Open Mic August 17

Mitt Rom­ney insisted that he hasn’t paid less than 13 per­cent on his taxes, though inter­est­ingly he never said fed­eral income taxes.

Rom­ney said he looked at his taxes for the last decade.

Three things:

1) Harry Reid never said the ten years Rom­ney paid no taxes occurred in the last decade. Rom­ney left Bain Cap­i­tal some­where around 1999 to 2002. The ten years of no taxes was prob­a­bly before he left Bain.

2) Romney’s pub­lic state­ments are mostly lies or, at best, half-​​truths. Why should any­one believe this state­ment of his?

3) If he’s telling the truth, he should release his records and embar­rass Harry Reid, prob­a­bly then ensur­ing Reid would be defeated in his reëlec­tion bid, pos­si­bly even forc­ing him to resign on ethics issues. Either Reid is right (and Rom­ney is lying), or there must be really, really toxic things in Romney’s tax returns to pre­vent him from using them to take Reid down.

Rom­ney needs to release his tax returns.

I still can’t fig­ure out the mes­sage Rom­ney wants to send with Ryan as his veep. Sure, he picks the intel­lec­tual force behind the Repub­li­can Party (a giant among men­tal midgets). But then he insists that Ryan’s rec­om­men­da­tions are irrel­e­vant because we’re sup­posed to lis­ten to Romney’s plans instead. So why bother to pick Paul Ryan The Big Thinker, Big Plans Guy if we aren’t sup­posed to take his Big Plans into account?

It’s more Rom­ney Slip­pery BS. A big part of Romney’s cam­paign is to avoid giv­ing actual, you know, pol­icy posi­tions, with any details that can be actu­ally, you know, con­sid­ered. Rom­ney has rec­og­nized that no one likes him and his wife dresses him funny, so he gets Mr. Kill Medicare to liven up the ticket. But no one likes Mr. Kill Medicare even more than they don’t like Rom­ney, because granny loves her Medicare. So let’s all play Let’s Pre­tend We’re Not Killing Medicare And No I Never Sug­gested We Would, and by the way, don’t look (for God’s sake DON’T!) at Romney’s tax pro­pos­als (or tax returns).

And notice, we’ve lost Romney’s laser-​​like focus on jobs and the econ­omy because nei­ther Rom­ney nor any other Repub­li­can has ever sug­gested any­thing that would actu­ally cre­ate jobs or improve the economy.

By the way, Ryan the Fis­cal Con­ser­v­a­tive has a vot­ing record he doesn’t want you to look at.

Uhhh… should we go back to talk­ing about con­tra­cep­tives again?

Yeah shiloh. When Rom­ney first named Ryan, all the media went gaa gaa over the thought of hav­ing some actual sub­stance in the pres­i­den­tial dis­cus­sion. But Romney’s advis­ers know the truth of it — dis­cussing sub­stance, talk­ing about the details of Ryan’s and Romney’s plans, would doom them. If the pub­lic knew and under­stood what these hatchet men were plan­ning to do, Repub­li­cans would lose not only the Pres­i­den­tial race, but the House and a half-​​dozen Sen­ate seats. Hon­esty would kill them.

So they’re left with lying about what the ACA does with Medicare. Once more, Rom­ney proves what is the basis of his campaign.

Oh, and what do they have for a for­eign pol­icy? Or mil­i­tary under­stand­ings? You know, the things that are the President’s pri­mary respon­si­bil­ity? We know their edu­ca­tion pol­icy — dis­man­tle the Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion, stop Pell Grants, and let all Amer­i­cans fend for them­selves. That’ll bring up test scores! (‘Course you don’t need much book learnin’ to flip burgers.

America’s crum­bling infra­struc­ture? The *magic!* of the Free Mar­ket will take care of that! (I have a col­lapsed bridge here in Min­neapo­lis to sell ya…)

And don’t even men­tion the envi­ron­ment or cli­mate change. Fin­gers in ears la la la! I’m not lis­ten­ing! (There’s an old joke about a Chris­t­ian Sci­en­tist in Hell, and the punch­line is, “This place is not hot, and I am not here.”)

But at least we’d finally get the National Endow­ment for the Arts de-​​funded. Sure, it’s not much money, but we can’t have artists being well-​​endowed. Pub­lic tele­vi­sion? Can’t have that. There are kids get­ting an edjukashun from it! Stop that and go wash your hands.

With any luck, things will go even bet­ter in the next pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, I think that’s in 1860.…

Ryan truly is fol­low­ing the Rom­ney plan.

Lie.

AW: Yes, that is what happened.

rgbact: The orig­i­nal stim­u­lus was only a frac­tion of what it should have been. It still stopped the bleed­ing, turned the 800,000 jobs/​month loss into gains, and reversed the Bush reces­sion into eco­nomic gains (for three years now). In spite of being mostly tax cuts instead of stim­u­lus spending.

And then the Repub­li­cans blocked every­thing else the Pres­i­dent wanted to try.

Do you want to offer another excuse, or can you explain the Repub­li­can hypocrisy as it was?

When Repub­li­cans block pro­grams, what gives them the balls to com­plain that those pro­grams didn’t work?

Screw it, they sim­ply lie.