up supporting these people anyway, except that we would have lost our domestic auto industry -- which, despite its many failings, is the only domestic auto industry we've got.

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Some of the most vocal critics of a Detroit bailout -- Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), for example -- happen to have foreign-owned auto plants in their home states. This has led to accusations that they are deliberately trying to sabotage the Big Three to help foreign automakers, but I think it's more likely that they're just being doctrinaire and ultimately self-defeating.

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They have managed to position their party as being against unions, against America's domestic industrial patrimony, against the blue-collar working class -- and also, incredibly, against the Rust Belt states, such as Michigan and Ohio, that are home to UAW-represented auto plants and that also regularly tip the balance of presidential elections.