Romney is the sleaziest piece of shit to ever try getting into the whitehouse

[Ricter]

"Mitt Romney Started Bain Capital With Money From Families Tied To Death Squads

"In 1983, Bill Bain asked Mitt Romney to launch Bain Capital, a private equity offshoot of the successful consulting firm Bain & Company. After some initial reluctance, Romney agreed. The new job came with a stipulation: Romney couldn't raise money from any current clients, Bain said, because if the private equity venture failed, he didn't want it taking the consulting firm down with it.

"When Romney struggled to raise funds from other traditional sources, he and his partners started thinking outside the box. Bain executive Harry Strachan suggested that Romney meet with a group of Central American oligarchs who were looking for new investment vehicles as turmoil engulfed their region."

More...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/08/mitt-romney-death-squads-bain_n_1710133.html

 

[Free Thinker]

yea, but hes not black.

 

[wildchild]

LOL

 

[Tsing Tao]

From one of the comments on the Huff and Puff website:

"The more we find out about Romney, the uglier it gets. No wonder Romney wants to hide everything from the public. "

While true if the article is accurate (and I have no idea if it really is or is a whole bunch of stuff out of context) but I find it odd that the only difference between Mitt and Obama is that we find out this stuff before the election for Mitt, but after it with Obama.

 

[Lucrum]

"Romney is the sleaziest piece of shit to ever try getting into the whitehouse"

NOBODY could be worse than the sleazy piece of shit we have in The White House now.

 

[Ricter]

"...a new Romney commercial was released on Tuesday that contained a grotesquely misleading statement. The video falsely claims the president tried to “gut” President Clinton’s welfare reform legislation from 1996.

"Big-time lie. (You can watch the entire video on YouTube, but if you don’t want to torture yourself with the deluge of crackpot Rove-style lies and propaganda then stick with me here.)

"The commercial narration, ostensibly approved by Romney himself, says, “On July 12th, President Obama quietly announced a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements.” Wrong, wrong, wrong. No gutting, no dropping of the work requirement. In fact, a long list of Republican governors wanted to do more than what the president and Health & Human Services has actually allowed. We’ll get back to that presently.

"What did the administration do? HHS authorized state governments to experiment with new ways of expediting welfare recipients (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program) back into the workforce; specifically, as the HHS website reports, to “test alternative and innovative strategies, policies, and procedures that are designed to improve employment outcomes for needy families.”

"Full stop. That’s all. Nothing more. Even the most bizarre left-field Orwellian use of the word “gut” wouldn’t apply here.

"Furthermore, in 2005, a letter signed by 28 Republican governors requested far more extensive leeway with the program. 28 Republican governors, including conservative sacred cows like Rick Perry, Mark Sanford, Jeb Bush, Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels and Mike Huckabee, requested “increased waiver authority, allowable work activities, availability of partial work credit and the ability to coordinate state programs are all important aspects of moving recipients from welfare to work.”

"And in keeping with everything we know about Mitt Romney and his ongoing strategy of attacking the president for things Romney himself once supported — yes, then-Governor Romney also signed the letter.

"So no — the president hasn’t gutted welfare reform, at least if you go by the Republican standard, which was a request for considerably more leeway than anything the administration has done. Another massive Romney lie.

"Are you noticing a pattern here? On various occasions, the president has acted like the grown-up in the room and acquiesced to several Republican policy demands and, again and again, the Republicans have attacked him for the policies that they themselves requested and, in some cases, invented. Do the list. The individual mandate for health insurance, cap and trade, all-of-the-above energy policy and now this.

"See, the Romney campaign and GOP leadership understand the far-right Republican base. They know the base doesn’t care about (or can’t remember) anything that happened prior to January 20, 2009. They know that fact-checking will come too late. They know that right-wing voters will repeat any and all lies simply because they’re wildly desperate to get rid of the African-American liberal with the exotic non-presidential name in the White House.

"Speaking of which, if you think the welfare line of attack is a racial dog-whistle, you’re goddamn right. Republicans only ever bring up perceived Democratic weakness on welfare when they’re trying to motivate the angry, resentful white base. So this particular commercial combines a whopper lie about the president’s record with some bonus Southern Strategy politics as the gravy."

Bob Cesca, August 08,2012

 

[JamesL]

Morning Bell: Obama Denies Gutting Welfare Reform

The Obama Administration came out swinging against its critics on welfare reform yesterday, with Press Secretary Jay Carney saying the charge that the Administration gutted the successful 1996 reform’s work requirements is “categorically false” and “blatantly dishonest.” Even former President Bill Clinton, who signed the reform into law, came out parroting the Obama team’s talking points and saying the charge was “not true.”

The Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector and Kiki Bradley first broke the story on July 12 that Obama’s Health and Human Services Department (HHS) had rewritten the Clinton-era reform to undo the work requirements, in a move that legal experts Todd Gaziano and Robert Alt determined was patently illegal.

The Administration’s new argument has two parts: denying the Obama Administration’s actions and claiming that Republican governors, including Mitt Romney, tried to do the same thing. In essence, “We did not do what you’re saying, but even if we did, some Republicans did it, too.” Both parts of this argument are easily debunked.

Obama Administration Claim #1: We Didn’t Gut Work Requirements

Ever since the 1996 law passed, Democratic leaders have attempted (unsuccessfully) to repeal welfare’s work standards, blocking reauthorization of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) and attempting to weaken the requirements. Unable to eliminate “workfare” legislatively, the Obama HHS claimed authority to grant waivers that allow states to get around the work requirements.

Humorously, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius now asserts that the Administration abolished the TANF work requirements to increase work.
HHS now claims that states receiving a waiver must “commit that their proposals will move at least 20 percent more people from welfare to work compared to the state’s prior performance.” But given the normal turnover rate in welfare programs, the easiest way to increase the number of people moving from “welfare to work” is to increase the number entering welfare in the first place.

Bogus statistical ploys like these were the norm before the 1996 reform. The law curtailed use of sham measures of success and established meaningful standards: Participating in work activities meant actual work activities, not “bed rest” or “reading” or doing one hour of job search per month; reducing welfare dependence meant reducing caseloads. Now those standards are gone.

Obama’s HHS claims authority to overhaul every aspect of the TANF work provisions (contained in section 407), including “definitions of work activities and engagement, specified limitations, verification procedures and the calculation of participation rates.” In other words, the whole work program. Sebelius’s HHS bureaucracy declared the existing TANF law a blank slate on which it can design any policy it chooses.

Obama Administration Claim #2: Even If We Did, the Republicans Tried It, Too

Though the Obama Administration is claiming it is not trying to get around the work requirements, it is also claiming that a group of Republican governors tried to do the same thing in 2005. Clinton also said in his statement yesterday that “the recently announced waiver policy was originally requested” by Republican governors.

Heritage welfare expert Robert Rector addressed this claim back on July 19. As Rector explains:

But [the governors'] letter makes no mention at all of waiving work requirements under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. In fact, the legislation promoted in the letter—the Personal Responsibility and Individual Development for Everyone (PRIDE) Act—actually would have toughened the federal work standards. It proposed raising the mandatory participation rates imposed on states from 50 percent to 70 percent of the adult TANF caseload and increasing the hours of required work activity.

The governors’ letter actually contradicts the Administration’s main argument: If the law has always permitted HHS to waive the work requirements, then why didn’t the governors just request waivers from then-President George W. Bush? Why would legislation be needed?

Two reasons: First, it has been clear for 15 years that the TANF law did not permit HHS to waive the work requirements. Second, the Republican governors were not seeking to waive the work requirements in the first place.

Obama’s Evolution from Welfare to Work and Back

President Obama had a convenient change of heart regarding welfare reform when it was time to run for President. In 1998, when he was an Illinois state senator, Obama said:

I was not a huge supporter of the federal plan that was signed in 1996. Having said that, I do think that there is a potential political opportunity that arose out of welfare reform. And that is to desegregate the welfare population—meaning the undeserving poor, black folks in cities, from the working poor—deserving, white, rural as well as suburban.

The same year, he reiterated that “the 1996 legislation I did not entirely agree with and probably would have voted against at the federal level.”
But in 2008, when he was running for President, Obama said he had changed his mind about welfare reform: “I was much more concerned 10 years ago when President Clinton initially signed the bill that this could have disastrous results….It had—it worked better than, I think, a lot of people anticipated. And, you know, one of the things that I am absolutely convinced of is that we have to work as a centerpiece of any social policy.”
One of his 2008 campaign ads touted “the Obama record: moved people from welfare to work” and promised that as President, he would “never forget the dignity that comes from work.”

This evolution is unsurprising, considering the vast majority of Americans favor requiring welfare recipients to work.

President Obama has finally accomplished what Democrats have been trying to do for years. He has even gotten President Clinton to turn his back on one of the signature achievements of his Administration to give him political cover—which Clinton was quick to do. In 1996, Clinton had to compromise and allow the tough work requirements to get the legislation passed.

Both Presidents have now revealed their true feelings about welfare—and there’s no denying it.





The only one's hearing dog whistles are Bo and Obama's every faithful collection of lap dogs.

 

[lindq]

Quote from Lucrum:


NOBODY could be worse than the sleazy piece of shit we have in The White House now.

Gosh, you mean you don't like the 'Change we can believe in'?

 

[Lucrum]

Quote from lindq:

Gosh, you mean you don't like the 'Change we can believe in'?

Nope, don't care for being lied to either. It's probably just me though.

 

[Mav88]

Honestly don't know how you get sleazier than the Clintons. The white house still has their stench.