mitt romney bak
he waffles on djt but may be bellweather on impeach?
bak 1219
senate run for hatch seat won --> ?!
---
no lnx 11 24
alternet-
The end of left-leaning news?
'Maximum chaos and upset': Rachel Maddow describes nightmare election scenario
Thom Hartmann
November 23, 2024
Have you heard that Comcast is planning to sell MSNBC? Is Rupert Murdoch planning to buy it? Will America’s media landscape soon resemble those of Hungary and Russia?
Without the rightwing media juggernaut, Donald Trump probably wouldn’t be president next year and wouldn’t have won in 2016. That said, the progressive media landscape looks like it might be about to get a whole lot worse.
Comcast, which owns NBC and its subsidiaries CNBC and MSNBC (among other media outlets) announced this week that they’ll be spinning off MSNBC (among others) next year.
And the consequences are already showing up. It was reported this week that Rachel Maddow just took a substantial annual pay-cut because of the uncertain future of the network.
In part, this probably reflects a belt-tightening at Comcast, but is also an indication of how legacy media — which now includes cable properties — are taking a hit from newer digital media, from social media to podcasts to web-based networks and programs.
The principal analyst and VP of content for the market research company eMarketer, Paul Verna, told the AP that:
“The writing is on the wall that the cable TV business is a dwindling business,” and, the AP noted, is “predicting future consolidation of the networks or acquisitions through private equity.”
Private equity (like Bain Capital) and large media operation acquisitions have a long history of gutting media properties to increase their profitability; often this includes what a study by Stanford University researchers described as a trend to “substitute coverage of local politics for coverage of national politics, and use more conservative framing.”
Air America radio (for which I wrote the original business plan and which carried my program) was on the air in virtually every major market in the United States, having leased over 50 major, high-powered radio stations from Clear Channel.
My program regularly beat Rush Limbaugh in the ratings: When I was invited to the Obama White House following that election, one person associated with the campaign noted to me privately that they believed Air America had played a meaningful role in Obama’s 2008 election.
That same year, Mitt Romney’s private equity company, Bain Capital, acquired Clear Channel and, in 2009, began reclaiming their stations, replacing Air America content with mostly sports. By coincidence, around that same time it appears Romney decided he’d run against Obama in the next election.
As Air America lost station after station, its ability to earn revenue through selling advertising collapsed. By 2010, the entire network was bankrupt just in time for Romney to run for president.
Will the same thing happen to MSNBC? Stay tuned.
Similarly, Republicans in Congress are salivating over Elon Musk’s rhetorical war with NPR after the network stopped using Xitter when Musk labeled the news network as “state-affiliated” media.
As the headline on Fox Business notes:
“Elon Musk renews calls to defund NPR after clip of CEO resurfaces on X: 'Your tax dollars' are paying for this.’”
Musk, of course, will be in charge of identifying those parts of government or institutions funded by government which can be cut to help pay for Trump’s planned $4 trillion in tax cuts for billionaires.
While it won’t fit her proposed new role as UN Ambassador, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a top member of Republican House leadership, was unambiguous, posting to Xitter: “I will DEFUND NPR.”
This is nothing new: Republicans in the House voted this past July to remove all federal funding for NPR by 2026; Musk and Ramaswamy, working hand-in-glove with Marjorie Taylor Greene (who was just made chairperson of the new subcommittee charged with implementing their recommendations) could probably speed up that timeline.
While NPR goes to great lengths to avoid political bias in their news (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting even hired last month, “in response to right-wing criticism,” multiple editors specifically to spot and stamp out any progressive perspectives that may creep into their reporting), if they were crippled, it’s safe to assume the roughly 1,500 rightwing hate radio stations in the country stand more than ready and willing to pick up their radio audience.
Rightwing billionaires brought us Fox “News,” Sinclair, two other web- and cable-based rightwing TV channels, nationwide networks of hate radio (now also in Spanish), tens of millions of dollars in subsidies to rightwing podcast hosts, and the destruction of about half the nation’s local newspapers.
Not to mention an entire network of billionaire-funded hard-right phony “pink slime” newspapers that pop up around the country every election year.
There’s no equivalent politically-tilted media systems on the left; Democratic-leaning billionaires have stayed out of the media space ever since Romney’s company took down Air America.
The closest TV and radio counterparts we have are Free Speech TV (available on the web, Dish, Sling, Roku, AppleTV, and DirecTV) and the Progress Channel on SiriusXM (my daily program is carried on both).
In the print media space, Substack is growing (although they also carry hard-right content) and provides a solid community of progressive publications (like HartmannReport.com), but that’s a drop in a much larger ocean; even The Washington Post and The New York Times don’t come close to the strength of editorial bias found in the Murdoch family’s The New York Post or The Wall Street Journal.
Publications like The New Republic, Mother Jones, The Nation, and The Guardian provide solid progressive content, but all have funding bases that are trivial compared to conservative publications supported by rightwing billionaire networks. Ditto for websites like Raw Story, Common Dreams, Alternet, LA Progressive, Democratic Underground, and Daily Kos.
As my old friend and the former CEO/founder of Air America, Jon Sinton, noted on his excellent “reluctant” Substack newsletter:
“The left-wing silo is barren. A couple of old line newspapers and magazines. MSNBC and a handful of smallish digital platforms and shows. Pod Save America stands nearly alone as a left-leaning podcast with a large audience.
“By contrast, the right-wing silo is vast and deep. It houses YouTubians, TikTokkers, broadcasters on Fox, Newsmax, Sinclair TV stations, and talk radio stations; posters on social media; and narrowcasters on myriad podcasts.”
All, I would add, heavily supported by rightwing billionaires. As Politico reported in 2014, the Heritage Foundation used to give $1 million a year to Sean Hannity and $2 million a year to Rush Limbaugh alone.
A close acquaintance who was, for years, a mid-level rightwing talk show host told me how a dozen or more times a year he’d give a speech at a random high school and would receive a check for $20,000-$30,000 by a rightwing foundation as a “speaking fee” each time. It was their way of supporting conservative talk radio.
Again, there is literally nothing like that on the left. Not even close.
I’ve repeatedly called for progressive billionaires to jump into the media space, and perhaps the Musk/Trump assaults that are coming will provoke some to act. It may be wishful thinking, but if it does happen it can’t come too soon.
In the meantime, we all must support (and share with our friends) those outlets where we find useful news and information; if we fail to, America’s media landscape may soon mirror Hungary’s and Russia’s with every station and publication praising Dear Leader 24/7/365.
NOW READ: The America-attacking Trump is coming for our military — and then he's coming for us
---
Mitt Romney defends Biden from 'politically charged' special counsel report - Alternet.org bob hur BS
said something dumb 3 23? nashville school shoot?
11 23 an
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) went from being the GOP's 2012 presidential nominee to being an outcast in much of his party. Romney's cardinal sin, as MAGA Republicans see it, was his willingness to vote "guilty" in Donald Trump's two impeachment trials and vehemently criticize the former president.
The Utah senator and former Massachusetts governor candidly discusses his relationship with the GOP in journalist McKay Coppins' new biography "Romney: A Reckoning." During an early November
, Coppins cited Romney's loss to President Barack Obama in 2012 as an early example of Trump's election denialism.
Host Charlie Sykes, a Never Trump conservative,
, "One of the interesting little tidbits in your book that I had completely forgotten about was Election Night 2012 after Romney lost — the role that Trump played. Trump started tweeting, foreshadowing about how the election was stolen. He tweeting things like, 'We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. We are not a democracy.' Now, that is years before January 6."
, "But isn't that so interesting? Because I had forgotten about that too; you had forgotten about it. I think that most readers, when they come to that portion of the story — this is the Election Night 2012 — they almost have to check back: Wait, what year is this, right? But it speaks to how unserious Donald Trump was at the time; it barely registered. It was: Oh, this loudmouth celebrity is saying stupid things on Twitter. But it speaks to how so much of the Republican Party and political establishment didn't take him seriously and didn't take what he represented seriously. And four years later, that element of their party, that ugliness took over."
READ MORE:'An idiot': GOP senators privately unload on Trump in new Mitt Romney biography
*Watch the video below or at this link.
March 30, 2023 rww
- Media Matters: Charlie Kirk compares trans people to “homeless encampments.”
- Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: Notorious judge strikes down ACA’s preventive coverage benefits.
- Emine Yücel @ Talking Points Memo: Utah Republicans Try To Accuse Romney Of Treason In Upcoming Censure Vote.
- Joe Jervis: QAnon Shaman Released From Prison 14 Months Early.
- Jennifer Bowers Bahney @ Mediaite: Trump Tells Hannity He Didn’t Know Anything About Ye’s Anti-Semitic Rants Before Dining with Him and Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago.
- Chris D’Angelo @ HuffPost: The Right’s War Against Offshore Wind Has Become Comically Absurd.
Tags: Charlie Kirk Donald Trump Mitt Romney Sean Hannity Round-Up
https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/manchin/
strategic use / weaponization of polarization // filibuster minority rule
kos
no lnx twt
Republicans delay everything in order to destroy Democratic agenda — with an assist from Manchin
Joan McCarter and Daily Kos June 19, 2022
Senate Republicans have been playing a transparent game for months now, using their willing tool of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) to drag out negotiations on any number of issues to keep him away from Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and President Joe Biden. To prevent Democrats from moving any significant policies that can help the American people and give Democrats a win.
They’ve done it on voting rights and election reforms. They’ve done it on climate and energy. It’s just one tactic—and a very successful one—Republicans are using to keep the Democratic majority tied up and unable to accomplish anything.
:{
}:
Case in point: additional funding for the federal COVID-19 effort. Manchin’s good friend and frequent negotiating partner Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) all but killed it this week when he alleged that the Biden administration lied about the government’s ability to secure additional vaccines, treatments, and supplies. That’s because the White House recently announced it was taking money from other priorities to pay for the most pressing needs.
:{
}:
:{
}:
“Washington operates on a relationship of trust between the respective parties,” Romney said Thursday,. “I hope that there’s an appreciation that for the administration to say they could not purchase these things, and then after several months, divert some funds and then purchase them is unacceptable, and makes our ability to work together … very much shaken to the core.” The pearls are tightly clutched.
The White House, not surprisingly, has a different interpretation on how discussions have been going. “We’ve tried to meet Republicans on their requests, and they keep moving the goal posts,” one official told the Washington Post. Another, spokesperson Kevin Munoz, went on the record. “Going back to January, we’ve been working with members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans, on the funding needs for the covid response,” he said in a statement. “We’ve also been crystal clear about the consequences of a lack of funding … including the very real possibility that we would have to reevaluate the planned uses of existing funds.”
There’s one more potential win for the White House—not to mention all the people at risk of catching COVID-19 in the coming weeks and months—Republicans are cynically blocking. It’s nearly as egregious as what they’ve been doing on guns.
:{
}:
All of that puts this in a “we’ll believe when we sit it” mood. “Senate Democrats are preparing for possible summer action on their still-elusive climate, tax reform and prescription drugs bill, grinding behind the scenes on a new version during high-profile gun safety talks.” Because it’s Manchin, once again, that all this is hinging on and Republicans are on the verge of declaring that partisan Democrats have destroyed any hope of gun safety regulation with their unreasonable demands that guns be kept out of the hands of people who have been convicted of violence.
:{
}:
That sets up Manchin to declare that the Democrats have been horrible partisans and he just can’t continue to work with them. He’s used far flimsier excuses before, like the fact that the White House included his name in a statement about Build Back Better. That’s what blew up the whole package last December, supposedly. It likely wouldn’t take anything more for Manchin to do it again.
Republicans are counting on that.
romney got tagged and 2 women did not? he is cand 2024 they're not?
he has ~ trump mult times in past?
// putin use of nazi
2022 is ABOUT trumpier than thou, clickbait, pwning the libs; GOP civil war?
https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/groomer-speech/
edit bd
Something I’ve been meaning to tell you. My dad is a pedophile. I’m not the victim. As always, though, there’s never just one. The ties that bound my family have largely come undone. Pain is now a feature, not a bug, of our lives. It’s a story without ending, nevermind a happy one.
So you can imagine what it felt like to see Republicans in the United States Senate using the word “pedophile” (as well as “child-predator”) during the confirmation hearings of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Their use of it was loose, irrelevant, warped and worse. The purpose was advancing conspiracy theories already spreading. The goal was smearing the new Supreme Court justice with the smell of evil.
Worst of all, by overusing it, they watered down the word. They hollowed out its primary moral essence. They created conditions in which my dad and other pedophiles can now plausible say their crimes aren’t as bad as they say. Just look at what the Democrats are doing.
Child abuse, predation, child molestation and rape – these are real problems responsible citizens much find humane ways of addressing while serving the often conflicting needs for rehabilitaton and justice.
These are real social, political and criminal problems.
By belittling them, the Republicans insult us.
They piss into the wounds of real victims, too.
That’s what you’d expect from a political party operating on the edge of political violence. Justice Jackson’s confirmation hearings were a case in point, according to Gabriel Rosenberg, a professor of gender, sexuality and feminist studies at Duke. During our interview, Professor Rosenberg walked me through the four stages of “groomer speech.”
“You're seeing a way in which partisan interests are pursued through the figure of the pedophile, not because any of these people give a damn about the sexual well-being of children, but because it's an incredibly charged and politically potent thing they can hurl.”
On Twitter, you offered an analysis of the rhetoric surrounding Florida’s new Don’t Say Gay legislation. That rhetoric seems to weaponize words like “pedophile” and “child predator” and other things beyond the pale. You outlined four items. Can you explain?
The basic thesis of what I'm calling the “groomer panic,” which I think is coherently understood as a moral panic, or sex panic, is that has the capacity to be significantly more dangerous than comparable sex panics in the past in which similar sorts of rhetorical weaponization of the terms “pedophile” or “child predator” had been deployed.
It has the possibility of spilling into actual political violence.
I made four points.
First, “groomer speech” is using the metaphor of child sexual abuse to describe educational content that rightwing forces disapprove of.
This metaphor of violent physical harm is being used to describe a disagreement over educational content and the underlying speech acts constituting that content. There is a confusion about different kinds of harm and a confusion about the difference between speech and act.
Second, this confusion means concrete evidence of child sex abuse is no longer necessary. Instead, the evidence is the speech act itself.
It becomes the case then that anyone can be credibly accused of being a “groomer,” not because there's evidence of grooming, but because such person has dissented from a preferred framework among conservatives for the understanding of Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law.
“Groomer” describes dissent from conservatism writ large.
There is specificity to the claim about “pedophile” that is itself unique and dramatic. I describe it as having an eliminationist intention.
Third, “groomer speech” is distinguishable from “subjugating speech.”
“Subjugating speech” might incite violence. It's possible. It has before. But broadly, it’s intended to justify social and political inequalities.
“Pedophile” is a specific term, however. It carries, at least in rightwing communities, a claim that the individual in question is pathologically invested in harming the most vulnerable members of society.
There's no interest in governing such individuals.
It's not about establishing them as second-class citizens.
It's about putting them to death.
That separates it from a general class of what I’m calling “subjugating speech” intended to degrade or lessen a person but isn't necessarily a suggestion that they and all people like them ought to be eliminated.
Fourth, “groomer speech” is not being directed at minorities.
At various points in American history, conservatives have accused gay people and other sexual (and sometimes racial) minorities of intending to prey on kids – they behave in a predatory fashion toward children.
What's interesting about “groomer speech” and what's most alarming about its use by the right is the charge being directed at powerful people who cannot by any measure be identified with a minority.
When Marjorie Taylor Greene said Mitt Romney is “pro-pedophile,” she's talking about the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee.
When James Lindsay called Nate Hochman, a writer for National Review, a “groomer,” he's talking about a conservative in good standing, or was. He's saying this individual also wants to abuse children.
This is radically different.
It's now about disciplining ingroup versus outgroup identity within conservatism writ large. It’s about reformatting and hardening the line between people who are conservative and people who are not.
In the end, conservatives are the good ones. They're anti-pedophile. Anyone who dissents from the conservative framework is therefore pro-pedophile. They constitute individuals who must be eliminated.
Ted Cruz used to talk about “San Francisco values.” Others talked about “the gay agenda.” Those are more abstract than “pedophile.” You’re saying we’ve arrived at a new and more explicit point in the evolution of conservative rhetoric. Is that accurate?
That's generally correct.
I would add that on the right, they're open to the idea of people who prey on children deserving the most extreme forms of violence.
I don't think anybody on the far right is trying to hide that.
That’s fundamentally important.
“Groomer speech” is deployed to advance virtually anything that fits within the broader political program of the conservative movement.
Right now, it's about targeting people who dissent from a particular kind of orthodoxy around interpretation of educational content.
But then we saw it coming into play in specious arguments about Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's sentencing record – that she was “pro-pedophile.” Therefore Mitt Romney, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski [“moderate” Republican senators who voted for her confirmation to the Supreme Court] were also “pro-pedophile.”
It's spilling into confirmations of Supreme Court nominees.
That's a break from the past.
That speaks to the flexibility and centrality of the charge eventually becoming the basis of things like criminal policy, militarization, policing, tax policy and labor policy. It can become a basic rhetorical strategy the far right uses to justify whatever they want to justify.
You're with us and the children.
Or you're on the other side with the pedophiles.
I’m thinking of eugenics. The antipathy toward LGBTQ people comes from the idea that LGBTQ-ness infects white people. As a result, they don't have enough babies. With too few white babies, white people risk becoming a minority. How would you understand that?
During the early human eugenics movement, there was a great deal of enthusiasm in the United States for coercive sterilization of anyone who exhibited homosexual tendencies or who desired sex with men.
There was this idea that homosexuality constituted a dangerous social contagion that needed to be eliminated from society regardless of whether it could be passed on as a congenital defect. It was that grave.
Immediately after World War II, there was something the Lavender Scare period in which heightened concern about male homosexuality resulted in the creation of a lot of criminal psychopathology laws.
These law created legal justification for jailing and sterilizing gay people under the auspices of gay people preying on innocent children.
So the far right isn’t punching down. It's punching sideways – or even up in the case of senators. Is there a link historically between that and a leap into political violence? Do they go hand in hand?
I think Judge Jackson's confirmation hearings clearly illustrate how this works. The Republican Party did not want to see anyone vote for her. Various Republican senators fixated on a specious charge that she'd been light on sentencing people who possessed child pornography.
It was so specious that Andrew McCarthy, who is a notable and extremely right wing figure with National Review, basically labeled it “demagoguery.” He said there were better reasons to oppose her.
The right mobilized after labeling her “pro-pedophile.” From there, they disciplined GOP apostates by labeling them “pro-pedophile,” too. They wanted to show as much opposition as they could.
Actual sexual harm to children had nothing to do with it.
But once it got invoked, it became a disciplinary tool.
You're seeing a way in which partisan interests are pursued through the figure of the pedophile, not because any of these people give a damn about the sexual well-being of children, but because it's an incredibly charged and politically potent thing they can hurl.
That kind of irresponsibility, with no bottom, carries with it its own momentum. It can become more and more difficult to control.
silly filibuster args
https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/mitt-romney/
https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/romney/
~ tucker orban
mitt and sasse
https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/sasse-romney-want-trump-out/
ME
Two Republican senators have finally pushed back against President Donald Trump's attempts to blatantly overturn the results of the presidential election.
On Thursday, Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), two of the very few lawmakers willing to verbalize their disapproval of the president, condemned Trump's continued attempts to undermine the election results. Both released statements on Thursday evening challenging the president's post-election legal battles.
Romney took to Twitter with a statement criticizing the president's claims of "widespread fraud or conspiracy." He also scrutinized Trump for resorting to pressuring state and local officials to adhere to his own personal agenda.
"Having failed to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the President has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election," Romney said in a statement posted to Twitter. "It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American President."...
definitive moral betrayal? LDS on abortion?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/romney-makes-up-new-precedent-to-say-hell-vote-on-a-trump-supreme-court-nominee/
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/weak-and-spineless-mitt-romney-hit-with-twitter-firestorm-over-support-for-gop-supreme-court-vote/
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/mitt-romney-slams-gop-investigation-of-hunter-biden-as-a-waste-of-taxpayers-money-not-the-legitimate-role-of-government/
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/romney-joins-growing-protests-as-more-prominent-republicans-disavow-trump/
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/mitt-romney-slams-gop-investigation-of-hunter-biden-as-a-waste-of-taxpayers-money-not-the-legitimate-role-of-government/
GOP coronavirus relief package to include Romney bill that would ‘fast-track Social Security and Medicare cuts’an 720Common Dream:{s:(style="letter-spacing:0px"):}:
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/romney-joins-growing-protests-as-more-prominent-republicans-disavow-trump/
Protests are expected to continue Monday after a weekend in which the tide continued turning away from Donald Trump’s attempts to promote division and violence, while a viewing is being held in Houston ahead of the third memorial service for George Floyd, to be held Tuesday. Also Monday, former officer Derek Chauvin will be appearing in court. Through the weekend, protests continued to grow in many places, while the police response became less vicious, resulting in fewer conflicts and less violence.
One such protest included Republican Sen. Mitt Romney marching with hundreds of evangelical Christians and saying he was seeking “a way to end violence and brutality, and to make sure that people understand that Black lives matter.” Trump, of course, couldn’t resist an angry tweet. Several Democrats, including widely cited vice presidential prospects Sen. Kamala Harris and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have joined protesters, but Romney is the first Senate Republican known to have done so.
Romney’s embrace of protest wasn’t the only sign this weekend of trouble for Trump among elite Republicans. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said he will vote for Joe Biden, while former President George W. Bush said he wouldn’t vote for Trump, though he didn’t go so far as to say he’d vote for Biden. If Trump gives a speech on race, as he is reportedly considering, how many more will join them?
It’s unlikely that anyone in Trump’s base will be moved by Bush or Powell—even though many of these same people had a fervent devotion for Bush 15 years ago—but their defections may continue to shift media coverage if nothing else.
in other news:
- Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, changed his story again about whether he ordered the attack on protesters outside the White House to enable Trump’s walk to St. John’s Church. Not a good look. Again.
- The Minneapolis City Council announced it plans to dismantle the police department and instead have “community-led public safety.”
- New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet resigned as a result of the horrifying op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton calling for military action against protesters.
==
==
an 1219
no lnx
Cruz draws audible laughs on live TV after pushing debunked Ukraine conspiracy theory
Written by Igor Derysh / Salon December 9, 2019
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., drew laughs from the NBC News studio after he pushed a debunked Ukraine conspiracy theory on Sunday’s edition of “Meet the Press.”
Host Chuck Todd got into a combative exchange with Cruz after he claimed that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election despite a Republican-led Senate investigation which found no evidence of Ukrainian interference.
“Do you believe Ukraine meddled in the American election in 2016?” Todd asked.
“I do,” Cruz replied. “And I think there’s considerable evidence of that.”
“You do?” a bewildered Todd asked, prompting laughter from inside the Washington studio.
“Senator, this sort of strikes me as odd, because you went through a primary campaign with this president. He launched a birtherism campaign against you,” Todd said. “He went after your faith. He threatened to ‘spill the beans’ about your wife about something. He pushed a National Enquirer story, which we now know he had a real relationship with the editors of the National Enquirer.”
“And Chuck, I appreciate you dragging up all that garbage,” Cruz complained.
“No, but senator, is it not possible that the president is capable of creating a false narrative about somebody in order to help him politically?” Todd asked.
“Except that’s not what happened. The president released the transcript of the phone call. You can read what was said on the phone call,” Cruz said. “Chuck, let me point out a game that the media is playing. You know, a question that you’ve asked a number of people is — you’ve said to senators sort of aghast, ‘Do you believe that Ukraine — and not Russia — interfered in the election?’ Now, that — that in a court of law would be struck as a misleading question. Of course, Russia interfered in our election. Nobody looking at the evidence disputes that.”
“But the president of the United States does,” Todd pointed out.
“Look, on the evidence, Russia clearly interfered in our election. But here’s the game the media is playing: Because Russia interfered, the media pretends nobody else did. Ukraine blatantly interfered in our election,” Cruz claimed. “The sitting ambassador from Ukraine wrote an op-ed blasting Donald Trump.”
“Do you know why he did that?” Todd asked. “What did Donald Trump — what did Donald Trump, as a candidate, say about Ukraine and Crimea during the election that might’ve inspired the ambassador?” Todd pressed, referring to Trump’s remarks about Crimea that alarmed Ukrainian officials.
“So you’re saying they had disagreements with Donald Trump,” Cruz said. “And they wanted Hillary Clinton to get elected.”
“OK, so they wrote an op-ed,” Todd said. “That’s the difference.”
Meet the Press
@MeetThePress
WATCH: @SenTedCruz says he believes Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election. #MTP #IfItsSunday
Embedded video
President Donald Trump and personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani have baselessly alleged a far more nefarious Ukrainian plot, claiming that Ukraine — not Russia — hacked the Democratic National Committee and blamed the Kremlin.
Cruz’s joins senators like Richard Burr, R-N.C., John Cornyn, R-Tex., John Kennedy, R-La., and John Barrasso, R-Wyo., in pushing baseless allegations that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election in recent weeks.
After the interview, Cruz accused Todd of “deliberately LYING” on Twitter and doubled down on his claim that “there’s significant evidence” of his allegation against the media.
Top officials who reviewed the evidence told Congress that this is not true. David Hale, the No. 3 official at the State Department, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that he was not aware of any evidence of Ukrainian interference in the election.
Fiona Hill, the former top Russia expert on the National Security Council, told the House Intelligence Committee last month that “this is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services.”
Cruz’s GOP colleague Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, agreed that there was “no evidence” that Ukraine interfered in the election. And fellow Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., told Politico that it is “important to distinguish op-eds . . . from the systemic effort to undermine our election systems.”
“There’s no way to compare any other efforts to what Russia did in 2016,” Rubio said. “There’s nothing that compares not even in the same universe.”
Former Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Penn., told CNN on Sunday that he was stunned by Cruz’s remarks.
“I can’t explain it,” he said. “You would think a man like that would have more self-respect. After all the things President Trump said about him and his family, you would think he would be out there trying to speak truth to power at a time like this.”
https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/gops-ted-cruz-draws-audible-laughs-on-live-tv-after-pushing-debunked-ukraine-conspiracy-theory/
Ted Cruz draws audible laughs on live TV after pushing debunked Ukraine conspiracy theory
romney crit trump again 10/19 called for impeach?
https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/utah-anti-impeachment-rally-backfires-as-trump-critics-vastly-outnumber-supporters/
...*Salt Lake Tribune’s* Lee Davidson reports that the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee this week held a rally outside the offices of Rep. Ben McAdams (D-UT) to get him to back off his support of impeaching President Donald
...
==
==
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23052019/carbon-pricing-microsoft-pepsi-stonyfield-corporate-lobbying-congress-climate-change-solutions
An epic quest loomed Wednesday before the largest gathering of business leaders in a decade to advocate for climate action on Capitol Hill.
Could they find a single Republican in the U.S. Senate to take up the cause of carbon pricing?
The answer appeared to be: "Not yet."
Officials from Microsoft, Nike, Pepsi, eBay, Exelon, Gap, Levi's, Mars and Tesla were among more than 75 business leaders making the case for a national price on carbon. They scheduled 80 meetings with lawmakers and staff, half of them with Republicans. Lawmakers and their aides ducked behind closed doors to confer with members of the delegation throughout the day.
Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who introduced bipartisan carbon tax legislation in the last Congress and would like to do so again, set up one roundtable meeting between his colleagues and six CEOs with a ground rule that he wouldn't name which members of Congress came to hear the pitch. (The bill he introduced last session put a fee on emissions of greenhouse gases and paid the revenues back to the public as a so-called "dividend.")
"By offering an invitation to come have an off-the-record conversation with CEOs, I was partly recognizing that it is politically challenging or sensitive to have conservative Republicans in a room talking about a price on carbon," Coons said. "And I'm trying to find a way to move that conversation forward."
One Republican who is seen by some as a hope for GOP climate leadership did stop and speak briefly with a reporter outside the door on his way out of a half-hour session with CEOs.
"I think we're a long way from legislation of that character at this stage," said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) of their plea for congressional action.
Although Romney maintained a skeptical stance on climate during his 2012 presidential run, his more recent statements show openness to addressing climate change—including a 2017 Tweetpraising the carbon fee-and-dividend proposal by the Climate Leadership Council, a coalition of businesses and environmental groups. But Romney, who represents astate where coal is the state rock,was not ready to commit to any view on what Congress should be doing.
"They made a number of important points about creating incentives for the various industries to consider a carbon-friendly approach as opposed to a less carbon-friendly approach, and creating pricing mechanisms that would encourage them to emit less carbon," Romney said.
Climate Reports, Polls and a Republican Shift
The companies lobbying for carbon pricing together represented combined annual revenues of more than $2.5 trillion, according to the sustainability nonprofit group Ceres, which helped organizing the lobbying effort. Boston-based Ceres works with investors and companies to build networks of leaders on climate issues.
Dawn Martin, executive vice president of Ceres, said the business members of its policy network began pushing for the idea of a group lobbying effort on Capitol Hill after back-to-back climate science reports last fall—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 1.5 degrees report and the Fourth National Climate Assessment—issued stark warnings about the need to rein in greenhouse gases quickly.
"It's been a game-changer for people," said Martin. And while there isn't a GOP standard-bearer in Congress on carbon pricing, Martin said she has seen a shift.
"To have Republicans saying, 'We get it, but it's the wrong solution'—at least they get it now," she said. "And that has happened relatively overnight."
That was also the finding of a national survey released earlier this week by the GOP polling firm Luntz Global. The surveyfound that by a margin of 8 to 1, U.S. voters are more worried about climate today than they were a year ago. Luntz found majority support across party lines for the carbon fee-and-dividend proposal of the Climate Leadership Council, which commissioned the survey. Among Republicans under age 40, 75 percent supported the idea of pricing carbon and returning all revenue to households.
Republicans on Capitol Hill are acting as though they've seen similar polling. Fewer are now openly questioning the core science of climate change, but many are still steering clear of the idea of strong government action.
The Republican-controlled Senate Agriculture Committee, stacked with farm state lawmakers who have largely ignored the topic, held a hearing Tuesday focused on climate change in which several senators and witnesses raised the prospect of carbon markets. With the farm sector battered by a series of natural disasters and suffering under President Donald Trump's trade policies, the idea of possible farm revenue from carbon markets has appeal, and evenAgriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue voiced support for the idea.But Republican lawmakers, who have long fought anything that remotely hints of regulation on American farms, were wary.
"What I would hate to see is heavy handed government regulation," said Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst. "I think we can do this on our own."
What Business Leaders Are Saying
Many Republicans are touting technology subsidies—not taxes—as the solution. At a House Ways and Means Committee hearing last week, several Republicans voiced support for increased incentives to spur innovation.
Hugh Welsh, president of DSM North America, a nutrition and health company, said he was telling lawmakers that government incentives are fine for sparking innovation, but not for scaling them up enough to make a difference on climate change. For example, DSM has developed a feed additive that the company says would reduce methane emissions from cows by 30 percent, but he said there's not enough incentive for farms to buy the product unless there is a market imperative to reduce greenhouse gases.
Jeff Eckel, CEO of the Annapolis, Md.-based clean investment firm Hannon Armstrong, is convinced he can make a business case for carbon pricing that should appeal to Republicans. To rely on subsidies and incentives alone, he said, "is a distinctly non-conservative economic position. If you want to go back to free market principles, you put a price on carbon and you stop socializing the cost" of climate change.
The business leaders said they understood, however, that no matter how much progress they made in their lobbying day on Capitol Hill, they were not likely to see legislation in the short-term with the Trump administration maintaining its stance of climate denial.
"We know where this administration is. It's living in a fact-free fantasy," said Gary Hirshberg, chairman of theorganic yogurt company Stonyfield Farm."But this is a matter of enormous urgency. What we need to help our colleagues and representatives understand is that this is not a partisan issue."
Said Welsh, "I think everybody understands that not much is going to get done in this Congress, in the polarized, divisive state we're in. But that's not a deterrent. That does not discourage us. It may be the first time we're up on the Hill, but it won't be the last time."
==
==
good e&e
Utah Sen.-elect Mitt Romney signaled he may focus on climate change when he's sworn in in January.
In a brief interview with E&E News yesterday, the former Republican presidential nominee said he sees climate change as a "critical area."
Asked if it was an issue he planned to be active on in the Senate, Romney said that he intends "to be active in everything I can be active in" after he takes his post.
Romney, a 2012 Republican presidential nominee who easily won his race to replace outgoing Sen. Orrin Hatch (R), has swung on the issue of greenhouse gas emissions for years.
As governor of the blue state of Massachusetts, he pushed to close old coal-fired power plants and helped create the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative — essentially a cap-and-trade plan — in the Northeast (Climatewire, Nov. 8).
He has also long advocated increased oil and gas production in an effort to increase U.S. energy independence, including drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
As a presidential candidate in a competitive GOP primary, Romney took a modified tone, shifting some of the dialogue to questions of economics as opposed to science.
"My view is that we don't know what's causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us," he said during a 2011 fundraiser, according to ABC News.
But for the past six years, the Republican has been fairly consistent in emphasizing climate change as an urgent problem that humans contribute to and demands action.
Last year, Romney told college students in St. Louis that he was "concerned about the anti-scientific attitude" expressed by some of his Republican colleagues and that he was convinced humanity has played a part in global warming (Climatewire, Oct. 3).
"I happen to believe that there is climate change, and I think humans contribute to it in a substantial way, and therefore I look with openness to all the ideas that might be able to address that," he said at the time.
2 in AN
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/mitt-romney-living-proof-there-are-no-decent-republicans-gop
==
2012 presidential candidate Mitt RomneyAs Governor of Massachusetts between 2002 and 2006, Romney said green energy could create jobs and recognized that climate change was caused by human activity. "I think the global warming debate is now pretty much over and people recognize the need associated with providing sources which do not generate the heat currently provided by fossil fuels," he said in 2003. He even opposed a temporary suspension of the state's gasoline tax during a period of high gas prices in 2006, saying that "these high gasoline prices are probably here to stay and that the appropriate action for us to take is to find ways to find fuel conservation."
Early in the presidential campaign Romney still recognized the existence of climate change. In June of 2011 he said, "I believe the world's getting warmer" and "I believe that humans contribute to that ... so I think it's important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases." Even in August of 2011, after climate change denier and Texas Governor Rick Perry had entered the GOP presidential primary and was a threat to Romney's candidacy, he still said, "I think the earth is getting warmer ... I think humans contribute to that. I don't know by how much. It could be a little. It could be a lot."
Just weeks later, Romney had completely shifted his position. On October 28, 2011, he said, "My view is that we don't know what's causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us." By the time of the Republican National Convention in August of 2012, Romney was openly mocking http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/10/29/1105451/mckibben-to-romney-please-explain-again-why-slowing-the-rise-of-the-oceans-is-such-a-silly-plan/any notion of taking action to slow global warming.
What changed?
Romney Changed Position While Wooing Kochs
One clue might come from a Romney campaign memo dated October 4, 2011 -- just weeks before the candidate flip-flopped on climate change -- indicating that Romney had been actively seeking the endorsement of Koch Industries heir David Koch. David and his brother Charles are top funders of climate change denial front groups and have long played an important role in choosing GOP political candidates, both via direct donations and through organizations like the David Koch-founded-and-led Americans for Prosperity.
Romney at the time was struggling for Tea Party support, and the memo, obtained by the conservative Washington Examiner noted that the Kochs were the "financial engine of the Tea Party." According to the Washington Examiner, just a few days after Romney announced his new agnosticism on climate change he bypassed an important Iowa event in advance of that state's crucial primary to speak at an AFP event. Romney also had scheduled a meeting at Koch's home in Southampton, NY, but it was cancelled because of the last natural disaster to pummel the East Coast, Hurricane Irene.
Though the Kochs had endorsed Romney in his 2008 presidential run, the Koch endorsement for 2012 was not immediate. Herman Cain, who had previously worked with Americans for Prosperity and referred to himself as the "Koch brothers' brother from another mother" at a November 2011 AFP convention, was leading in the polls until late last year, when allegations of sexual harassment and an extra-marital affair sank his campaign. But Romney eventually survived the GOP primary and sufficiently ingratiated himself with the Koch brothers to earn their endorsement.
And the Kochs have come through for Romney. In addition to the mailer sent to 45,000 Koch Industries employees urging them to vote for Romney and other Republicans, David Koch's AFP has spent at least $31 million on ads attacking President Barack Obama, and have spent millions more organizing a sophisticated get-out-the-vote effort for Romney.
David Koch also held a $50,000 per plate Romney fundraiser in July, and mocked a plane flying overhead with a MoveOn.org banner that read "Romney Has a Koch Problem." Koch told the crowd, "I understand there is a plane out there saying Mitt Romney has 'a Koch problem.' I don't look at it as a problem; I look at it as an asset."
With Atlantic storms growing in frequency and severity as a result of warming oceans, millions of Americans are becoming increasingly vulnerable to catastrophe -- but Romney's opportunistic "Koch problem" may have pushed him into taking a position that ignores reality.
Attachment http://www.prwatch.org/node/11822
==
he longer he runs for president, the more doubts Republican front-runner Mitt Romney seems to have about the science behind global climate change.
Speaking at a closed-door fundraiser Thursday in Pittsburgh, Romney's position on the causes of global warming continued the rightward shift that has been underway for several months. "My view is that we don't know what's causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us,"he told donors at the Consol Energy Center.
As recently as his 2010 book, No Apology, Romney wrote, "I believe that climate change is occurring. ... I also believe that human activity is a contributing factor. I am uncertain how much of the warming, however, is attributable to man and how much is attributable to factors out of our control."
In June of this year, Reuters reported that Romney said that the United States should "reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors." Then in August, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who openly questions the science of climate change factors, entered the GOP primary race, and Romney appeared to dial down his own certainty of the science, saying, "I think the earth is getting warmer. ... I think humans contribute to that. I don't know by how much. It could be a little. It could be a lot."
While Romney's expressed skepticism about climate change plays well with conservatives, Democrats are bound to use it against him with the moderate and independent voters who hold sway in a general election. His remarks at the Pittsburgh fundraiser were captured on video, which ended up in the hands of the liberal Center for American Progress. The center distributed the video to news outlets today.
Romney spokesman Ryan Williams said Friday, "Governor Romney has been consistent in his statements on global warming."
At the fundraiser, Romney was asked by a member of the audience to explain his position on man-made global warming and asked further whether he would reject a cap-and-trade bill to limit carbon emissions linked to climate change.
Romney replied, "Man-made global warming and cap and trade and so forth - I actually had in Massachusetts a consortium of states that came together with a cap and trade program. It was called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. And all the governors, Governor Pataki and so forth, signed it. I refused to sign. I do not believe in a cap and trade program."
By the way, they do not call it America warming, they call it global warming. So the idea of America spending massive amounts, trillions of dollars to somehow stop global warming is not a great idea. It loses jobs for Americans and ultimately it won't be successful, because industries that are energy intensive will just get up and go somewhere else. So it doesn't make any sense at all. My view is that we don't know what's causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us. My view with regards to energy policy is pretty straightforward. I want us to become energy secure and independent of the oil cartels. And that means let's aggressively develop our oil, our gas, our coal, our nuclear power."
energy co $ in election http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-zeller-jr/the-politics-of-climate-silence_b_2026392.html?view=print&comm_ref=false
==
Environmental advocates argue that the scope of the law has narrowedin recent years due to misguided Supreme Court decisions and confusing regulatory guidance. And they say it will erode further if Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney wins the presidential race.
In discussing agricultural policy, Romney highlights President Barack Obama's "overzealous efforts to extend the Clean Water Act to rainwater in ditches."
His plan would require Congress to approve new major regulations proposed by federal agencies, as part of an effort to reverse what he calls "the massive overregulationthat President Obama has pursued."
"A Romney Administration will appoint strong leaders to handle regulatory agencies," the Romney Campaign responded to questions from the American Soybean Association. "These leaders will be chosen because they understand the private sector."
During Tuesday's debate, Romney frequently touted his "life in the private sector," but his first private sector client is probably the most despised company among proponents of clean water: Monsanto, the manufacturer of products like Agent Orange and Roundup weed killer. *The Nation* reported in September that the "romance between Romney and Monsanto" began in 1977 and continues today with Monsanto friends and partners currently packing his 11-member Agricultural Advisory Committee.
The Obama administration isn't void of Big Ag ties either, as reflected by the appointment of Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, a major Monsanto supporter during his time as the governor of Iowa....
==
Mitt Romney's Bain Made Millions On Big Tobacco In U.S., Russia
Posted: 10/09/2012 12:46 am EDT Updated: 10/09/2012 10:53 am EDT
WASHINGTON -- As the Soviet Union splintered in the early-1990s, Sushovan Ghosh packed his colleagues into a van and chugged across the collapsing nation, hitting depressed towns and famished cities, busted up factories and lonely kiosks. In each ragged destination, they stopped long enough to interview cigarette smokers.
Ghosh plied the citizenry with free cigarettes and, sometimes, McDonald’s hamburgers.
They were pursuing a lucrative target: determining what Russian smokers wanted out of a cigarette -- specifically, a Western cigarette. "We had to develop a brand the Russians would smoke," Ghosh explained to The Huffington Post. For one study, they interviewed more than 1,000 smokers. "We stopped the bus and offered them cigarettes. And they all queued."
Ghosh’s work for cigarette companies was chaotic, unbridled and, ultimately, deadly. To Mitt Romney and his colleagues at Bain & Co., it was a chance to rake in money. Ghosh said he reported directly to Romney, who was excited about the Russian market. "He was my boss," Ghosh said.
At the time, Romney was CEO of Bain & Co., the Boston-based consulting firm that launched his white-collar career and led him into the high-stakes world of corporate buyouts. Although Romney's activities helming the private equity giant Bain Capital have drawn significant attention, his role at Bain & Co. has received almost no public scrutiny. A Huffington Post investigation into Bain's tobacco work found that the consulting firm helped Philip Morris increase its revenues in the U.S., and aided two other tobacco titans as they vied to move forcefully into the Russian market....http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/09/mitt-romney-bain-tobacco_n_1949812.html?view=print&comm_ref=false
murray miners req to go to rally w/o pay http://grist.org/news/romney-coal-miner-ad-provokes-complaint-to-fec/
bump grist:
Four times as much money has been spent on ads promoting the fossil fuel industry during this presidential campaign than in defense of President Obama’s efforts to increase clean energy production or to discuss global warming and air pollution. Four times as much. Some $153 million — as of a few weeks ago.
An increasingly nervous Mitt Romney has turned to the imaginary “war on coal” to buttress his eroding position in Ohio. (A Times/Quinnipiac poll out today has Romney down 10 points in a state that is almost must-win.)
The “war on coal” argument, like the argument from fossil fuel companies, is that the president’s policies on energy development hurt the economy, that the effort to reduce pollution from fossil fuels costs jobs. The argument is much more commonly made during debate on the House floor and at campaign rallies than it is by economists — for good reason. It doesn’t hold up.
Research released yesterday by the (admittedly left-leaning) Economic Policy Institute argues that the economic impacts of the Obama administration’s (modest) efforts to reduce pollution uniformly produce much more economic benefit than cost. Specifically: for $26 billion in cost associated with pollution reduction, the country sees $144 billion in benefit — a return of $5.50 on every dollar spent.
Mitt Romney's Dangerous Foreign Policy Team: Nostalgic for Bush, Hellbent on War with Iran
May 1, 2012 |
It's hard to watch the Romney campaign with a straight face. Their latest crackup has one Romney adviser, John Lehman [3], [3]warning of the “Soviet threat [3]," and another, Pierre Prosper, complaining that the administration hasn't done enough to stand with Czechoslovakia. And those comments were hardly the first time we've heard throwbacks to the Cold War in this campaign. But don't laugh too hard—it might distract from the dangerous and discredited worldview Romney's foreign policy team is pushing.
Despite Obama’s expansion of the war in Afghanistan and his ramping up of drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan, Romney claims Obama is a president who does not want “America to be the strongest nation on earth,” as he told [4] an audience at the Citadel military college in South Carolina.
Romney’s persistent knocks on Obama’s foreign policy make clear that, while the economy will be the number-one issue this year, foreign policy will be a close runner-up. Behind Romney’s statements on world affairs is a group of close advisers whose views harken back to the Bush administration’s belligerent neoconservative brand of US foreign policy--not the best idea, considering how discredited it has become.
“The most striking aspect of Romney's approach to foreign policy is its lack of creativity -- its brazen willingness to recycle Bush-era talking points, attitudes, and of course personnel,” said Peter Certo, a researcher at Right Web, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies. “A Romney administration would be a fresh canvas for the neocons to paint on.”
As the general election season heats up, the noise from the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party will only grow louder. So here’s a look at three of the top advisers shaping Romney’s view of the world.
1. Eliot Cohen.Currently a professor at John Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, Cohen [5] was a founder of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and is now a special adviser [6] for the Romney campaign. The Washington, DC-based PNAC was an influential incubator of neoconservative policy ideas whose members later went on to successfully push for the invasion of Iraq. He was a member of the Defense Policy Board, a Department of Defense advisory committee, while Donald Rumsfeld ran the show, and served as counselor to Condoleezza Rice while she was Secretary of State.
Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Cohen penned [7] a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he labeled the US “war on terror” as “World War IV,” and advocated for the overthrow of both the Iranian and Iraqi governments. Cohen’s focus on Iran has not relented: in 2009, another op-ed in the Journal [8] again called for the overthrow of the Iranian regime—which could only be accomplished by a full-scale invasion and occupation.
In October 2011, the prominent neoconservative wrote the foreword to a "white paper [9]" laying out Romney’s foreign policy vision. It reads, in the words of journalist Max Blumenthal [10], as “a concoction of post-9/11 unilateralism and unvarnished neo-imperialism.”
The paper calls for boosting the military budget, and the assertion of US dominance in Asia against a “rising China.” The document also warns that the Arab Spring might become an “Arab winter” due to Iranian or Islamist influence, and criticizes the Obama administration’s plan on Iraq, which called for 3,000 troops to stay in the country after the expiration of the Status of Forces Agreement. The white paper called for 14,000-18,000 troops to stay on in the country. Today, only 150 American troops remain in Iraq.
On Iran, the country that Cohen and his neoconservative colleagues are currently targeting, the paper states: “U.S. policy toward Iran must begin with an understanding on Iran’s part that a military option to deal with their nuclear program remains on the table.” The paper also slams the “anti-American ‘Bolivarian’ movement across Latin America” and denounces the Obama administration’s alleged support for Manuel Zeyala, the Honduran president deposed in a coup in 2009.
All in all, the paper Cohen wrote the foreword to is an ode to US empire that pines for the Bush administration’s approach to international affairs. Having an official like Cohen figure so prominently in the campaign “represents a general refusal to repudiate the Bush administration's approach to intelligence gathering, its sunny view of the Iraq war, and its dismissive attitude toward the world community,” Right Web's Certo said. “It's a heavy nod to the ancien regime in an issue area that gets little attention from the public.”
2. Dan Senor.Well known for his past role as chief spokesperson for the Coalition Provisional Authority in American-occupied Iraq, Senor [11] is closely linked to neoconservative policy circles. He is also currently a “special adviser” to Romney, and was a senior adviser for Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign. Senor is a co-founder of the Foreign Policy Initiative [12], a PNAC-linked group that advocates for US pressure on Iran and a military solution to the crisis in Syria.
Senor has acted as one of Romney’s go-to men on Israel, a country Senor has close ties with. Senor is a former intern for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and still has ties to the lobby group. His sister, Wendy Singer, runs AIPAC's operations in Israel. [13]
“He'll essentially be a Netanyahu guy inside the White House. He's going to be the AIPAC enforcer,” MJ Rosenberg, a prolific critic of AIPAC who used to work for the lobby, told AlterNet. Rosenberg also worked as chief of staff for Congressman Edward Feighan, D-Ohio while Senor was an intern there in the early 1990s. “You can't be an American and be closer to the right-wing part of Israel than Dan Senor is.”
Senor is the co-author of Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, which lauds Israel’s economic progress while skirting mention of the Israeli occupation--an omission that, as the *Jewish Daily Forward* [14]noted [14], aligned “nicely with recent public relations efforts by Israel to shift attention away from its problems and toward its achievements.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called Senor and co-author Saul Singer (Wendy Singer's husband) “perceptive writers,” and quipped at a 2009 speech [15] to the Jewish Federations of North America that Israel “is the start-up nation.” And when Netanyahu wanted to get a message across to Romney fast--that Netanyahu had played “no role” in billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s decision to bankroll Newt Gingrich--he relayed a message to Senor, according to the *New York Times* [16].
Senor is a contributor to various media outlets. In July 2010, before scheduled talks between Obama and Netanyahu, Senor took to the Daily Beast [17] to argue that Obama “must reassure Netanyahu” in order to head off a “train wreck” for Mideast diplomacy. The argument dovetails with the view pushed by the Israel lobby that there should be no “daylight” between the US and Israel, and that disagreements on policy should be aired in private.
In September 2011, Senor wrote in the *Wall Street Journal* [18] that the president had “launched” an “offensive” against Israel after a March 2010 announcement of new settlements in Jerusalem. In the same op-ed, he lambasted the State Department for considering Jerusalem, a city under occupation, separate from Israel proper.
Clearly, Senor’s position is that the US should never put pressure on Israel, which is exactly the position Romney professes. At a December 2011 debate in Iowa, Romney stated [19]: “If we disagree with [Israel], like this president has time and time again, we don't do it in public like he's done it, we do it in private. And we let the Israeli leadership describe what they believe the right course is going forward.”
3. Cofer Black.A former vice-chairman for the private security company Blackwater USA, Black has been involved with the Romney campaign since 2007 [20], when he came on as a senior adviser on counterterrorism and national security.
Writing in theDaily Beast, the right-leaning national security reporter Eli Lake explained that Black was Romney’s [21] “trusted envoy to the murky world of the U.S. intelligence community who is also treated like a close political aide.” According to Lake’s reporting, Black sets up intelligence briefings for Romney from former CIA officers, and used his contacts in the Egyptian and Israeli intelligence worlds to debrief Romney on events in the region.
As Lake notes, Black’s claim to fame as a CIA officer is that he did “much of the street work” that led to the apprehension of Carlos the Jackal. He was part of the CIA team that tracked bin Laden in the 1990s. Black, a 28-year CIA veteran who directed the agency’s counter-terror center from 1999-2002, also served during the Bush administration as State Department coordinator for counterterrorism, and resigned shortly after Bush’s 2004 reelection.
According to Jeremy Scahill’s book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, Black played “an essential role in crafting and implementing the Bush administration’s counter-terror policies.” Specifically, Black played an integral part in the use of “extraordinary renditions,” the euphemism for the Bush administration’s program of kidnapping alleged terrorists and spiriting them off to secret CIA prisons around the world to be tortured.
In 2005, Black joined the Blackwater USA team, the well-connected private security company that has been derided as a “mercenary” group, as vice chairman. He stayed on until 2008, a year after Blackwater agents committed the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad, an event that resulted in the deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians.
Black's influence on Romney's views on torture is clear. In a 2007 debate, Romney was asked whether water-boarding was torture. His response was noncommittal, but noted that he gets advice on those questions “from Cofer Black, who is a person who was responsible for counter-terrorism in the CIA for some 35 years.” In November 2011, Romney advisers made clear [22] that the candidate does not believe that water-boarding is torture.
See more stories tagged with:
black [23],
foreign policy [24],
romney [25],
cohen [26],
senor [27]
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/alex-kane
[3] http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/04/romney-campaign-brackets-biden-foreign-policy-speech-by-warning-of-soviet-threat.php
[4] http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/186197-romney-emphasizes-military-strength-will-blast-obama-strategies-in-foreign-policy-speech-
[5] http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Cohen_Eliot
[6] http://www.mittromney.com/news/press/2011/10/mitt-romney-announces-foreign-policy-and-national-security-advisory-team
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_A._Cohen
[8] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204518504574420641457091318.html
[9] http://www.mittromney.com/sites/default/files/shared/AnAmericanCentury-WhitePaper_0.pdf
[10] http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/3901/
[11] http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/senor_dan
[12] http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/foreign_policy_initiative
[13] http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/04/as_christie_toured_israel_an_e.html
[14] http://forward.com/articles/126843/senor-decides-against-running-for-senate-citing-fa/
[15] http://www.haaretz.com/news/full-text-of-netanyahu-s-speech-at-jewish-federations-of-north-america-ga-1.4478
[16] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/us/politics/mitt-romney-and-benjamin-netanyahu-are-old-friends.html?pagewanted=all
[17] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/07/06/obama-netanyahu-white-house-meeting-peace-process-at-risk.html
[18] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904353504576568710341742174.html
[19] http://www.theisraelproject.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=ewJXKcOUJlIaG&b=7721235&ct=11521355#.T5mu_o7XEfE
[20] http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=95556#axzz1tAqZ5VID
[21] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/11/meet-mitt-romney-s-trusted-envoy-to-the-dark-side-cofer-black.html
[22] http://articles.cnn.com/2011-11-12/politics/politics_gop-cbs-debate_1_waterboarding-foreign-policy-gop-candidates?_s=PM:POLITICS
[23] http://www.alternet.org/tags/black
[24] http://www.alternet.org/tags/foreign-policy
[25] http://www.alternet.org/tags/romney-0
[26] http://www.alternet.org/tags/cohen
[27] http://www.alternet.org/tags/senor
[28] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
chickenhawk? 4 college deferments; 1968 mssionary in france (gloria borgia said dengerous: trains on strike and hard to get $ wired from dad? counterspin 9/o7/12 FAIR
ridicule ocean rise (out of context):http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-romm/romney-climate-change_b_1855252.html
dn; AMY GOODMAN: We are joined by Don Barlett and Jim Steele. They are the authors of the new book, The Betrayal of the American Dream. I want to go to the issue of the Olympics since they’re happening in London right now. In 2001, you wrote a story called "Snow Job" about the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, headed by none other than the Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney. In your investigation, "Snow Job," about these Olympics, which you published inSports Illustrated, you reported, quote, "The $1.5 billion in taxpayer [dollars] that Congress is pouring into Utah is 1.5 times the amount spent by lawmakers to support all seven Olympic Games held in the U.S. since 1904—combined." Jim Steele?...
JAMES STEELE: Well, his idea, I mean, is a very valid idea, because one of the things that’s been happening with the multinationals is a lot of the money they earn offshore, they keep offshore. The estimates of the amount of money that companies like Apple, the technology companies, the pharmaceutical companies, some of the big manufacturing companies—their estimates are $2 trillion is sitting in foreign accounts that they will not bring back to this country. And the reason they will not bring it back, they say, is because of this onerous U.S. tax rate.
But the fact of the matter is, once, a few years ago, Congress waived that and let a number of them bring money back—and my memory is they brought back $3.3 billion in some of the assets that were there—with the understanding that they would create jobs here. But you know what they did? Those same—the leading companies that brought their money back actually killed 20-some thousand jobs, did not create jobs. I mean, it just gets back to what Don was saying earlier in terms of the power of these multinational corporations. They’re beyond our control theoretically. And even when they get a right like that, it’s not enforced. And as a result of that, no jobs are created.
matt T on DN on vulture cap/LBO: http://www.alternet.org/print/election-2012/matt-taibbi-reveals-how-romney-made-his-fortune-it-aint-pretty-and-he-shouldnt-be
==
==
ff policyhttp://grist.org/news/romneys-energy-plan-dissected-putting-government-to-work-for-big-oil/
--
huffpo zeller
==
Romney, once an anti-sprawl crusader, created model for Obama ‘smart growth’ program
By Lisa Hymas
hoto by Gage Skidmore.)
Everyone knows that “Obamacare” was modeled on Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health-care law. But did you know that a key Obama “smart growth” initiative — the Partnership for Sustainable Communities — was also created in the mold of a Romney program?
Tea Partiers rallied to quash funding for this Obama partnership last fall. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), conservative darling, criticized the idea for the partnership when it first arose and accused the Obama administration of trying to impose “an urban-utopian fantasy through an unprecedented intrusion of the Federal Government into the shaping of local communities.” The Republican National Committee recently warned that smart growth is part of a U.N. conspiracy (green helicopters, anyone?).
This is yet another issue on which the party’s presumptive presidential nominee looks to be seriously out of sync with the GOP base.
Romney’s “get smart” phase
As governor of Massachusetts, Romney actively fought sprawl and promoted density. He ran on a smart-growth platform: “Sprawl is the most important quality-of-life issue facing Massachusetts,” he said in 2002.
After winning, Romney swiftly set about remaking state government to encourage smarter land use. He created a powerful new Office for Commonwealth Development, and appointed an aggressive environmental activist to run it — Douglas Foy, who for 25 years had headed the Conservation Law Foundation, a litigious regional environmental group. The state’s business community was appalled.
The Office for Commonwealth Development served as a “super-secretariat” or umbrella office for state agencies dealing with transportation, housing, energy, and the environment. It made sure the agencies were all pulling in the same direction toward smart-growth goals — concentrating development in town centers, constructing housing near transit stations, fixing existing roads instead of building new ones.
... grist
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/8/10/romneys_death_squad_ties_bain_launched
...
RYAN GRIM: He was assassinated the day after the clip you played, shot through the heart while delivering mass. We since know, conclusively, that his assassination was ordered by Roberto D’Aubuisson. D’Aubuisson, 18 months later would found the ARENA party which was, basically, at the time, a vehicle for these death squads. ARENA is still around. It has become more of a conventional Latin American right-wing party, but for its first several years, it was, quite simply, the political organization which was managing the death squads. So, Mitt Romney, in this context, knew very well what was happening in El Salvador. The U.S. Ambassador [Robert] White, who you mentioned —
AMY GOODMAN: Robert White.
RYAN GRIM: Robert White, had publicly accused six Salvadorans living in Miami of financing, two of them Salaverrias. When it was suggested to him by Harry Strachan that he go down to Miami to raise money from the exiles there, he actually said to Strachan, make sure that these people are not connected to right-wing death squads. It’s very clear he knew the context and he knew what was going on at the time, but he was having a seriously hard time raising capital for his new enterprise, Bain Capital, and his boss, Bill Bain, told him that he couldn’t use any of the investors or clients of Bain and Co., which was the very successful consulting firm, because if Bain Capital failed, he didn’t want it to take everything else down with it. It’s been reported in a number of places that he failed to raise capital from traditional sources in the U.S. So, given that, he flew to Miami and, in mid 1984, he went directly to a bank and met with a number of these families who were involved with death squads and accepted, what at the time, was a huge amount of money that amounted to 40% of the outside capital that he was able to raise for that initial fund. As Harry Strachan said, they continued to roll over their investments and certainly are worth tens of millions of dollars in Bain Capital now. Just reading from your piece, Ryan Grim, when Romney returned to Miami in 2007 to launch another venture that needed funding, his first presidential campaign, Romney said, "I owe a great deal to Americans of Latin American descent... When I was starting my business, I came to Miami to find partners that would believe in me and that would finance my enterprise. My partners were Ricardo Poma, Miguel Dueñas, Pancho Soler, Frank Kardonski, and Diego Ribadeneira." Can you talk about these men, like Poma, and their relationship to the death squads in El Salvador?
RYAN GRIM: The Poma family was one of the top families in El Salvador. They were very tightly intertwined with ARENA. The Salaverrias, which we mentioned earlier, two of them were specifically named by White as specifically financing death squads. The De Solas are another family that originally invested in Bain. We know that at least four members of the De Sola family invested in Bain. We only know the names of two of them. There’s one man named Orlando de Sola who the Romney campaign, and nobody else, denies, was a leader of the death squad movement. There’s no question about that. What the Romney campaign has relied on is that they say that Orlando de Solo was a black sheep of the De Sola family. The fact that he was running death squads should not besmirch the four De Sola investors, even though they won’t tell us who two of those four were. However, what we found was that one of the two named De Sola investors — his name is Francisco de Sola — was connected in 1990 to the assassination of two left-wing activists.
There was a meeting held in Guatemala that Chris Dodd, the former senator from Connecticut, moderated. He was trying to strike a peace deal between ARENA and the FMLN. And shortly after that meeting two of the activists who had met with him were assassinated. The Guatemalan government, citing its intelligence sources, concluded that the assassinations were committed by Orlando de Sola, Roberto D’Aubuisson and Fransicso de Sola. Now, Francisco de Sola is still alive and his assistant confirmed to us that he was one of those three people who was accused of these murders. Now, he denied it at the time and denies it today, but just the fact that the Guatemalan intelligence services would lump him together with Orlando de Sola and Roberto D’Abuisson, just known as the basically two leaders of the death squad movement at the time, dramatically undermines the notion that the people involved with Bain are somehow deeply disconnected or that there’s some bright line between the people involved in Bain and the people who are funding and operating the death squads.
AMY GOODMAN: Ryan Grim, Mitt Romney’s response to your investigation and to these allegations?
RYAN GRIM: What they did is they sent me a paragraph of an article from the Salt Lake Tribune in 1999 that read, "As was Bain’s policy, they had the families checked out as diligently as possible. They uncovered no unsavory links to drugs or other criminal activity." That is simply impossible to believe. These families were certainly connected to death squads. Now Romney told the Boston Globe in 1994, something along the lines of, we checked out the individual investors and made sure there were no "obvious signs of criminal activity," we didn’t check out their in-laws and their cousins. Those are two inconsistent levels of diligence that Romney is claiming to two separate papers. But, if you take the one at the Tribune, which was sent to me by the Romney campaign, that’s simply unbelievable. There’s no possible way that anybody in 1984 could check out these families — which is the term they use, these families — and come away convinced that this money was clean.
AMY GOODMAN: You quote Robert White saying, "The Salaverria family was very well known." Robert White was the U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador. "The Salaverria family was very well known as backers of D’Abussionthese guys big money contributors, they were total backers of D’Abuisson including death squads." And I wanted to read an excerpt from Greg Grandin’s book, "Empire’s Workshop." He is a professor of Latin American history at New York University. He writes, "The problem was that the military groups had very little popular support due in large part to the fact that they were 'preternaturally violent.' According to Reagan’s own ambassador, Robert White, their solution to the crisis 'was apocalyptic: the country must be ’destroyed totally, the economy must be wrecked, unemployment must be massive,' and a 'cleansing' of some '3 or 4 or 500,000 people' must be carried out," he says. And he his quoting Robert White. Ryan Grim?
RYAN GRIM: I spoke also with the Sergio Bendixen who is a pollster who did a lot of work in the country in the 1980’s for Univision and is now, coincidentally, he became a pollster for Hillary Clinton and he’s now working with the Obama campaign now. He knew D’Abuisson and he knew lot of the people who were involved with these death squads, and he said that, and this is what I have heard from other people who are familiar with him in the exile community, that this is not something they would hide. Like you said, they were persuaded that they were freedom fighters, that they were on the side of justice, and that if it meant that you had to kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, those were evil people who were supported by Castrowho wanted to bring about tyranny, etc., etc. So, everything that they were doing was justified by that. Mitt Romney even hinted at that in his 2007 talk to the Miami crowd when he came down to raise money for his campaign. He said, not only did these people invest in me, but they taught me a lot. And what they taught me is that these guerrillas were horrible and they kidnapped one of their brothers and killed him and they tortured Miguel Dueñas he mentions. They kidnapped and tortured Miguel Dueñas. There’s no question that atrocities were certainly committed by both sides, but you can see in that quote that Romney is partly buying into this notion that the violence was justified. And he would not be at all be alone in the Republican Party at that time or the Democratic Party. As you said,these death squads had the backing of the United States government.
AMY GOODMAN: We are talking about, as you said, tens of thousands of people in 1989, the government bestowed the Salvadoran government, bestowed — well, this was in 2009. But, remembering, 20 years ago, the killing of the six Jesuit priests in 1989, and then there was the killing of the four American nuns, all these part of the casualties of, as you said, the Salvadoran military and paramilitary, overwhelmingly doing the killing. Now, interestingly, we started with Oscar Romero’s death March 24, 1980. Killed by the right-wing death squads in Salvador. President Obama visited Honduras visited El Salvador and went to the grave of Archbishop Oscar Romero.
RYAN GRIM: And that was an acknowledgment that what the United States and its allies in El Salvador did in the 1980’s was wrong. It wasn’t exactly, but it was tantamount to an apology for all of the death and destruction that was brought about in the name of anti-communism. Archbishop Romero is now known as one of the great heroes and martyrs of the 20th-century. At the same time that we’re talking about Romney’s Association here, we ought to mention that the current occupant of the White House has — operates drones that kill people on a fairly regular basis. There is, unfortunately, still no shortage of killing around the globe.
AMY GOODMAN: And, interestingly, the question, will the Obama administration will make something of this initial Bain investment capital, and will the Romney administration — will the Romney campaign raise the issue of President Obama and his kill list and the operating of drones that are killing many in Yemen and Pakistan, etc.
RYAN GRIM: It will be interesting to see. If the Obama campaign does do anything with it, I would expect that it would be done in the Latino community to help drive support for Obama there, because as you said, there are thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of refugees who are here today because of the violence from there, and when they find out that the oligarchs that were funding that violence get also helped get Romney’s Bain Capital off the ground, that could influence the way they vote.
AMY GOODMAN: Are these families still donating to Romney’s current presidential campaign as they did to his first effort?
RYAN GRIM: I didn’t find any of them doing so. Romney had a strange use of the phrase we he went to Latin America; he called them Americans of Latin American descent. I don’t know if they have become Americans in the sense of the United States as America. If they haven’t gotten U.S. citizenship, then they can’t donate directly to U.S. presidential campaigns. I searched a few names that we do know, and they did not come up as donors to his presidential campaign. But, as Harry Strachan said, they have become — they continue to be significant investors in Bain Capital. Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, Bain Capital made just absolutely extraordinary returns, something like 88% annual return over two decades, which is just an absolutely astounding amount of money. If you apply that to $9 million initial investment, you get an absolute fortune.
AMY GOODMAN: Ryan Grim, I want to thank you for being with us, Washington Bureau Chief for The Huffington Post for his latest story, "Mitt Romney Started Bain Capital With Money From Families Tied To Death Squads". We’ll link to it at Democracy Now! This is Democracy Now!. Next up, we’re going to the Syria-Turkish borders. Stay with us.
Mitt Romney Started Bain Capital With Money From Families Tied To Death Squads
Posted: 08/08/2012 9:38 am Updated: 08/08/2012 1:05 pm
ryan@huffingtonpost.com
In 1983, Bill Bain asked Mitt Romney to launch Bain Capital, a private equity offshoot of the successful consulting firm Bain & Company. After some initial reluctance, Romney agreed. The new job came with a stipulation: Romney couldn't raise money from any current clients, Bain said, because if the private equity venture failed, he didn't want it taking the consulting firm down with it.
When Romney struggled to raise funds from other traditional sources, he and his partners started thinking outside the box. Bain executive Harry Strachan suggested that Romney meet with a group of Central American oligarchs who were looking for new investment vehicles as turmoil engulfed their region.
Romney was worried that the oligarchs might be tied to "illegal drug money, right-wing death squads, or left-wing terrorism," Strachan later told a Boston Globe reporter, as quoted in the 2012 book "The Real Romney." But, pressed for capital, Romney pushed his concerns aside and flew to Miami in mid-1984 to meet with the Salvadorans at a local bank.
It was a lucrative trip. The Central Americans provided roughly $9 million -- 40 percent -- of Bain Capital's initial outside funding, the *Los Angeles Times* reported recently. And they became valued clients.
"Over the years, these Latin American friends have loyally rolled over investments in succeeding funds, actively participated in Bain Capital's May investor meetings, and are still today one of the largest investor groups in Bain Capital," Strachan wrote in his memoir in 2008. Strachan declined to be interviewed for this story.
When Romney launched another venture that needed funding -- his first presidential campaign -- he returned to Miami.
"I owe a great deal to Americans of Latin American descent," he said at a dinner in Miami in 2007. "When I was starting my business, I came to Miami to find partners that would believe in me and that would finance my enterprise. My partners were Ricardo Poma, Miguel Dueñas, Pancho Soler, Frank Kardonski, and Diego Ribadeneira."
Romney could also have thanked investors from two other wealthy and powerful Central American clans -- the de Sola and Salaverria families, who the Los Angeles Timesand Boston Globe have reported were founding investors in Bain Capital.
While they were on the lookout for investments in the United States, members of some of these prominent families -- including the Salaverria, Poma, de Sola and Dueñas clans -- were also at the time financing, either directly or through political parties, death squads in El Salvador. The ruling classes were deploying the death squads to beat back left-wing guerrillas and reformers during El Salvador's civil war.
The death squads committed atrocities on such a mass scale for so small a country that their killing spree sparked international condemnation. From 1979 to 1992, some 75,000 people were killed in the Salvadoran civil war, according to the United Nations. In 1982, two years before Romney began raising money from the oligarchs, El Salvador's independent Human Rights Commission reported that, of the 35,000 civilians killed, "most" died at the hands of death squads. A United Nations truth commission concluded in 1993 that 85 percent of the acts of violence were perpetrated by the right, while the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, which was supported by the Cuban government, was responsible for 5 percent.
When The Huffington Post asked the Romney campaign about Bain Capital accepting funds from families tied to death squads, a spokeswoman forwarded a 1999 Salt Lake Tribune article to explain the campaign's position on the matter. She declined to comment further.
"Romney confirms Bain had investors in El Salvador. But, as was Bain's policy with any big investor, they had the families checked out as diligently as possible," the Tribune wrote. "They uncovered no unsavory links to drugs or other criminal activity."
Nobody with a basic understanding of the region's history could believe that assertion.
By 1984, the media had thoroughly exposed connections between the death squads and the Salvadoran oligarchy, including the families that invested with Romney. The sitting U.S. ambassador to El Salvador charged that several families, including at least one that invested with Bain, were living in Miami and directly funding death squads. Even by 1981, El Salvador's elite, largely relocated to Miami, were so angered by the public perception that they were financing death squads that they reached out to the media to make their case. The two men put forward to represent the oligarchs were both from families that would invest in Bain three years later. The most cursory review of their backgrounds would have turned up the ties.
The connection between the families involved with Bain's founding and those who financed death squads was made by the Boston Globe in 1994 and the Salt Lake Tribunein 1999. This election cycle, Salon first raised the issue in January, and the *Los Angeles Times* filled out more of the record earlier this month.
There is no shortage of unsavory links. Even the Tribune article referred to by the Romney campaign reports that "about $6.5 million of $37 million that established the company came from wealthy El Salvadoran families linked to right-wing death squads."
The Salaverria family, whose fortune came from producing cotton and coffee, had deep connections to the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), a political party that death-squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson founded in the fall of 1981. The year before, El Salvador's government had pushed through land reforms and nationalized the coffee trade, moves that threatened a ruling class whose financial and political dominance was built in large part on growing coffee. ARENA controlled and directed death squads during its early years.
On March 24, 1980, Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador and an advocate of the poor, was celebrating Mass at a chapel in a small hospital when he was assassinated :{on D'Aubuisson's orders:(style="background-color:#fff200;"):}:, according to a person involved in the murder who later came forward.
The day before, Romero, an immensely popular figure, had called on the country's soldiers to refuse the government's orders to attack fellow Salvadorans.
"Before another killing order is given," he advised in his sermon, "the law of God must prevail: Thou shalt not kill."
In 1984, Robert White, the former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, named two Salaverria brothers -- Julio and Juan Ricardo -- as two of six Salvadoran exiles in Miami who had directly funded death squads, repeating in sworn congressional testimony a claim he'd made earlier as ambassador. The group became known as the "Miami Six." White testified that a source close to the Miami Six had notified the U.S. embassy of their activities in January 1981.
White was pushed out of his job by the incoming Reagan administration in 1981; he was considered insufficiently supportive of the Salvadoran ruling class. (D'Aubuisson endorsed Ronald Reagan in 1984.) When contacted by phone recently, White reiterated his claim about the Salaverria brothers, but said he couldn't reveal his source's identity in order to protect the source.
"The Salaverria family were very well-known as backers of D'Aubuisson," White told The Huffington Post. "These guys were big-money contributors. ... They were total backers of D'Aubuisson and the extremist solution, including death squads."
Alfonso Salaverria was a close associate of Orlando de Sola, a leading death-squad figure, and, like him, supported D'Aubuisson.
The Salaverria family also violently resisted land reform efforts. When the Salvadoran government seized about 140 of the country's largest farms in March 1980, 73-year-old Raul Salaverria was the only landowner to openly resist, the Washington Post reported at the time. A brief exchange of gunfire between government forces and Salaverria's people resulted in two injuries, and 1,500 weapons were allegedly found on the property.
Eight years later, workers in an agrarian reform co-operative whose land once belonged to the Salaverrias barely escaped an assassination attempt. "Members of the co-op suspect the former owners, the Salaverria family, were behind the violence," a 1988 Human Rights Watch report said. The family denied involvement.
Francisco de Sola and his cousin, Herbert Arturo de Sola, also invested early in Bain, according to the Los Angeles Times. Two other members of the de Sola family were "limited partners," according to the Boston Globe, but the Romney campaign declined to provide The Huffington Post with their names. The de Sola family was one of El Salvador's most powerful coffee growers and a financier of the ARENA party.
Herbert's brother was the notorious Orlando de Sola, who resisted the peace negotiations toward the end of the civil war. The Romney campaign acknowledges Orlando de Sola's connection to death squads but insists he is not representative of the de Sola family investors. While Romney told the Tribune in 1999 that the backgrounds of the families had been checked diligently, he had explained to the Boston Globe in 1994 that Bain's due diligence included only the backgrounds of the individual investors, not their family members. "We investigated the individuals' integrity and looked for any obvious signs of illegal activity and problems in their background, and found none. We did not investigate in-laws and relatives." Deflecting the association with Orlando, Strachan, whom Romney had charged with vetting the investors, described him that same year to the Globe as "the black sheep of the family. ... He was kicked out of the family business."
Yet there is strong evidence that Orlando was anything but a black sheep in the de Sola family. Indeed, he was a leading public face of the Salvadoran elites in Miami, speaking, for example, on behalf of the El Salvador Freedom Foundation, the organization which arranged a U.S. press conference for D'Aubuissonas part of its public relations activities on behalf of the oligarchs and ARENA. An Associated Press story from April 1981 includes Orlando de Sola and Alfonso Salaverria speaking on behalf of the oligarchs in exile. The story also makes reference to White's charges regarding the funding of death squads, indicating that the charges were already well known by that point.
But the ties run deeper still. In 1990, Orlando de Sola, D'Aubuisson and founding Bain investor Francisco de Sola allegedly assassinated two left-wing activists then in Guatemala, according to a report by that country's government, which cited its intelligence sources. The activists had just held a meeting with then-Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who was attempting to broker a Salvadoran peace deal.
Francisco de Sola later pleaded his and his cousin Orlando's innocence to the U.S. ambassador. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights looked further into the killings and concluded that elements of the Salvadoran right were indeed the mostly likely assassins, but said that it couldn't confirm the guilt of the de Solas or D'Aubuisson. It deemed the investigation incomplete and called for a deeper look. The three men were never charged.
Francisco de Sola is now president of the Salvadoran Foundation for Economic and Social Development. His assistant, Ada Chang, said that he was traveling and unavailable to comment, but she confirmed to HuffPost that he had been accused of murdering the two leftists in 1990. Whether he committed the crime or not, the fact that Guatemalan intelligence would associate him with Orlando de Sola and D'Aubuisson, and place them in Guatemala together, casts further doubt on Strachan's claim that Orlando de Sola was merely a "black sheep" who had been "kicked out of the family business."
Orlando de Sola, who is serving an unrelated prison sentence for fraud, told the Los Angeles Times that he did not personally benefit from the Bain investments. "I would say their relationship with Bain Capital was a step to diversify into foreign investments," he said of his family.
Ricardo Poma was the first investor Romney thanked when he traveled to Miami in 2007. The head of the Poma Group, he became one of the three members of the Bain Capital investment committee, according to Strachan's memoir. The Poma family were financiers of D'Aubuisson's ARENA party.
The Regalado-Dueñas family, like many of El Salvador's other powerful clans, amassed much of their wealth and political power through the coffee industry. Along with the Alvarez family, they also helped to found Banco Comercial, one of the biggest banks in El Salvador.
The Regalado-Dueñas and Alvarez families were leading supporters of ARENA. Arturo Dueñas "regularly supplied" the head of an ARENA-affiliated "paramilitary unit ... with a variety of official Salvadoran documents," according to a redacted 1984 CIA document, which uses the euphemism for death squad. (Salvadoran government documents were used by death squads to assemble lists of people to kill.)
Miguel Dueñas and Ricardo Poma did not respond to requests for comment. The Salaverria brothers are dead, according to Ambassador White.
Jeffery Paige, author of "Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central America" and a professor at the University of Michigan, has studied the political economy of Central American oligarchies. Romney's claim to have checked out the backgrounds of the families and come away satisfied befuddles Paige.
"These people benefited from one of the most exploitative and repressive agricultural systems in Latin America. That's why they had a revolution," Paige said. "This money, certainly there wasn't much concern where it came from and what these people had done to make that money."
Sergio Bendixen, who now does polling for President Barack Obama, spent a significant amount of time in El Salvador in the early '80s, doing political polling for Univision. He said that he met D'Aubuisson on many occasions and found him to be one of the warmest, most charming and charismatic people he has ever met. But he said D'Aubuisson was also very upfront about what he saw as the justifiable use of death squads.
"There were 10 or 30 bodies in the street every morning," Bendixen recalled of his time there. "D'Aubuisson said it was necessary. The message needed to be sent [that] if you were associated with the communists or socialists, you had to be killed. He said it was an instrument in keeping the violence down, because others would see the consequences."
Bendixen suggested that a cursory look would have shown Romney what those families were involved with. "If anybody tries to tell you there was a line, a Chinese wall, between ARENA and the death squads, that's just not the way it was," he said.
The Salvadoran elite in Miami talked openly at the time, he said, of supporting the death squads battling the rebels. It wasn't a source of shame, Bendixen recalled, but a source of pride. "They were proud of the fact that they were supporting their country against the communists," he said.
As Romney now seeks support from the Latino community in his campaign for president, his knowledge of Bain's all-too-few degrees of separation from Salvadoran death squads may become a topic of interest.
"Under Ronald Reagan, the U.S. sent billions of dollars to the murderous regime, which utilized that aid to fund the military and death squads in an effort to preserve the unjust privileges of the Salvadoran oligarchy," said Arturo J. Viscarra, an immigration lawyer, who, like many other Salvadorans, emigrated to the United States in order to escape the civil war. He said his family left the country in 1980 after his father began receiving death threats.
"To now learn that a man that may become president of the U.S. deserves some of his success due to the incredible inequality that the U.S. helped to preserve in El Salvador is ironic," Viscarra said. "It's morbidly funny.”
The U.S. involvement in the bloodshed is now seen as a black mark on the nation's record. When President Obama visited Central America in March 2011, he made a symbolic stop at Romero's grave, lighting a candle for the archbishop.
Romney, however, has shown no public remorse for signing up such investors, although the concept of culpability is not foreign to him. When he returned to Miami in 2007, he condemned those who had financed torture and other human rights abuses during the Salvadoran civil war -- just not those he was connected to.
"These friends didn't just help me; they taught me," Romney said.Ricardo Poma "Ricardo's brother had been tortured and murdered by rebel terrorists in El Salvador. Miguel Regalado-Dueñas himself had been chained to a floor in Guatemala for weeks and tortured. And their torturers were financed by Fidel Castro. I learned from these friends about the human cost when Castro has money."
Payments from
ROMNEY FOR PRESIDENT INC.: $55,824,004
AMERICAN RAMBLER PRODUCTIONS, LLC $18,881,448
SJZ, LLC $6,224,498
SCM ASSOCIATES, INC. $5,813,954
TARGETED VICTORY $3,929,579
FLS CONNECT, LLC $3,370,787
Majority Strategies $2,304,319
AIR CHARTER TEAM, INC. $1,430,532
REDWAVE COMMUNICATIONS $1,293,825
INSPERITY $1,141,931
CMDI $992,162
RED CURVE SOLUTIONS $973,029
INTUITIVE TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS $778,469
MARQUIS JET PARTNERS $764,230
American Express $631,260
GOP SHOPPE $609,612
585 COMMERCIAL STREET, LLC $605,386
ELAVON $492,683
WWP STRATEGIES $368,201
THE LEGITTINO GROUP, LLC $331,814
PATTON BOGGS LLP $325,535
MINDSHIFT TECHNOLOGIES $313,311
Marriott $297,788
Delta Airlines $275,557
FREE AND STRONG AMERICA PAC. INC. $264,763
FREEMAN CO. $262,156
RSIG SECURITY
34 registered lobbyists have bundled a total of $5,250,506 for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign.
Mitt Romney Bundlers| Name | City | State | Employer | Amount Bundled | Contributions* |
| Durkin, Patrick J. Sr. | New York | NY | Barclay's Capital | $1,111,790 | $90,575 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Graves, Bill | McLean | VA | American Trucking Association | $587,500 | $111,928 |
| Berman, Wayne | Washington | DC | Ogilvy Government Relations | $478,175 | $1,050,008 |
| Grand, Robert T. | Indianapolis | IN | Barnes and Thornburg | $367,250 | $150,979 |
| Fiorentino, T. Martin Jr. | Ponte Vedra Beach | FL | Lender Processing Services | $325,045 | $30,700 |
| Van Dongen, Dirk W. | Washington | DC | National Assn of Wholesaler-Distributors | $273,305 | $0 |
| Ingle, Edward | Washington | DC | Microsoft Corp | $252,460 | $46,816 |
| Barbour, Austin | Jackson | MS | Clearwater Group | $210,700 | $500 |
| Beightol, David | Chevy Chase | MD | Dutko Worldwide | $180,280 | $21,375 |
| Harrison, Debbie M. | Bethesda | MD | Marriott International | $165,600 | $101,900 |
| Hughey, Gaylord T. Jr. | Tyler | TX | Self-Employed | $157,150 | $78,296 |
| Simmons, William Mark | Arlington | VA | Dutko Worldwide | $134,684 | $0 |
| Baker, Mark A. | Helena | MT | Anderson & Baker | $102,500 | $90,505 |
| Wall, Joseph C. | Washington | DC | Goldman Sachs | $90,367 | $9,475 |
| Sanchez, Ignacio E. | Potomac | MD | DLA Piper | $86,700 | $110,148 |
| Rigby, Gina Joy | Washington | DC | AFLAC Inc | $82,250 | $3,500 |
| Loeffler, Tom | Terrell Hills | TX | Akin, Gump et al | $78,100 | $547,375 |
| Rhines, Judi K. | Concord | NH | Rath Group | $68,850 | $22,850 |
| Mattera, Paul | Swampscott | MA | Liberty Mutual | $64,200 | $31,250 |
| Maloney, Drew K. | Washington | DC | Ogilvy Government Relations | $56,750 | $261,900 |
| Hipp, Van D. Jr. | Alexandria | VA | American Defense International | $40,000 | $554,767 |
| Tamasi, David | Washington | DC | Rasky Baerlein Strategic Communications | $39,785 | $20,300 |
| Bravacos, Christopher | Hershey | PA | Bravo Group | $30,305 | $27,400 |
| McSherry, Michael | Alexandria | VA | Mercury Public Affairs LLC | $30,200 | $29,850 |
| Blunt, Abigail | Washington | DC | Kraft Foods Global Inc | $28,700 | $0 |
| Gates, Bruce A. | Alexandria | VA | Altria Client Services | $27,500 | $636,717 |
| Tripodi, Cathleen W. | Arlington | VA | FaegreBD Consulting | $27,000 | $0 |
| Burton, Kent | Arlington | VA | National Environmental Strategies | $26,510 | $21,150 |
| Boyd, Tom | Alexandria | VA | DLA Piper | $26,350 | $26,475 |
| Roche, Michael | Washington | DC | Anheuser Busch | $25,000 | $15,898 |
| Hohlt, Richard F. | Alexandria | VA | Hohlt & Assoc | $22,500 | $1,088,384 |
| Hardy, Ralph W. Jr | Potomac | MD | Dow Lohnes | $19,000 | $25,582 |
| Isakowitz, Mark W. | Oak Hill | VA | Fierce, Isakowitz & Blalock | $17,000 | $496,431 |
| Wheeler, Andrew | Washington | DC | Fagre Baker Daniels LLP | $17,000 | $15,240 |
*The "Contributions" column indicates the total amount the bundler, their spouse and dependent children have given to all federal candidates, parties and PACs in all election cycles since 1990.
little blue book co-author; romney says gov't has invisible boot on the neck of ppl
go after corps: life is a precious good; fire clerks so we need to use more of our time
corp dominate our life: airline sched, rx decisions, communications [many choices?]
pol is biz in which ideas are being sold: problem frame (eg contract w/ Am)
be careful about conveniently accepting a frame short term b/c it can turn into policy/reality later
green record as gov not good
http://www.motherjones.com/print/177666
Mitt Antagonists
Posted: 05/24/2012 10:25 am
Which environmental policies reflect the real Mitt Romney? Those he displayed as Massachusetts governor, or the ones that the Republican Party is asking him to embrace as a presidential candidate?
How Romney responds to the Republican National Committee's (RNC) request to denounce a United Nations non-binding environmental protection action plan should go a long way towards telling us which direction he is ultimately headed. The U.N. plan, which also calls for the eradication of poverty, was denigrated by the RNC in a resolution issued at its annual winter meeting in January. RNC officials dismissed the action plan as a thinly veiled attempt to usurp our sovereignty and absorb us into a U.N.-orchestrated world government. The RNC is the central policy arm of the Republican Party and clearly has little use for the U.N. One wonders whether Romney shares that dim view. If so, he certainly did not exhibit that sentiment as governor. Would he now be willing to consider reducing our financial contribution or even severing ties to the U.N., courses of action that would be cheered in some Republican quarters?
In its resolution, the RNC demonized U.N.-recommended "sustainable development" and "smart growth" land use planning as "extreme environmentalism" and "social engineering" threatening America's core value of private property ownership.
One of the cornerstone's of Romney's administration while Governor of Massachusetts was a sustainable development program rooted in the concept of smart growth. The state encouraged clustered high density multi-family housing where development already existed and public transit was nearby. In 2003, the Governor told Commonwealth Magazine "I very much believe in the concept known as smart growth or sustainable development... We don't want to deplete green space, air, water, in the rush to grow."
The RNC also singled out the U.N. plan's advocacy of "green" and "alternative energy" projects as a blatant example of anti-capitalist social engineering.
Romney, on the other hand, had no political reservations about green technology when presiding over Massachusetts. He established a 15 million dollar Green Energy Fund and authorized state subsidies for solar energy expansion.
In its resolution distributed to all Republican candidates from the presidential nominee on down (with full expectation of concurrence), the RNC issued a blanket indictment of the U.N. Action Plan, calling its principles "destructive and insidious". Just how bad were they? Among those U.N. "menacing" principles was the concept that environmental protection should be integral to economic development. Another principle was that a solid framework of environmental regulation needed to be in place. A third urged that environmental impact statements be prepared prior to approval of projects in ecologically sensitive areas.
It is very unlikely that Romney as Massachusetts Governor would have had a problem with any of the aforementioned principles. After all, while in the State House, he implemented stringent anti-air pollution standards and strengthened environmental enforcement by 54 percent.
So the question boils down to whether Romney, the presidential candidate, has undergone a transformation from Romney, the governor, and will acquiesce to the RNC'S conspiratorial vision of internationally-endorsed environmental protection?
The voters are entitled to know.
Romney, once an anti-sprawl crusader, created model for Obama ‘smart growth’ program
By Lisa Hymas
Everyone knows that “Obamacare” was modeled on Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health-care law. But did you know that a key Obama “smart growth” initiative — the Partnership for Sustainable Communities — was also created in the mold of a Romney program?
Tea Partiers rallied to quash funding for this Obama partnership last fall. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), conservative darling, criticized the idea for the partnership when it first arose and accused the Obama administration of trying to impose “an urban-utopian fantasy through an unprecedented intrusion of the Federal Government into the shaping of local communities.” The Republican National Committee recently warned that smart growth is part of a U.N. conspiracy (green helicopters, anyone?).
This is yet another issue on which the party’s presumptive presidential nominee looks to be seriously out of sync with the GOP base.
Romney’s “get smart” phase
As governor of Massachusetts, Romney actively fought sprawl and promoted density. He ran on a smart-growth platform: “Sprawl is the most important quality-of-life issue facing Massachusetts,” he said in 2002.
After winning, Romney swiftly set about remaking state government to encourage smarter land use. He created a powerful new Office for Commonwealth Development, and appointed an aggressive environmental activist to run it — Douglas Foy, who for 25 years had headed the Conservation Law Foundation, a litigious regional environmental group. The state’s business community was appalled.
The Office for Commonwealth Development served as a “super-secretariat” or umbrella office for state agencies dealing with transportation, housing, energy, and the environment. It made sure the agencies were all pulling in the same direction toward smart-growth goals — concentrating development in town centers, constructing housing near transit stations, fixing existing roads instead of building new ones.
grist
superpac/lobby:
Obama uses bundlers extensively but allows no lobbyists.
As for Republicans, in 2011, 16 lobbyists collectively raised nearly $2.2 million for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, including nearly $1.2 million during the fourth quarter alone. (That was nearly $1 out of every $20 Romney raised during the fourth quarter, when he pulled in about $24.3 million.)
Texas Gov. Rick Perry was aided by six lobbyists who collectively raised $178,250 for Perry before he dropped out of the race. And one lobbyist-bundler raised $17,610for former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty during his unsuccessful presidential run.
Former Sen. Rick Santorum's campaign has not reported assistance from any lobbyist-bundlers, and neither has that of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. The campaign of Rep. Ron Paul says it does not utilize bundlers...
http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2012/01/where-in-the-world-are-obamas-bundlers3.html
related; Sixteen lobbyists raised nearly $2.2 million to aid the presidential campaign of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in 2011, according to a Center for Responsive Politics review of documents filed with the Federal Election Commission.
Patrick J. Durkin, Sr., of commercial bank Barclays, alone was responsible for $774,750 of that sum.
Meanwhile, Romney also benefited from two lobbyist-bundlers who work for D.C. lobbying powerhouse Ogilvy Government Relations and two who work for K Street giant DLA Piper.
Eight of Romney's 16 lobbyist-bundlers were disclosed for the first time in Romney's fourth-quarter filings with the FEC, including Austin Barbour, the nephew of former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who collected $210,700; Joseph C. Wall of Goldman Sachs, who bundled $30,399 for Romney; and Edward Ingle of Microsoft, who raised $30,260.
Restore our future superpac http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/indexpend.php?strID=C00490045&cycle=2012
tomgram:
*Goldman Sachs ($367,200)
Credit Suisse Group ($203,750)
Morgan Stanley ($199,800)
HIG Capital ($186,500)
Barclays ($157,750)
Kirkland & Ellis ($132,100)
Bank of America ($126,500)
PriceWaterhouseCoopers ($118,250)
EMC Corp ($117,300)
JPMorgan Chase & Co ($112,250)
The Villages ($97,500)
Vivint Inc ($80,750)
Marriott International ($79,837)
Sullivan & Cromwell ($79,250)
Bain Capital ($74,500)
UBS AG ($73,750)
Wells Fargo ($61,500)
Blackstone Group ($59,800)
Citigroup Inc ($57,050)
Bain & Co ($52,500).*
Now, if that isn’t a poem that sings the (corporate) body electric, I don’t know what is. According to the invaluable OpenSecrets.org website, it’s also the list of the top 20 contributors to presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign
The super PAC message could well benefit President Barack Obama, whose supporters have run ads of their own attacking Romney — apparently because they fear he has the best chance to defeat the president in November.
The ad footage will be distilled from a 27-minute documentary created by filmmaker Jason Meath, who worked on Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign and helped produce pro-Romney ads.
Entitled “When Mitt Romney Came to Town,” the film looks at four companies including Indiana-based Ampad, which were bought out in the 1980s and 1990s by Bain Capital, where Romney made his fortune.
The film interweaves personal statements from workers who lost their jobs with footage of Romney’s multimillion dollar homes, including one in Southern California near La Jolla, that’s being torn down to make way for a one that is double its size.
Comments from workers interviewed for the film include one woman who says Romney is a “money man and he is going to look out for the money people … He doesn’t look out for us.”
The film’s narrator attacks the “greed” of Wall Street buyout firms and at one point says that “nothing mattered but profits. This film is about one such raider and his firm.”
The entire film will be posted in coming days on the website KingofBain.com, according to Tyler.
went after pork http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/11/mitt-romney-republican-washington-spending-flip-flop?page=2
cindy gillespie demo
http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2011/12/pro-romney-super-pac-surges-to-life.html
--
pac:
RESTORE OUR FUTURE
Founded by former aides to Mitt Romney, this group is expected to maintain the minimum legal distance between itself and Romney’s official campaign. Romney himself even spoke at a Manhattan fundraiser for the group, though — apparently for legal reasons — he left the room before an explicit appeal for money was made, the Times reported.
The funders:
- Ed Conrad: A former executive at Bain Capital, Romney’s old firm, he originally gave $1 million to Restore Our Future through a shell company, W Spann LLC, before coming forward amid media scrutiny of the transaction. Conrad is reported to be a longtime Romney friend and contributor who has otherwise not been particularly active as a GOP fundraiser or donor.
Steve Lund and Jeremy Blickenstaff: The co-founder of the Provo, Utah-based skin care firm Nu Skin — which claims to have “unlocked the science behind the secret to looking and feeling young” — gave Restore Our Future $1 million. Lund has bankrolled Romney’s political career from the very beginning: his race against Ted Kennedy in 1994. He and his wife have given tens of thousands of dollars to Romney over the years. He is also a leader in the Mormon church and reportedly owns a valuable early copy of the Book of Mormon.
Also pitching in $1 million to Restore Our Future is Jeremy Blickenstaff, Lund’s son-in-law and an attorney who has worked at Nu Skin. He does not have a history of political giving, but Blickenstaff did do a stint at the Marriage Law Foundation, a Utah-based group that “provides legal resources to defend and protect marriage between a husband and wife.”
- John Paulson: A hedge fund billionaire who placed a successful bet on the crash of the housing market, he gave Restore Our Future $1 million. He’s given generously to members of both parties for years, and his firm also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying on Capitol Hill on financial regulatory matters. He was also a major figure in the SEC’s fraud case against Goldman Sachs last year, which the company settled by paying a $550 million fine.
- Paul and Sandra Edgerly: Paul Edgerly, a top executive at Bain Capital, with his wife gave $1 million to Restore Our Future. He and his wife have made well over $200,000 in political donations in the past 20 years, primarily to Romney and the national and Massachusetts Republican parties. Both Harvard Business School graduates, the Edgerlys were featured in the school’s alumni magazine for building a “family clubhouse” in their backyard that features a full gymnasium, a tennis court, a batting cage, a sauna and other amenities.
- Bob Perry: The Texas construction magnate hedged his bets with Rick Perry by giving the Romney PAC $500,000.
What you’ll hear: “We need a man who has run a business running the White House.”
The group is legally barred from coordinating expenditures — such as buying ads — with the Romney campaign, but look for it to echo Romney’s message closely. Its bare-bones website, for example, declares that “It is time that we restore our future by supporting candidates who have worked in the private sector and created jobs, who understand the economy, and who believe in America, American workers, and American values.” That candidate is Mitt Romney, the group made clear in its formation announcement in June:
Our nation is burdened by a struggling economy; our job creators who are tied up with red tape, and a growing federal government is stifling the private sector. President Obama has failed to fix the problems that affect Americans. … Restore Our Future will support our next president, Mitt Romney.
Restore Our Future appears to have kept its powder dry — so far. As of its most recent Federal Election Commission filings, which cover the first half of 2011, the group has not bought any ad time or spent money on other substantive political action.
What you won’t hear: “Mitt’s healthcare plan is superior to Barack’s.”
Candidate Romney spelled it out: "I think it's time for programs that we like but that we simply can't afford, to be stopped... and I'm going to do that," listing the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities , PBS and NPR, and Amtrak.
on occupy:
Mitt Romney--whose own Wall Street investment fund made huge profits in the 1990s by taking over various companies, plundering their assets, and firing thousands of workers--sounded this alarm about the rising rabble who dare to confront the financial order: "I think it's dangerous, this class warfare." from hightower
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/12/psychometer-week-in-crazy_n_875531.html stands up to limbaugh on gw
update: http://www.grist.org/election-2012/2011-06-03-mitt-romney-reducing-global-warming-pollution-is-important
Romney has not, however, endorsed any policies that would actually achieve his supposed goal of reducing global warming pollution. In his book, *No Apology*, Romney endorses the climate policy of Bjorn Lomborg, who grossly misrepresents science to claim adaptation to rapid climate change will be a simple prospect.
By Lee Fang on Sep 12, 2011 at 7:12 pm
Former Sen. Jim Talent (R-MO), a lobbyist and current advisor to Mitt Romney
Boston Globe reporter Donovan Slack reports today that Mitt Romney’s top energy advisor also works for a lobbying firm that counts coal giant Peabody Energy as a top client.
Former Sen. Jim Talent (R-MO) has emerged as a key player in Romney’s policy circle, and is featured in Romney’s jobs plan writing about the importance of the coal industry. As Slack reports, Talent simultaneously maintains a lucrative career at a firm that represents Peabody, one of the largest coal companies in the world:
What the former Missouri senator’s essay does not mention is that the Washington lobbying and communications firm he leads as co-chairman, Mercury Public Affairs, counts among its clients Peabody Energy, a St. Louis-based company that is one the largest coal producers in the world.
Peabody Energy has paid Talent’s firm an average of $125,000 every year for the past five years to help represent its interests in Washington. The energy company also retains other firms, spending an average of $2 million each year on lobbying, records show.
As ThinkProgress Green’s Brad Johnson noted back in May, Romney has sought energy advice from other polluter lobbyists. One of them, Jeffrey Holmstead, has worked as a registered lobbyist for Duke Energy, Southern Company, and other fossil fuel giants.
Romney’s current energy policy includes polluter friendly ideas like “amending the Clean Air Act to exclude regulation of carbon and opening the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge for oil production.”
grist:
Mitt Romney (R-Mass.)Photo: World Affairs Council of PhiladelphiaMitt Romney
Former Massachusetts governor and 2008 presidential contender
Romney acknowledges that climate change is real and at least partially human-driven, but don't go thinkin' he likes cap-and-trade -- at least not any more.
On climate science: "I believe that climate change is occurring -- the reduction in the size of global ice caps is hard to ignore. I also believe that human activity is a contributing factor," Romney wrote in his 2010 book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.
On climate policy: In a June 2010 statement, Romney said, "Cap and trade effectively constitutes an enormous, hidden tax on the American people and American businesses. It will lead to higher joblessness and make a bad economic situation even worse. And because it will simply move greenhouse gas emitters from America to other nations like China, it won't do a thing to affect climate change."
It would appear he didn't always feel that way. In 2005, when he was governor of Massachusetts, Romney pulled his state out of a soon-to-launch cap-and-trade system for Northeast states, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, but only after his staffers spent two and a half years and almost half a million dollars helping to shape the pact.
In 2004, Romney unveiled a Massachusetts Climate Protection Plan that aimed to reduce the state's greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2010 and then about 10 percent more by 2020, though it relied primarily on voluntary measures and requirements that applied only to the state government.