LGBTQ news and entertainment
This is brilliant.
Watch as Rep. Paul Ryan blame the Obama Administration for the closing of a General Motors plant in Wisconsin. A plant that closed in 2008 before President Obama was elected.
Ryan’s speech is juxtaposed with local news coverage from 2008 as the plant was being shut down.
Seriously. Who gave Paul Ryan these talking points?
Fail.
“There was a disappointment tonight. I was very embarrassed. I was in this parking lot and there was a man looking for a space to park, and I found a space for him. And I felt badly — he looked like he was sort of in distress. And I said, ‘Sir, here’s a place.’ And he said, ‘That’s a handicapped space.’ I said, ‘Oh I’m so sorry, I saw that Obama sticker and I thought you were mentally retarded.” – Pennsylvania Allegheny County GOP Chairman Jim Roddey, speaking last night at a Romney fundraiser. The crowd roared.
Via JoeMyGod
The Romney campaign ratcheted up its language on Tuesday in a conference call on which former New Hampshire governor and White House chief of staff John Sununu said he wished President Obama “would learn how to be an American.”
“The president clearly demonstrated that he has absolutely no idea how the American economy functions. The men and women all over America who have worked hard to build these businesses, their businesses from the ground up is how our economy became the envy of the world — it is the American way,” Sununu said in his opening remarks of the conference call.
He added: “I wish this president would learn how to be an American.”
The first question to Sununu later in the call was about that comment, which exploded quickly on Twitter for its stark claim about Obama.
“What I thought I said, but I guess I didn’t say, is that the president has to learn the American formula for creating business,” he said. “If I didn’t give all that detail I apologize.”
The Obama campaign’s Lis Smith said that Sununu’s rhetoric represented that the Romney campaign had grown desperate.
“The Romney campaign has officially gone off the deep end,” she said. “The question is what else they’ll pull to avoid answering serious questions about Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital and investments in foreign tax havens and offshore accounts. This meltdown and over-the-top rhetoric won’t make things better — it only calls attention to how desperate they are to change the conversation.”
Regardless of the walk-back, the tone of the call was consistently negative — and harshly so — with Sununu and the four small businesspeople on the call ripping the president’s policies, background and campaign tactics.
Mitt Romney adviser Ed Gillespie said Sunday that the candidate “retired retroactively” from his job at Bain Capital, which Romney maintains that he left in 1999 despite evidence suggesting he remained involved with the company until 2002.
Gillespie said Romney may have been listed as “part-time” after 1999, but that he had no role in the firm’s day-to-day affairs, a point the campaign has attempted to make repeatedly in order to separate him from Bain’s activity related to outsourcing during that period. Romney has said he left the company completely in 1999 when he started working to plan the 2002 Winter Olympics.
“There may have been a thought at the time that [Romney’s Bain work] could be part-time. It was not part-time. The Olympics was in a shambles,” Gillespie told Candy Crowley on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“He took a leave of absence and in fact, Candy, ended up not going back at all and retired retroactively to February 1999 as a result,” Gillespie said.
Romney’s involvement at Bain came under renewed scrutiny last week after additional reports surfaced revealing that he was listed as the CEO, president and chairman of the firm long after he had previously stated. He has insisted that he had nothing to do with Bain after 1999 in response to questions about its activities at the time, including investing in companies that sent jobs overseas.
Mitt Romney appeared on Fox & Friends Monday morning to respond to the growing number of conservatives who are calling on the former Massachusetts governor to release more of his tax returns.
At least eight Republicans have urged Romney to publicize the records and put the issue behind him, but the candidate is sticking to his guns. The public will see just two years of returns and no more, Romney said, before appearing to admit that the records may contain something politically damaging:
ROMNEY: The Obama people keep on wanting more and more and more. More things to pick through, more things for their opposition research to try make a mountain out of and to distort and to be dishonest about. We’re going to put out two years of tax returns.
Republicans are also raising alarms about Romney’s returns. “The fact is, there are a couple of years he may not have paid any taxes,” MSNBC host and former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough predicted during Monday’s Morning Joe. “Maybe he’s concerned about that. But if it’s going to come out, he needs to get it out now so he has a couple of months to explain it.”
Via ThinkProgress
The answer is Mitt Romney knows his tax returns show how he used the system – albeit legally – to avoid paying fair tax rates the way middle-class Americans do.
He will look out of touch with most Americans by using tax shelters that really only apply to the super rich.
His campaign says Romney paid the same taxes whether his money was in Switzerland or the US. If that’s true, then why did he deposit his money in Swiss accounts and the Caymans?
Things that make you go “hmm…”
Ignoring a federal judge’s injunction, Scranton, Pennsylvania moved ahead with its plan to reduce the pay of city workers to the federal minimum wage starting Friday. Scranton Mayor Chris Doherty claims the city is broke and that the minimum wage payments are all it can possibly pay, the Scranton Times Tribune reports:
Amid Scranton’s ever-deepening financial crisis, Mayor Chris Doherty said his administration is going forward with a plan to unilaterally slash the pay of 398 workers to the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour with today’s payroll, insisting it is all the city can afford.
That will likely earn administration officials an appointment with Judge Michael Barrasse, who granted the city’s police, fire and public works unions a special injunction temporarily barring the administration from imposing the pay cuts after a brief hearing Thursday.
With local budgets slammed since the Great Recession. Congressional Republicans repeatedly blocked efforts to extend aid to the states that would have helped shore up their budgets and keep these workers on payroll. In the case of Scranton, such aid may have helped the city actually pay its workers a living wage instead of a federal minimum that hasn’t been raised since 2006 and has less buying power than it had in 1968.