The opportunity for Equity Specialty Holdings was simple. Its management could invest in insurers that badly needed to cover losses due to 9/11, and reap enormous benefit from the increased fees that the surviving insurance companies could then charge. The results were astounding: “Over the next nine months, the company generated a net income of $63.5 million. By the end of 2003, the company was reporting net income of $263.4 million.â€The Romney family disavows any knowledge or responsibility for this investment, saying that their money is in a blind trust. Famously, Romney dismissed Ted Kennedy’s identical response in 1994, ridiculing…
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This lack of empathy is one of the creepy-chilling things about Romney, and is an insight into the way he would interact with the kinds of people he is not programmed to understand. Romneybot2012 understands “family” to mean man-woman-children. Romneybot2012 has no comprehension of why anyone would choose not to follow this plan, which comes from God and must not be rejected. No matter how they try to make Romney appear to be a warm, caring human being they will never succeed in changing his core program. He’s a political-advantage calculator in Mom Jeans. I’ve read the account of what…
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This excellent quote from President Dwight D. Eisenhower (R-Reality) was buried in the comments of the Daily Kos post on the Medicaid issue gaining traction. It would be very interesting to see either Romney or Ryan squirm while attempting to comment on this. Their rigidly imposed frame of reference prevents them from seeing that the GOP is in danger of becoming just such a negligible, stupid party, if it hasn’t already. The original commenter’s blog is called Condemned To Repeat It “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you…
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I saw this on Digby’s blog and read and re-read it several times today, trying to figure it out. On NBC’s “Meet The Press,†Romney dodged multiple questions about which deductions or credits he’d target, saying only that he’ll get rid of “some of the loopholes and deductions at the high end†while seeking to “lower the burden on middle income people.â€Pressed for one specific example, Romney replied, “Well, the specifics are these which is those principles I described are the heart of my policy.†via Romney Refuses To Offer Details On His Tax Plan | TPM2012 All will become…
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Link: Kim Phillips-Fein for Democracy Journal: The Disappeared
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After seeing a lot of tweets yesterday about Up with Chris Hayes and the Melissa Perry-Harris Show, I finally watched both shows (or most of Up and all of MPH) via TiVo. I’ve never watched political wonk shows before (comedy shows like Jon Stewart and Bill Maher shouldn’t count, but they do), and it was fun! They’re shown Saturday and Sunday mornings and seem to have an enthusiastic fan base that hang out on Twitter under hashtags #uppers and #nerdland respectively. A lot of dumb sex-link spambots and anti-factists hang out too, so I quickly learned who was reality-based and…
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“It’s my belief that this is exactly the time that the American people need to hear from the person who in approximately 40 days will be responsible for dealing with this mess,” Obama said. “It’s going to be part of the president’s job to deal with more than one thing at once.” Link: McCain Suspends Campaign, Shocks Republicans – US News & World Report
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When Carlos Maza, a gay activist who monitors the National Organization for Marriage, the “moderate” anti-gay marriage group (let’s face it, the ANTI-GAY HATE GROUP) went undercover to attend one of their weekend training sessions, he found himself connecting with another attendee in a surprising way. Read the whole thing, it’s like a spy novel except with Leviticus-spouting Religious Right leaders trying to “turn” a roomful of impressionable college students, instead of Communist moles posing as tweed jacketed leather-patched college professors. Yeah, it’s that complicated. Also, take note of some interesting details: Many of the college attendees were from either…
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Take a look at these two pictures. One is from the Plain Dealer article on this story, one is a screencap from Raw Story’s followup. As the miners and their families arrived, they looked like this (some may have been office workers and executives): Amercian coal miners stands with Mitt! Look at how hard they work, in their dirty work clothes and sooty faces! They are obviously real working Amercians! WASHINGTON, D.C. — When GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney visited an Ohio coal mine this month to promote jobs in the coal industry, workers who appeared with him at the…
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This is juicy, if a little opaque to the non-Tweety, non-Bloggy, non-Facebooky clueless unlikely voter. The telling point is that he deleted his Linked In profile rather than answer tricky questions about whether his work for the organization would be part of his professional resume. Hat tip: OsborneInk Team Romney’s Social Media Director, Bill Murphy, is the former Director of the National Bloggers Club, a group under IRS investigation for soliciting donations while falsely claiming to be a non-profit organization. Although NBC filed incorporation papers in January, the organization is still absent from both the IRS and GuideStar charity databases.…