LGBTQ news and entertainment
Emergency room treatment is expensive and isn’t free. Taxpayers pay for it.
The Affordable Care Act asks that folks who can afford to at least pay for some kind of catastrophic care insurance. I thought conservatives liked the idea of people being responsible for themselves?
And then there’s the flip flop on this issue by Romney. He really is good at contradicting himself. It’s not rhetoric anymore. It’s habit.
“When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem. So it’s very dangerous. And she was choking and rubbing her eyes. Fortunately, there was enough oxygen for the pilot and copilot to make a safe landing in Denver. But she’s safe and sound.” – Mitt Romney, telling a fundraiser crowd about Ann’s Friday flight that was diverted due to smoke in the cabin.
Twitter, of course, is loving the whole thing:
Folks can defend him all they like, but it really does raise some eyebrows when you realize that:
But Mitt Romney only releases 2 full years of tax returns.
Don’t you wonder why? Legal or not, what could he be hiding? And seriously, compared with all those other Presidents, doesn’t it seem strange?
“Whether someone punches you in the nose because they really hate you, or they punch you in the nose because they want to impress people who hate you, you still have a broken goddamn nose.”
Mitt Romney released his 2011 tax return today. Releasing information on a Friday afternoon is traditionally a way to reduce the amount of media exposure.
Trustee Brad Malt writes: In advance of the posting of these new documents, I wanted to provide some top-line details. Regarding the newly-filed 2011 Tax Return:
The Romneys’ generous charitable donations in 2011 could have further reduced their tax obligation for the year. However, the Romneys decided to limit their deduction of charitable contributions so to “fit” the Governor’s statement in August, based upon the January estimate of income, that he paid at least 13% in income taxes in each of the last 10 years.
Had the Romney’s actually taken the legal deductions available to them, they would have paid an effective tax rate of 9%.
Now, at a time when Mitt Romney is criticizing Americans for not paying their share of taxes, how would it look for Mitt to only pay 9%?
Yeah, he thought so too. And so, he chose to NOT take a deduction so that his tax rate would be in line with the figure he had previously stated.
By the way – it’s worth noting that even though Mitt Romney paid more than he needed to (about $200,000), he has the right to go back and amend his tax return for three years and take that full tax deduction.
I’m betting that should he lose this election, that’s exactly what he’ll do.
The information was released in a blog post, written by the manager of Romney’s blind trust since 2003, R. Bradford Malt, which said the Romneys had filed their 2011 tax return with the IRS Friday morning. It also indicated that the Romneys’ tax preparer, PricewaterhouseCoopers, would provide a letter summarizing the tax rates that the Romneys paid from 1990 to 2009.
According to Malt, the Romneys paid an average annual effective federal tax rate of 20.2 percent, with the lowest rate coming in at 13.66 percent. Over that same stretch of time, they gave an average of 13.45 percent of their adjusted gross income to charity.
“The Romneys’ generous charitable donations in 2011 would have significantly reduced their tax obligation for the year. The Romneys thus limited their deduction of charitable contributions to conform to the Governor’s statement in August, based upon the January estimate of income, that he paid at least 13% in income taxes in each of the last 10 years,” Malt wrote.
President Obama leads Mitt Romney in a new poll of 12 key swing states. This is the news that counts, kids.
Obama leads 49 percent to 44 percent in the poll from Purple Strategies.
The poll is a combined sample of likely voters in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, and also shows good news for Obama in over-sampled results for Ohio, Virginia, Florida and Colorado. Last month’s Purple Poll showed Romney with a slight edge in swing states, 47 percent to Obama’s 46 percent.
“One important change in the latest numbers: President Obama now leads among independents,” in the states surveyed, Purple pollsters wrote. It’s the first time Obama has led independent swing-state voters in seven months, the pollsters wrote.
TMZ has the scoop:
TMZ has learned Mitt Romney’s son Tagg — who had twins this year through a surrogate — signed an agreement that gave the surrogate, as well as Tagg and his wife, the right to abort the fetuses in non-life threatening situations … and Mitt Romney covered some of the expenses connected with the arrangement.”
From Paragraph 13 of the agreement:
“In the event the child is determined to be physiologically, genetically or chromosomally abnormal, the decision to abort or not to abort is to be made by the intended parents. In such a case the surrogate agrees to abort, or not to abort, in accordance with the intended parents’ decision.”
And there’s another relevant provision in Paragraph 13:
“Any decision to abort because of potential harm to the child, or to reduce the number of fetuses, is to be made by the intended parents.”
Tagg Romney chose the same surrogate in 2009, and apparently that agreement did not have this clause.
Tagg Romney’s lawyer says it was a careless mistake.