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Title: Who Are You Mitt?
Source:
YouTube
URL Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIeekoQfqVU
Published: Jun 20, 2011
Author: RinoMitt
Post Date: 2011-11-18 04:05:58 by GreyLmist
Keywords: Mitt Romney, RINO
Views: 304
Comments: 28
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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 15.
#1. To: All (#0)
4um thread: Mitt Romney Not Eligible?
Thanks for stopping by. Am recommending this article on Gingrich: 27 Reasons Why Newt Gingrich Would Be A Really, Really Bad President On Romney, aside from the natural born citizen issue (linked in the opening post above) per his eligibility for the Presidency, Democrats questioned his eligibility to run for Governor of Massachusettes because of State residency issues. He was a one-term Governor whose Health Care interests may have been intertwined with his business ventures in the Medical sector. Flagging Original_Intent to that data here and here. The first link notes his reputation as a "turnaround artist", which is overly polite shorthand for cheap buyouts of debt-ridden companies and layoffs. Am posting a list of several more links in the next post, with particular attention to the Clear Channel takeover by the company Romney co-founded, Bain Capital, as it pertains to rigged campaign coverage by the media. Edited last sentence.
cbsnews.com - MoneyWatch: How Mitt Romney Is to Blame for Hundreds of Layoffs at Clear Channel Radio, October 28, 2011 That debt came from the financing of a buyout of Clear Channel back in 2006. At the time, Clear Channel was also a healthy functioning business -- it had just $8 billion in debt, and saw net income -- real profits after interest payments - - of $691 million for the year on growing revenues of $7 billion. But that just wasn't good enough for the folks at Bain Capital Partners, the private equity group. Bain and its partners bought Clear Channel at that time, but the buyout loaded the company with roughly $12 billion in more debts -- which still isn't paid off. The debts are so large they threaten the future of the company. About $1 billion in Clear Channel's debt comes due in 2014, and another $10.4 billion comes due in 2016. ____________ Bain Capital's Romney aiming for politics after Olympics, Date: Thursday, August 23, 2001 Before taking the Olympics job, Romney previously interrupted his business career in 1994 for a failed bid as Republican challenger to Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy. Mitt Romney Buys Clear Channel, Posted on Tuesday, December 11, 2007 Romney's Bain Capital Buys Clear Channel Communications, First Posted: 12-14-07 | Updated: 03-28-08 Mitt Romney's VC [Venture Capital] Firm to Buy Clear Channel, December 14, 2007 Clear Channel owns more than 1,100 full-power AM, FM, and shortwave radio stations, twelve radio channels on XM Satellite Radio, and more than 30 television stations in the United States. Premiere Radio Networks, which is the largest syndication company in the United States, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Clear Channel and is home to Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and many others. Sean Hannity recently signed a large multi-market contract with Clear Channel, as well. From an anonymous email: It should be noted that Mitt Romney, while no longer the CEO, remains a silent partner of Bain Capital. Romney, Beck, Limbaugh and Clear Channel Communications -- undated article Clear Channel is no stranger to shilling for Republican Neo-cons and their causes: "The Clear Channel's activities go beyond radio. In March 2003, its affiliate stations throughout the United States organized pro-war rallies, under the name of Rally for America, to coincide with the Bush administration's launch of war with Iraq. [Am noting here that Romney was a Pro- Vietnam War activist but got a student-deferment, then a draft-deferral from the Mormon church to work in France as a Missionary instead of going to the War he supported and hawked for others, "then got another student deferment.[23] [31] When those ran out, his high number in the December 1969 draft lottery (300) meant he would not be selected.[11][23][31][32]" Ref.] Largest private equity firms -- Bain Capital 7th of 50 for 2011 How complete are this candidate's campaign finance reports? [for the 2008 election cycle] Incomplete $562,014 No Disclosure $4,688,195
The Romney Economy - New York Magazine, 7 page article Page 1 photo: Mitt Romney and the 1% Economy Page 4 photo: Romney, center, and six other founding members of Bain Capital, in an outtake of their photo shoot for a 1984 brochure that surfaced this month. Short summary of Page 6 + excerpts: "all these uninsured people clog the ER," complained Dr. Slavin. The Staples office-supplies chain founder, Tom Stemberg, then fields the slavish-sounding but elitist-centric grumble to gov-Mitt and -- boddaboom-boddabing -- the poor "clogs" are muscled into a costly "Romneycare fix" to financially support the Medical/Insurance Complex. Stemberg served then (as now) on the president’s council of Massachusetts General Hospital, and he remembered a conversation he’d had with a doctor named Peter Slavin, who has been the chief executive of that hospital system for most of the last decade. “[Slavin] mentioned this huge problem,” Stemberg told me, “which is all these uninsured people clog the ER.” The hospital had to treat them. “There was a law that said that all the insurance companies had to fund the free care. That system made absolutely no sense. “It was, as Stemberg told Romney, “the least efficient way to serve them.” The conversation moved on, and Stemberg figured his ten-minute-long career as a policy maven was over. “I figured that’s the end of that.” But Romney’s staffers, consulting with experts, began to work out a fix, requiring almost every citizen in the state to carry insurance, and providing subsidies for those who couldn’t afford it. Eventually he was heading down to Ted Kennedy’s office in Washington to explain the program, PowerPoints in hand. Three and a half years later, Romney introduced his universal-health-care plan, and in the press he credited Stemberg with suggesting it. Continued on Page 7: But what separates Romney’s plan from Obama’s—and gives some clues about his potential presidency—is its almost-accidental origin. Romney did not begin with a philosophical quest to improve American health care. He began with the idea of himself as a problem solver and asked those around him for a problem that he might usefully solve. I remembered, when I was told this story, an anecdote I’d heard from a former political staffer of Romney’s. On even basic philosophical questions like abortion, the staffer said, Romney did not try to resolve the question in the abstract, as a matter of principle, and would consider instead various hypothetical cases—for instance, a late-term abortion—and build from them a politics. The line that Romney is a flip-flopper may vastly understate the depth of the condition.
Yahoo! News: Romney staff spent nearly $100,000 to hide records By Mark Hosenball | Reuters – Tue, Dec 6, 2011 The move during the final weeks of Romney's administration was legal but unusual for a departing governor, Massachusetts officials say. The effort to purge the records was made a few months before Romney launched an unsuccessful campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. He is again competing for the party's nomination, this time to challenge Barack Obama for the presidency in 2012. Five weeks before the first contests in Iowa, Romney has seen his position as frontrunner among Republican presidential candidates whittled away in the polls as rival Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, has gained ground. When Romney left the governorship of Massachusetts, 11 of his aides bought the hard drives of their state-issued computers to keep for themselves. Also before he left office, the governor's staff had emails and other electronic communications by Romney's administration wiped from state servers, state officials say. Those actions erased much of the internal documentation of Romney's four-year tenure as governor, which ended in January 2007. Precisely what information was erased is unclear. Republican and Democratic opponents of Romney say the scrubbing of emails - and a claim by Romney that paper records of his governorship are not subject to public disclosure - hinder efforts to assess his performance as a politician and elected official. As Massachusetts governor, Romney worked with a Democrat-led state house to close a budget shortfall and signed a healthcare overhaul that required nearly all state residents to buy insurance or face penalties. Massachusetts' healthcare law became a model for Obama's nationwide healthcare program, enacted into law in 2010. As a presidential candidate, however, Romney has criticized Obama's plan as an overreach by the federal government. Massachusetts officials say they have no basis to believe that Romney's staff violated any state laws or policies in removing his administration's records. They acknowledge, however, that state law on maintaining and disclosing official records is vague and has not been updated to deal with issues related to digital records and other modern technology. BUYING UP HARD DRIVES Romney's spokesmen emphasize that he followed the law and precedent in deleting the emails, installing new computers in the governor's office and buying up hard drives. However, Theresa Dolan, former director of administration for the governor's office, told Reuters that Romney's efforts to control or wipe out records from his governorship were unprecedented. Dolan said that in her 23 years as an aide to successive governors "no one had ever inquired about, or expressed the desire" to purchase their computer hard drives before Romney's tenure. The cleanup of records by Romney's staff before his term ended included spending $205,000 for a three-year lease on new computers for the governor's office, according to official documents and state officials. In signing the lease, Romney aides broke an earlier three-year lease that provided the same number of computers for about half the cost - $108,000. Lease documents obtained by Reuters under the state's freedom of information law indicate that the broken lease still had 18 months to run. As a result of the change in leases, the cost to the state for computers in the governor's office was an additional $97,000. [sic] State officials and a longtime Romney adviser have acknowledged that before leaving office, Romney asked state archives officials for permission to destroy certain paper records. It is unclear whether his office notified anyone from the state before destroying electronic records. Officials have said the details of Romney's request to remove paper records, such as what specific documents he wanted to destroy, could be made public only in response to a request under the state's freedom of information law. Reuters has filed such a request. (Reporting by Mark Hosenball; editing by David Lindsey and David Storey) Egads, that's alotsa "privatization" expenditures for the Massachusettes taxpayers to closeout a one-term Governorship on account of his copy-catting Clinton and Bush's bad-management examples on "State Secrecy Priviliges" per the whimsy of Executives. Interesting comments at the site. Can America afford such extravagant indulgences for the "WAAAH! Street" types (as the mo'money demanding 1%-ers have been dubbed) who wannabe jockeying for elevation to the office of President here? I think not. Edited for spelling.
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#11. To: noone222, abraxas, farmfriend, X-15, Original_Intent, All (#1)
(Edited)
Gingrich is a big time Washington insider who believes in individual health care mandates, who supported the bailouts, who was instrumental in cramming NAFTA down the throats of the American people and who is either soft or wrong on just about every single issue that conservatives care about.
#13. To: All (#11)
As a business, Clear Channel is doing quite well. It made revenue of $1.6 billion in Q2 2011, up from $1.5 billion the year before. It showed an operating profit of $311 million, from stations such as KTU in New York and KIIS FM in Los Angeles. Clear Channel's problem is that is also had a quarterly interest payments of $359 million -- more than its operating profits. That interest is being paid on a staggering $20 billion in debt.
Romney, 54, is giving up his 100 percent control of Bain Capital to 26 managing directors. The firm has made 170 venture and buyout investments in companies like pizza delivery chain Domino's Pizza Inc., brokerage Datek Online Holdings Corp. and retailers Staples Inc. and the Sports Authority Inc.,
this disturbing nugget on the 2008 Presidential race: Clearchannel just recently went up for auction. Mitt Romney's Bain Capital bought it along with Thomas H Lee Partners
Ed. Note -- The original story we posted on this topic inferred that Bain Capital had recently purchased Clear Channel Communications. That is not true. The transaction took place in November of 2006. The facts remain that Bain earns a share of Clear Channel's profits and that Mitt Romney, while a retired partner, still earns money from the private equity firm.
What would it cost to buy the support of just about every nationally syndicated neocon talk show host in America? About $19.5 billion, which is what Mitt Romney's private equity firm, Bain Capital, and Thomas H. Lee Partners have agreed to pay in a leveraged buyout agreement with Clear Channel Communications, the largest radio station owner in the country. This is part of a negotiation that has been pending for over a year.
"I'll bet those hosts won't reveal that conflict of interest, but it's worth noting when you hear them begin hyping Romney, which has already begun. A lot of GOP supporters will support whomever they are told to support, so be prepared for a big push for Romney. [sic] Rich men can bankroll their own campaigns (a la John Kerry), but it takes a special breed to use investors' money to buy entire networks that can operate as passive wings of a presidential campaign."
Clear Channel Communications was bought out by a partnership between Bain Capital and Thomas Lee Partners. (Source) Bain Capital manages $67 Billion in assets, Lee Partners has about 10 billion in its investment fund. [sic] Mitt Romney was the founder of Bain and is still a major stockholder in the company.
Romney's Clear Channel Communications is actually doing more than its part to help Democrats maintain their majority in Congress this election cycle. Donating twice as much to Democrats in the House as Republicans. In fact, they donated to many of the Democrats that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck name and shame. (Source)
Full Disclosure $52,094,882
#14. To: All (#13)
When Romney was elected governor of Massachusetts in 2002, one of the members of his transition team was Tom Stemberg, the founder of Staples. The two men were talking one day, and Romney asked Stemberg if he had any ideas for how he ought to govern. Stemberg, thinking off the top of his head, had two ideas. “One was to blow up Logan airport and start over.” That didn’t make it far. The other one did.
The punch line, of course—the punch line to Romney’s campaign so far—is that the plan he built was an almost exact model for Obama’s national plan, designed by some of the same experts.
#15. To: All (#14)
(Edited)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Mitt Romney spent nearly $100,000 in state funds to replace computers in his office at the end of his term as governor of Massachusetts in 2007 as part of an unprecedented effort to keep his records secret, Reuters has learned.
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