This year we have the strange situation of an obvious GOP loser picking another obvious GOP loser as his running mate long before the GOP convention has a chance to declare them the official losers, so here's our one chance to honor Ted and Carly with an Veepstakes anagram of their own.
Congratulations. May your Crazy Rancid Life Tour run forever.
Mitt Romney recently tried to play this deus ex machina role for the Republican Party's current trumpsterfuck of a primary season, but the GOP is going to need something a little more Zeus than machine to solve their Donald problem.
Maybe Mitt should have channeled his inner Shakespearean Jupiter before dashing back to his beach house with the car elevators:
No more, you petty spirits of region low, Offend our hearing; hush! How dare you ghosts Accuse the thunderer, whose bolt, you know, Sky-planted batters all rebelling coasts?
[The dictionary entry photographed above is from The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, Unabridged, 1987.]
As long as taxes, their routine avoidance by rich American businessmen, and hidden tax returns are back in the news, this quotation from the Gospel of Mark seemed to be the appropriate True Blue Liberal bible lesson for the day.
Mark 11:13 And they send unto him certaine of the Pharises, and of the Herodians, to catch him in his words. 14 And when they were come, they say unto him, Master, we know that thou art true, and carest for no man : for thou regardest not the person of men, but teachest the way of God in truth. Is it lawfull to give tribute to Cesar, or not?
15 Shall we give, or shall we not give? But he knowing their hypocrisie, said unto them, Why tempt yee mee? Bring me a penny, that I may see it.
16 And they brought it : and he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? And they said unto him, Cesars.
17 And Jesus answering, said unto them, Render to Cesar the things that are Cesars : and to God the things that are Gods. And they marvailed at him.
"We have good reason to believe that there's a bombshell in Donald Trump's taxes [...] I think there's something there. Either he's not anywhere near as wealthy as he says he is, or he hasn't been paying the kind of taxes we would expect him to pay. Or perhaps he hasn't been giving money to the vets or the disabled, like he's been telling us he's been doing."
You don't need an essay from me on irony, do you? All I want to add is to suggest that you review some of the many classic 2012 installments in the #MittsMissingReturns saga that appeared here on True Blue Liberal Dot Org:
Jimmy Carter's cancer news this week got me thinking about his stellar post-Presidential life of service, which led me to muse about some of the less admirable roles played by recent ex-Presidential candidates (especially from the Republican Party). I knew that Mitt Romney's wealth had insulated him from the financial need host a Fox News show or sell boner pills or reverse mortgages, but I didn't know much about the Solamere Capital group he had formed with his son Tagg, so I visited and found the following three-page white on white on white website.
Shield your eyes.
You've been warned.
The complete home page featuring a white wall and
empty white desk on an empty white background.
The "About Us" mission statement highlighting nepotism and backscratching.
The White Leadership Team.
That's it. That, except for a disclaimer, is the entire website.
“Tomorrow, we begin a new tomorrow. Tomorrow, we begin a better tomorrow. This nation is going to begin to change for the better tomorrow. … We can begin a better tomorrow tomorrow, and with the help of the people in Florida, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.” -- Mitt Romney, yesterday in Sanford, Florida (not in coordination with Stephen Colbert or Colbert's "Americans for a Better Tomorrow Tomorrow" Super PAC)
"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day
to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have
lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a
walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the
stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of
sound and fury, Signifying nothing." --William Shakespeare, The Scottish Play
Here's another essential video from Hurricane Sandy. I'm sure that we'd be doing much better if we had Mitt Romney's privatized Federal Emergency Management Agency working on a profit motive starting the clean-up later this week, wouldn't we?
This performance from a (pre-Etch-a-Sketch) man who would be President took place at one of the early Clown Circus performances in New Hampshire on June 13, 2011.
This asshole has been on our television sets for much too long. The American voters cannot be stupid enough to keep him in the public eye for four more years, can they?
I'm sitting at home with my office and mass transit closed in advance of Hurricane Sandy's arrival in the New York area later today. I haven't had any trees come down on my power or cable lines yet, so I have the opportunity to watch a lot of daytime television, with non-stop storm updates on WABC, WNBC, and WCBS. There are the predictable number of weatherpeople in suits predicting storm tracks in front of satellite maps and field reporters in raincoats standing on boardwalks in Long Beach, NY and Long Branch, NJ, but the number of mentions of the possible role of climate change in relation to these storms I've heard is the same as the number of mentions of climate change I heard during the Presidential debates: Zero.
Both sides need to be criticized for sacrificing the environment on the altar of low gas prices, but no one (especially those soon to be affected by record storm surges) should forget how one of the candidates milked sea level rise for laughs during his convention speech:
Worse than the words are the way that Mitt Romney waits for the laughs and jeers from his audience of well-heeled white "Job Creators" (one of whom may be the next crony looking for a cushy job running FEMA, or dismantling the EPA, in a Romney administration).
Donald Trump's "major announcement" has been the subject of twittering speculation this week, and now he's announced his major announcement on YouTube and Facebook. If you can't stand his voice, the gist of the following video is basically this: If President Obama releases all of his college applications and records and passport applications and records by October 31, America's self-anointed Birtherist-in-Chief Donald J. Trump will donate $5 million dollars to a charity of the President's choice.
Of course this is as meaningless -- and as racist -- as the campaign for the "long-form birth certificate."
How much is Donald Trump offering to Willard "Mitt" Romney to release as many years of tax returns as Barack Obama has released? What if The Donald offers Willard one million for one year? He won't. And we won't even see 2009, let alone any tax returns from any of Mitt's years in the private sector.
The press is playing dead and it's obvious that the richest man to ever run for the Presidency is going to give us the least financial information, even though his financial expertise is supposedly his main qualification for the office (Slogan: "Elect Me for My Business Experience, but My Business Experience Is None of Your Business."). Maybe Mitt's plan involves cheating America back to prosperity.
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Review this past list of installments in the #MittsMissingReturns saga by clicking on any of these links:
"I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m going to stop other things. I like PBS. I love Big Bird. I actually like you [Jim Lehrer] too. But I’m not going to -- I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it. That’s number one."
Debate #2, Hempstead New York, October 16:
"The administration brought a criminal action against the people drilling up
there for oil, this massive new resource we have. And what was the cost? Twenty
or 25 birds were killed, and they brought out a migratory bird act to go after
them on a criminal basis."
Which bird(s) will Mitt Romney attack in Debate #3 next Monday?
It makes you wish that famous flock of crows in The Birds would make an appearance.
There used to be a poster back in the Vietnam years (known to Mitt Romney and the "Parisian Sightseeing Boat Veterans for Truth" as the years of French hell when Mitt could find neither good Velveeta nor real Wonder Bread!) that said something like, "What if Schools Had All the Money They Need and the Air Force Had to Hold a Bake Sale to Buy Bombers?" Maybe that great day has finally come. Mitt Romney is asking us to give $5 to the military, but he doesn't seem to be promising us a homemade cupcake from Ann Romney's kitchen, so I say No Deal!
A Romney ad that appeared on my Rutgers Football blog earlier today.
"I'm dreaming of a white President / Just like the ones we've always had / A real live white man / Who knows the score / How to handle money or start a war / Wouldn't even have to tell me what we were fighting for." --Randy Newman, "I'm Dreaming"
I didn't see Mitt Romney interviewed by David Gregory on Meet the Press yesterday, but I've now seen a few choice quotes. Just as the most memorable line from his convention speech (for me) was this one: "President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet. [GOP conventioneers snickering and jeering] My promise ... is to help you and your family. [cheers]", the most jarring line from the Gregory interview I saw was this one:
"I’m not in this race to slow the rise of the oceans or to heal the planet. I’m in this race to help the American people." -- Mitt Romney, August 9, 2012
It's obviously a memorized and well-rehearsed talking point.
Fuck you polar bears. Fuck you planet. Fuck you grandkids.
It's not a photo or video or song that comes to my mind when I think of this shortsighted profit-driven anti-environmentalism. When I think of the world after the ravages of human-influenced climate change, it's these lines from Section V, "What The Thunder Said," in Eliot's "The Waste Land" that come to mind.
"Paul Ryan and I understand how the economy works, we understand how Washington works, we will reach across the aisle and find good people who, like us, want to make sure this company deals with its challenges. We’ll get America on track again."
Mitt and Paul can probably sell off some of the company assets. I'm sure the oil and gas companies could use Yellowstone and Yosemite and the Grand Canyon for something more lucrative than usless "scenery."
Mitt Romney will be giving his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention tonight and we can be pretty sure that he won't be saying, "I've got nothing to hide and I'm proving that by having my campaign release a dozen years of tax returns to independent news organizations as I address you here tonight." OK, we can be more than "pretty sure" he won't do that. It's as certain as death and (the fact that most of us will pay) taxes that we won't be seeing #MittsMissingReturns that easily.
I stumbled upon the following video this afternoon in which even the formerly staid and sober Wall Street Journal joins the racist "Obama's Sealed Records" chorus, equating school records from 30 years ago with Mitt Romney's business records from 2 years ago.
Watch the talking heads above repeat the same hypothetical "trade" that Donald Trump proposes:
Female WSJ Talking Head at 1'28":"Has the Romney campaign caught onto this, this kind of tit for tat fairness. 'If you want me to release the tax returns, you gotta release the transcripts.' Or no?"
1) There is no "tit for tat fairness" here.
2) Mitt Romney would not honor his side of this trade if Barack Obama's records from Columbia and Occidental and high school and kindergarten were all released tomorrow.
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Keep up with the lengthening list of installments in the #MittsMissingReturns saga by clicking on any of these links:
CNN may have forsaken its quest to become Fox News. The original cable news network is now attempting to become The Onion, or Comedy Central, with their recent Mitt Romney infotainment, "Romney Revealed":
Forget the horrors of the Vietnam War in 1968, that war that Mitt Romney demonstrated in favor of, and whose draft the young Mormon missionary avoided:
CNN Narrator: “In 1968, France was a dangerous place to be for a 21-year-old American, but Mitt Romney was right in the middle of it. Fellow Missionary Mike Bush: “There were protests and there were blockades and there were marches all over the country."
CNN: "The streets of France were in chaos."
Bush: "There was no train service, there were no buses, no newspapers. The electricity would go off from time-to-time. There were no letters from home. The money at the time came via check. That was our lifeline was getting letters from home.”
CNN: "So you were totally isolated."
Bush: "Totally isolated."
Just watch the rise he gets out of this crowd earlier today when he says, "No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised."
Sorry Mitt, we don't care about your birth certificate, but we'd love to see the missing tax returns from 1998 -- 2009 (and the missing pieces from 2010 and 2011) that would give us some more realistic ideas about that fantastic business experience that you keep touting as your main competency and reason to be President (other than the fact that you're a white guy from Michigan who will never be asked for his "long-form birth certificate" by a billionaire publicity hound with a bad hairpiece).
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Keep up with the lengthening list of installments in the #MittsMissingReturns saga by clicking on any of these links:
Now that Mitt Romney has come out today and called the press and the American voters "small-minded" for asking about his tax returns, I'm sure that we'll all just leave him alone.
Who are we to distrust him and ask for written details?
“Y'know, y'know given, I just, I just have to say, given the challenges that America faces – 23 million people out of work, um uh Iran about to become nuclear, uh one out of six Americans in poverty – the fascination with taxes I’ve paid I find to be very uh small-minded compared to the broad issues that we face. Uh but I did go back and look at my taxes and over the past 10 years I never paid less than 13 percent. I think the most recent year is 13.6 or something like that. So I paid taxes every single year. Harry Reid’s uh charge is totally uh false. I’m sure waiting for Harry to put up who it was that told him what he says they told him. I don’t believe it for a minute, by the way. But every year I’ve paid at least 13 percent and uh if you add in addition the amount that goes to charity, why the number gets well above 20 percent.” -- Mitt Romney, 16 August 2012
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Keep up with the large list of small-minded installments in the #MittsMissingReturns saga by clicking on any of these links:
Watch (courtesy of Media Matters for America) a video showing how two of the major cable news channels are willing to ignore the fact that the Republican Presidential candidate is obviously hiding something seriously wrong in his financial history:
Why the business and financial history of someone whose main qualification for President is his self-proclaimed (but unverifiable) business and financial acumen should be considered tangential or a distraction is beyond me. His tax returns seem central to understanding who this candidate is. The demand for more than the two partial returns from 2010 and 2011 is not a case of Birtherism Redux, though that is certainly the way the GOP, Fox, and (maybe) CNN, would like to portray it, and us.
We'll keep up the call for 10-12 years of Mitt Romney's tax returns here on TrueBlueLiberal.org and with the #MittsMissingReturns hashtag on Twitter, but the media won't necessarily be working with us. I'm not looking forward to Candy Crowley's role as the impartial moderator for the single debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan.
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Catch up with the lengthening list of installments in the #MittsMissingReturns saga by clicking on any of these links:
According to the results of free non-scientific online tests, TBL found that he was "Existentialist", "Communist", and "A Grammar God," i.e., if he were a short wall-eyed Frenchman rather than a 6'3" blond American, he would be constantly mistaken for Jean-Paul Sartre!
