Actually, to buck the trend going on in this thread, I am rather encouraged. Mittens isn't exactly a full blown conservative, so what is you libs' problem with him?
I'm hardly a liberal, but I'd still like to take a stab at this one. My issue with Romney is, well... nobody can seem to really pin him down on what he (actually) is. He claims to be a "severe conservative". Now those are words directly out of the man's mouth. What did that one conservative, Foster Friess, say about Romney at the CPAC convention?
"A liberal, a moderate and a conservative walk into a bar and ask for a drink. The bartender looks up and says, 'so what can I get you Mr. Romney?'" Now, unless someone wants to try to convince me that Foster Friess is a double super secret agent of the vast left wing conspiracy, supporting the pinko missions of George Soros and the MSM, that mud has tended to stick to Romney, no matter how hard he's tried to shake it off. Why can't the man just be honest and say what he actually is... whatever that is? Like I said in another thread, Obama may remind some of Carter, but the more Romney reminds them of Nixon... that dog just don't hunt.
And in addition to Romney being a political chameleon, his economic plan doesn't add up any better (and maybe worse) than Obama's.
Is your problem with him that, though he's not 100% conservative, is that he isn't 100% liberal either?
So... he's like a White, Mormon version of Obama? :dunno:
Is you all's problem with him that he's rich? So's Obama, and the guy in the video above comes from a pretty well to do rich family and he was okay in you all's book.
There is a HUGE gulf between Obama's wealth and Romney's. But no, a man's wealth doesn't matter to me. How he makes it may be a cause of concern though. And to be honest, the fact that Romney's effective tax rate is substantially lower than mine, while his income is substantially higher... yeah, that does stick in my craw just a bit. Him wanting to keep it that way, now
that royally pisses me off!
Is your problem with him that he "outsourced" jobs? Obama sent taxpayer money abroad for stuff like solar panels from Mexico, delivery trucks from Great Britan, and don't forget the Fisker from Finland.
Buying certain products from overseas sources is hardly the same thing as directly outsourcing employment. And as far as what was bought with the stimulus money a couple of years back, if the right wingers and so called "fiscal libertarians" in the Club for Growth weren't such total boot-lickers for the Chinese and others, more would have been bought from U.S. sources. Let's not forget who put up the biggest fight when it came to the Buy America clauses in the stimulus plan.
Is your problem with him that his company, Bain Capital, couldn't keep ALL business open? One word: Solyndra...
Bain is neither
all good nor
all bad... despite how some want to characterize private equity. Although I do my best to avoid working for private equity companies. Privately owned businesses are one thing. But in PE, what they often do is reorganize a division of businesses into separate LLC's. By doing that, they can hold them as legally separate businesses, sell off individual assets and even raid the pension fund of the overall business. And once they sell them off, and they've collected their profits, if the remainder can't be sold, they tend to bankrupt the poorer performing individual LLC's, without harming the ones that they'll allow to limp along. If they bankrupt the remainder of the overall, the underfunded pensions are then picked up by the U.S. taxpayer: Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. And yes, Bain did do this exact thing on more than one occasion. They all do it. And there are other businesses that they pulled out of the fire, operated for a time and then sold later. Some of those worked out just fine. No problem. But they perfected the art of outsourcing. That is just a fact.
I don't avoid working for them because I'm all moral and high & mighty... it's because they have a tendency to not pay people like me if/when things go sour, and then we become creditors of the individual LLC that we did the work for. And as an individual, you are so low on the totem pole and once you pay an attorney to represent you, it's just not worth it. Best just to avoid them altogether, IMO. But if you get lucky and get in with the actual PE company, you can make a damn good living (travel, generous expense account, car, etc.)... as long as getting blood on your hands from time to time doesn't bother you.
As for Solyndra, it is no different than any other private company that's gotten government loans or grants and gone belly-up... except that there may have been some financial improprieties there. Would you like to talk about the $20 billion or so of cash that Bush/Cheney sent to Iraq, and now nobody seems to know where billions of those American taxpayer dollars are? It's so bad that we don't even know how much is missing. Some say it's $6.6 billion and others say it could be as much as $18 billion. But any way you cut it, I'm rather amused that the far right wants to harp about $500 million (still a heck of a lot of money) when they were the ones beating the drum to send $20 billion into Iraq for a pointless nation-building exercise. ... and now most of it seems to be missing.
Oh yeah, while we're talking about nation-building, that's another thing about Romney. Unlike Bush (who at least had the good sense to lie to me to get my vote), Romney doesn't seem to be shy about admitting to his neo-con, nation-building ways. Even now, I would pick up a rifle and fight for this republic if I needed to. But don't ask me to go across the water to fight for somebody else. And don't think that I'll ever vote for anyone who wants to waste my hard earned money on nation-building exercises. As has been said,
NEVER AGAIN!
Is your problem with Mittens that "he's got all the contribution money", that the "fat cat" donors are giving him all the money? Don't forget!! Back in 2008 those same "fat cat" donors gave all the money to Obama, and not a peep was heard from the media in a negative way, but now that the shoe's in the other foot, the media (and from what I've read, some here) is all bitching and moaning that "the rich are all for Romney". Obama OWNED Wall Street back in 2008 but now those same Wall Street guys are having buyer's remorse.
Corporations own them all. The Supreme Court now says that's OK, so I just accept that sad fact.
And Ryan, throwing grandma off the cliff. You guys seem to easy to brainwash. Let the media paint the GOP candidate in a certain way and you guys complety fall for it. Like Palin and Bush, they're so stupid because Saturday Night Live says so, same thing with Ryan, he's so mean and wants to kill old people because TV says so (never mind that it was a Democrat paid ad). Now, am I saying that the media don't vet either of these GOP guys? No, but they should have vetted Obama back in 2008.
Outside of Bloomberg Financial and CNBC, the only other TV that I regularly watch is AMC. So is Romney like Walt or Jesse... or maybe he's like Gus Fring? :dunno: There are those of us who read and watch a variety of sources to arrive at our opinions and conclusions. Just as I would hope those on the right can scoot their chairs away from Fox News and Rush for a few minutes a day to let their brains breathe. I read the original Ryan plan and it quite simply did not add up. The only ones who claimed it did were out of the Heritage Foundation... the same bunch that claimed Bush's tax cuts would lead to a surplus. And how did that one pan out again?
Mittens wasn't my first choice, but, heck, we got a MA Republican and with MA being mostly Democrat, hopefully he'll at least make the election more competitive in his own state than, say a Texas Republican, would have made it, though I'm don't expect him to win there anyway. But generally speaking, this election is his to loose and I am completely sure that the media will do whatever it takes to help him loose it by magnifying any little mistake he makes and ignoring or diminishing any mistakes, whether big or small, that Obama may make.
What can I say? Even as one who voted for W. Bush the first time... to roughly paraphrase Johnny Boehner:
Mittens is a hard dude to like.
He only got the nomination because the other Republicans that stepped into the ring this time were the absolute biggest collection of clown shoes this nation has ever seen at any one time. But I personally plan on being just fine no matter who wins. Whoever the President is will not affect whether I am successful or a failure. The weak kneed people who claimed that the end was here for America and their future, because Obama was President, were
already failures. Those kind of people were the ones who served tea to the British when it looked like they were going to win.
