10 Dead In Tennessee Meningitis Outbreak Linked to Romney

The free market kills people, plain and simple. One of the jobs that citizens place on their government is to keep them safe from all threats, both foreign and domestic. Mitt Romney and his friends appear to be one of those domestic enemies. From Salon Magazine:

“The philosophy of the Romney administration was to have lax regulations across the board,” Philip Johnston, a former secretary of health and human services in Massachusetts before the Romney administration, told Salon. “It speaks volumes about the tragic outcome of Romney’s view on regulatory issues. There are two dozen people who died needlessly. It was clearly the responsibility of the company to protect them, but it was also the responsibility of the government at various levels, and, as far as I’m concerned, they failed.”

Read it!

The War on Women

Republicans Destroy Mitt Romney

Romney Is the Right Man

HMS Bounty

There will be a lot of images from this monster storm. This one will stick with me.

Photo: USCG More

Republicans Cut FEMA 43% In Last Two Years

So House Republicans put our government on the brink of default in order to get budget cuts for programs that help ordinary Americans, FEMA being one of them and now in the spotlight as Hurricane Sandy wreaks its havoc. (They are all wet and frothy on increasing defense spending, though.) It's quite amusing to see grand stander in chief, Republican Governor Christie, saying he needs substantial federal dollars to pay for storm damage. Christie has been one of the prime grand standers in refusing federal money for project that would help his state. Mitt Romney will now come out and say he never said he would dismantle FEMA, which he most certainly did say. Romney would turn disaster relief back on the states, which would leave Gov. Christie twisting in the wind. It would take a very stout pole to do that, given his substantial heft. Perhaps he can help pay for his state's disaser needs by trimming his food budget?

Over the last two years, Congressional Republicans have forced a 43 percent reduction in the primary FEMA grants that pay for disaster preparedness. Representatives Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and other House Republicans have repeatedly tried to refuse FEMA’s budget requests when disasters are more expensive than predicted, or have demanded that other valuable programs be cut to pay for them. The Ryan budget, which Mr. Romney praised as “an excellent piece of work,” would result in severe cutbacks to the agency, as would the Republican-instigated sequester, which would cut disaster relief by 8.2 percent on top of earlier reductions.

That and more here.

The Conversation on Climate Science Is Killing Us...Because there Isn't One

http://energy.nationaljournal.com/2012/10/what-is-climate-silence-costin.php

Romney: Bankruptcy to Eliminate Unnecessary Expenses"...Like Employee Pensions

If you work for a living, get a paycheck for the hours you put in for your employer, you need to understand some things about Mitt Romney and Mitt Romney's way of doing business. First: Mitt is a sociopath. Believe nothing he tells you. This is the same character trait that allows him to rail against anti-war protestors and then take four military deferments to do Mormon missionary work in France. My friends were getting shot at and dying, Mitt was here...

Second: Your personal welfare means nothing to him. You are expendable as long as he makes money. Mitt's solution to the struggling American auto industry? "Let them go bankrupt!" Mitt says this would have eliminated unnecessary expenses, like worker pensions. This is how Mitt creates jobs...in China! CBS reporter Dean Reynolds talked with GM CEO Dan Akerman...

"Did President Obama save General Motors?" Reynolds asked "Without the money, without the funding, it would have been very problematic," said Akerson. "At the risk of alienating a whole lot of potential customers, I would say the Obama administration did a good job." Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and other critics have argued the bailout was unnecessary, and that the regular bankruptcy process would have made GM and Chrysler stronger companies. "Would that have happened?" Reynolds asked. "Not in my opinion," asked Akerson. "It would have been in bankruptcy for years and I think you could have written off this company, this industry and this country."

So in Mitts world GM goes bankrupt and workers lose the pensions they earned over years of job service to their company. In Obama's world each worker still has a job, a pension, and a $7000.00 profit sharing check. Third: Mitt believes in bailouts for him but not you: Mitt saved the Salt Lake City Olympics...With a billion and a half dollars in government bailout money. Mitt's own company, Bain Capital, ws facing bankruptcy...Mitt took over ten million dollars n bailout money to save it. Mitt Romney has created zero net jobs in America. Never has, never will. It's all about him. A vote for Mitt Romney is a vote to end the middle class in America. Tell your friends. I mean it...Tell them! Steve

And the very conservative side of the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the Free Press endorses the Republican candidate Gary Johnson. Wait...What?

As a result of his failure to provide clear methods for reducing the size and scope of the federal government, unwillingness to address structural flaws with entitlement programs, reliance on government to intervene in issues best left to families and individuals, and sporadic support of the Constitution and America's founding principles, Mitt Romney is too flawed to earn the Free Press' endorsement.

Spin the Debate

I remember watching the Veep debate between Lloyd Bensen(D) and Dan Quayle(R) during which Quayle proves himself to be a nice bland sort of guy with no qualifications whatsoever for the position. Bensen thoroughly trounced Quayle in a mismatch that was at times painful to watch. The moment that sticks in my mind even more than the "You're no Jack Kennedy" zinger from Bensen after Quayle tried to invoke some claimed resemblance to John F Kennedy, was the statement from George H W Bush immediately after the closing handshake, "Dan knocked it out of the park" said Bush. Even the reporters were stunned at the disingenuous and plainly false utterance of the man who went on to become a one term President of the US. Now we expect it. Barack Obama clearly won this debate. He knew more, never said one thing that wasn't exactly correct, and even knew the Iran has two entire coastlines unlike Romney, who insistently displayed his ignorance with such statements as "Syria is Iran's route to the sea." Here we have a man claiming the stature to be President with a plan to forcibly deal with Iran but who doesn't even seem to know that Iran has a formidable navy controlling both its coastlines. But that won't come out in this morning's press. Here's what will come out:(LA Times)

Monday's presidential debate, the third and last between President Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney, featured a forceful and articulate defense of Obama's foreign policy. That was no surprise. What was surprising was that it came from Romney.

What will Republicans say about the debate? There's no place for truth in a Republican campaign. Watch for it.

Update from our Told You So department: Sarah Palin: "...It’s unfortunate that Gov. Romney didn’t have time to answer all the false charges. I made a couple of pages of a list of the false charges." Only she never actually says what a single one of those false charges are. It's like all those newspapers she told Katie Couric she reads. Yeah right... From Bloomberg: "Someone apparently forgot to tell Mitt Romney about last night’s foreign-policy debate. He didn’t come to debate, and he wasn’t eager to talk about foreign policy."

What Does Mitt Romney Stand For, A Politicians Right to Prevaricate?

MORONi? Really?

So a convicted con man comes to you and says an angel has commanded him to found a new religion that has him as its leader. Before you go all wandering off in the desert and everything, how about doing some research on the guy's history.

The Pro-Life Swindle

How can a person call themselves "pro life" and yet be willing to vote for someone who will: Take us to war in Iran? Dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency? Dismantle Medicare and Medicaid? Is against the Lilly Ledbetter Act for equal pay for equal work? Turn public schools over to profiteers? Essentially destroy the very things that lifted America's middle class out of poverty? I'm beginning to think that the religious extremists who claim an acorn is an oak tree and an egg is a chicken are not pro life... They are Pro-Suffering! They seem to be against everything that helps people help people and believe in their hearts that Jesus was wrong to turn over those nice Money Changer's tables.

DesJarlais Has 8 Times Cash over Eric Stewart

TFP Story

It's Pretty Danged Clear...Mitt Romney Doesn't Like You

I was part of closing a factory and sending good people's jobs to a foreign country. In this case the foreign country was South Carolina and we offered everyone who was willing to move another job. This is impossible in most cases but about 20% actually did it. The scenario was that I and my partners had built a company from nothing to something and then something bigger. We now had a closely held corporation that had become far bigger than we had any idea how to run. We made the decision to sell and become part of a larger entity where we thought there would be experienced managers who understood the ballgame at high levels. We chose our new partners carefully, hoping they would buy into our vision of team building, taking personal interest in every employee, making decisions for the greater good, being involved in our community, and always looking five years down the road on any big decision. Boy were we naive. The recent debate performance by Mitt Romney is nothing new to me. I saw it time and time again in corporate meetings, where managers would tell straight up lies and misrepresentations to get what they personally wanted, regardless of the eventual consequences for people and profits. You could cut the self serving platitudes with a butter knife. I watched this over and over. The resulting decisions occasionally made short term sense but nearly always led to long term disaster. Morale plummeted along with quality and profitability. Skilled and creative people left in droves. Hard working production people stood in shocked amazement as English became the second language on the manufacturing line as the general manager decided that paying highly productive people what they were worth was cutting into profits and replaced them with temps from the lowest cost supplier of people as a commodity. I quit going to meetings and stepped back to a consulting role partly to avoid watching the death of something I had given birth to and partly to quit causing trouble when I would point out the downside of certain decisions and then somehow being at fault when the predicted future became reality. I lost way too many meetings in exactly the same fashion as Obama "lost" his first Presidential debate. The experienced managers who won those meetings by spewing emphatic bombastic bullshit, can take credit for turning a $65 million corporation into about a third of its former self. They got their money and left. Workers at Sensata in Illinois watched in dismay as the American flag was taken down in their factory and the Chinese flag raised... Romney makes $450,000 per week from his blind trust which contains a lot of Bain Capital stock. • Bain is closing a Sensata factory and shipping equipment and jobs to China • The US government has paid $780,000 retraining fired Sensata workers. • Bain can deduct the expense of moving to China from US taxes. • US workers at the Sensata factory have to train their Chinese replacements. • Romney owns about $8 million worth of Bain funds that hold 51 percent of Sensata’s shares. • These are high-tech, well paid jobs performed by skilled American workers. • Workers in the Sensata factory in China make 99 cents an hour. • Chinese laborers work 12 hour shifts, 7 days per week. • Chinese workers are housed 2 to 3 to a room in barracks • The American workers set records for profits for Sensata I'm seeing a repeat of my own personal history with the corporate sociopathic decision making process. It's all about the money to those at the top...Right and wrong and basic human decency be damned. It appears that Romney's Ten Commandments don't apply through the corporate veil. Corporations are not people with a moral code of ethics. Corporations, as they are constructed in America at present, are ravenous predators. It is only the few regulations that remain, and which Mitt Romney wants to remove, that keep them even partially in check. If America lets Mitt Romney take the White House it will lead to cataclysmic ruin of the American middle class and the economy we built. There is no decision I can find that Mitt Romney has ever been a part of that indicates he has any whiff of a care with respect to any of the people whose jobs and lives he destroyed. They don't seem to exist to him except as numbers on a spread sheet. Given his history of job destruction in America, it's clear that he goes beyond not caring about us. It looks like he actively dislikes the American worker, not only sending your job to China but taking his tax breaks to do it. Think about it. Steve More on this HERE

From Our "well, Duh!" Dept.: UT Study Shows Republicans Screw Workers

It took an academic study to show that? I'll be the Prof gets hammered on Fox News or Limbo or somewhere, if the study is ever mentioned at all. It was interesting to note that the disparity between working folks and rich people goes up as the S&P 500 index goes up. Kinda makes you feel all conflicted about your 401k, doesn't it? UT Study

What It Really Means To Fire Big Bird

The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) was conceived and born to bring knowledge and education to the citizens of the United States of America with no concessions to commercial viability. PBS is the alternative to the other media which bring us all the programming some business entity will pay for. Looking at the product that commercial media served up for our consumption, our elected officials, back in the day when elected officials served their constituents instead of corporations, decided to create PBS to be above the commercial fray and to deliver the needed information and educational programming to America's children and adults that would be free of the bias that requiring advertisers inherently creates. The Bank of America, for instance, is certainly not going to sign on to advertise on a program that specializes in financial shenanigan exposes. In fact, we've seen whole stories on banking irregularities goes strangely missing on all three major networks. It is precisely this monetary bias that PBS was created to avoid, for the sake and future of the American people. PBS programming has addressed the tough social issues well before commercial media even thought about it. I'm pretty sure Ernie is gay, and there's that Cow Pattie girl. Black friends of white kids in school, bullying, lessons on life for preschoolers and all sorts of things like that would never be covered by a media that has to prostitute itself to advertisers...too risky! But PBS was there for all those kids who faced the same problems and taught them to read and count and pass the GED at the same time. There are few things on this planet that deserve the support of all American citizens through their taxes than the Public Broadcasting System. And no character epitomizes the good that PBS does better than Big Bird. Will you stand with Big Bird or Mitt Romney? Republicans don't hate Big Bird because of the pittance in subsidies PBS receives. Republicans hate Big Bird because he(she?) speaks the truth and cannot be pressured by advertisers into misleading American children. So there! Steve Update: Rick Santorum puts his foot in it...

I’ve voted to kill Big Bird in the past. So I have a record there that I have to disclose. That doesn’t mean I don’t like Big Bird, I mean, you can kill things and still like them, maybe to eat them, I don’t know.