Friday, August 31, 2012

"Paul Ryan and I understand how the economy works, we understand how Washington works, we will reach across the aisle and find good people who, like us, want to make sure this company deals with its challenges. We’ll get America on track again."

Mitt and Paul can probably sell off some of the company assets. I'm sure the oil and gas companies could use Yellowstone and Yosemite and the Grand Canyon for something more lucrative than usless "scenery."

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Mitt Romney will be giving his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention tonight and we can be pretty sure that he won't be saying, "I've got nothing to hide and I'm proving that by having my campaign release a dozen years of tax returns to independent news organizations as I address you here tonight." OK, we can be more than "pretty sure" he won't do that. It's as certain as death and (the fact that most of us will pay) taxes that we won't be seeing #MittsMissingReturns that easily.

I stumbled upon the following video this afternoon in which even the formerly staid and sober Wall Street Journal joins the racist "Obama's Sealed Records" chorus, equating school records from 30 years ago with Mitt Romney's business records from 2 years ago.

Female WSJ Talking Head at 1'28":"Has the Romney campaign caught onto this, this kind of tit for tat fairness. 'If you want me to release the tax returns, you gotta release the transcripts.' Or no?"

1) There is no "tit for tat fairness" here.
2) Mitt Romney would not honor his side of this trade if Barack Obama's records from Columbia and Occidental and high school and kindergarten were all released tomorrow.

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Keep up with the lengthening list of installments in the #MittsMissingReturns saga by clicking on any of these links:

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

CNN may have forsaken its quest to become Fox News. The original cable news network is now attempting to become The Onion, or Comedy Central, with their recent Mitt Romney infotainment, "Romney Revealed":

Forget the horrors of the Vietnam War in 1968, that war that Mitt Romney demonstrated in favor of, and whose draft the young Mormon missionary avoided:

CNN Narrator: “In 1968, France was a dangerous place to be for a 21-year-old American, but Mitt Romney was right in the middle of it.Fellow Missionary Mike Bush: “There were protests and there were blockades and there were marches all over the country."
CNN: "The streets of France were in chaos."
Bush: "There was no train service, there were no buses, no newspapers. The electricity would go off from time-to-time. There were no letters from home. The money at the time came via check. That was our lifeline was getting letters from home.”
CNN: "So you were totally isolated."
Bush: "Totally isolated."

I ran this question with another version of this video in the year of the last Presidential election, but the video was taken off YouTube and the posting seems appropriate again. When one political party is looking back to their halcyon days in the 1950s (or 1850s), many of us look back to another golden age, located squarely in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Here are the Grateful Dead playing Mountains of the Moon and St. Stephen on "Playboy After Dark" in 1969:

At the two minute mark, be sure to catch Jerry Garcia explaining to a clueless Hugh Hefner and his entourage, with appropriate smiles and hand gestures, "... they more chase each other around. It's kinda, it's like, it's like the serpent that eats its own tail, y'know. And it goes round and round like that and if you, if you could stand in between them, uh, they, they make uh big figure eights on their sides, in your head." Of course Jerry's elucidating why the Dead have two drummers, but Hugh seems to be having some trouble following this crystal-clear explanation.

So what side of this culture divide do (did) you come down on? Would you be wearing a Mexican poncho or a black tuxedo in 1969? Riding in a psychedelic bus or a black Mercedes limosine?
Would you rather be Hugh? Or Jerry?

Just watch the rise he gets out of this crowd earlier today when he says, "No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised."

Sorry Mitt, we don't care about your birth certificate, but we'd love to see the missing tax returns from 1998 -- 2009 (and the missing pieces from 2010 and 2011) that would give us some more realistic ideas about that fantastic business experience that you keep touting as your main competency and reason to be President (other than the fact that you're a white guy from Michigan who will never be asked for his "long-form birth certificate" by a billionaire publicity hound with a bad hairpiece).
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Keep up with the lengthening list of installments in the #MittsMissingReturns saga by clicking on any of these links:

“Y'know, y'know given, I just, I just have to say, given the challenges that America faces – 23 million people out of work, um uh Iran about to become nuclear, uh one out of six Americans in poverty – the fascination with taxes I’ve paid I find to be very uh small-minded compared to the broad issues that we face. Uh but I did go back and look at my taxes and over the past 10 years I never paid less than 13 percent. I think the most recent year is 13.6 or something like that. So I paid taxes every single year. Harry Reid’s uh charge is totally uh false. I’m sure waiting for Harry to put up who it was that told him what he says they told him. I don’t believe it for a minute, by the way. But every year I’ve paid at least 13 percent and uh if you add in addition the amount that goes to charity, why the number gets well above 20 percent.” -- Mitt Romney, 16 August 2012

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Keep up with the large list of small-minded installments in the #MittsMissingReturns saga by clicking on any of these links:

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Watch (courtesy of Media Matters for America) a video showing how two of the major cable news channels are willing to ignore the fact that the Republican Presidential candidate is obviously hiding something seriously wrong in his financial history:

Why the business and financial history of someone whose main qualification for President is his self-proclaimed (but unverifiable) business and financial acumen should be considered tangential or a distraction is beyond me. His tax returns seem central to understanding who this candidate is. The demand for more than the two partial returns from 2010 and 2011 is not a case of Birtherism Redux, though that is certainly the way the GOP, Fox, and (maybe) CNN, would like to portray it, and us.
We'll keep up the call for 10-12 years of Mitt Romney's tax returns here on TrueBlueLiberal.org and with the #MittsMissingReturns hashtag on Twitter, but the media won't necessarily be working with us. I'm not looking forward to Candy Crowley's role as the impartial moderator for the single debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan.

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Catch up with the lengthening list of installments in the #MittsMissingReturns saga by clicking on any of these links:

Unfortunately, the only known recordings of Ryan's Opus One have been squirreled away in an undisclosed location with Mitt Romney's missing tax returns from 1999-2009, but the title remains a tantalizing clue to the development of this multi-dimensional renaissance man running for Vice President of the United States.

Monday, August 13, 2012

I heard that strange bit of trivia on NPR on the way home from work tonight and I confirmed it with a couple of links online. And, what do you know, this group of radical leftists from the city of Los Angeles even played at the Republican National Convention in 2008 ... or outside the convention ... or actually they were prevented from taking the stage by the police, so Tom Morello played his classic guitar riffs with his mouth and the crowd sang along. I'm sure that, as a fan, Paul Ryan will enjoy singing along with Zach de la Rocha and Rage Against the Machine while watching this video:

And, in case he's forgotten, here are the lyrics of the final lines of "Killing in the Name" so Paul can sing along with the crowd and his favorite band at the end of this video:

Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!

Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!

Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!

Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me! Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me! Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me! Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me! Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me! Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me! Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me! Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me! Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me! Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me! Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me! Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me! Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!

Please just watch Mitt Romney's face in this very short clip from last night's installment of 60 Minutes on CBS. This early joint appearance with Bob Schieffer was mostly fluff, but there was this one priceless moment when a flicker of terror crossed Mitt's face.
Before the next non-Fox appearance, Paul Ryan will receive more than a fashion memo concerning the uniform of the evening.

Paul Ryan's Mouth:"What we're saying is take away the tax shelters that are uniquely enjoyed by people in the top tax brackets, so they can't shelter as much money from taxation, so you can lower tax rates for everybody to make America more competitive."

Mitt Romney's Eyes: "Who's this 'we' you're referencing, Sonny?"

This is the reason that seeing #MittsMissingReturns for more than 2010 and 2011 is important. Which tax loopholes available only to the ultrarich has Mitt Romney been taking advantage of? Which would he close, if any? Which would Paul Ryan close? We can't even start this conversation until we know what the questions are.
Ten to twelve years of Mitt Romney's 1040s should be enough to start, but I'm starting to doubt that we'll even see 2009. Is it possible that in '09 he realized and reflected losses from the stock market declines of '08? And if so, is it possible that he paid close to zero taxes in that year?

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Catch up with previous installments in the #MittsMissingReturnssaga by clicking below:

Saturday, August 11, 2012

"EAST HAMPTON, N.Y., July 8, 2012— A woman in a blue chiffon dress poked her head out of a black Range Rover here on Sunday afternoon and yelled to an aide to Mitt Romney. “Is there a V.I.P. entrance? We are V.I.P.”"

Wednesday, August 08, 2012

Jerry Garcia's smile at the 4'30" mark of this video is the way I'll always remember this man and this band. Here are the Grateful Dead in 1972 playing "He's Gone" and I realized again while watching this that three of these six men are no longer with us, with Jerry Garcia having left us on August 9, 1995.

He's already been gone for 17 years.

Everyone should read what Bob Dylan and Jerry's writing partner Robert Hunter had to say about their friend immediately after his death.

“There’s no way to measure his greatness or magnitude as a person or a player. I don’t think any eulogizing will do him justice. He was that great, much more than a superb musician, with an uncanny ear and dexterity. He’s the very spirit personified of whatever is Muddy River country at its core and screams up into the spheres. He really had no equal. To me, he wasn’t only a musician and friend, he was more like a big brother who taught and showed me more than he’ll ever know. There’s a lot of spaces and advances between The Carter Family, Buddy Holly and say Ornette Coleman, a lot of universes, but he filled them all without being a member of any school. His playing was moody, awesome, sophisticated, hypnotic and subtle. There’s no way to convey the loss. It just digs down really deep”-- Bob Dylan

An Elegy for Jerryby Robert Hunter

Jerry, my friend,you've done it again,even in your silencethe familiar pressurecomes to bear, demandingI pull words from the airwith only this morningand part of the afternoonto compose an ode worthyof one so particularabout every turn of phrase,demanding it hit homein a thousand waysbefore making it his own,and this I can't do alone.Now that the singer is gone,where shall I go for the song?

Without your melody and tasteto lend an attitude of gracea lyric is an orphan thing,a hive with neither honey's tastenor power to truly sting.

What choice have I but to dare andcall your muse who thought to restout of the thin blue airthat out of the field of shared time,a line or two might chance to shine --

As ever when we called,in hope if not in words,the muse descends.

How should she desert us now?Scars of battle on her brow,bedraggled feathers on her wings,and yet she sings, she sings!

May she bear thee to thy rest,the ancient bower of flowersbeyond the solitude of days,the tyranny of hours--the wreath of shining laurel lieupon your shaggy headbestowing power to play the lyreto legions of the dead

If some part of that musicis heard in deepest dream,or on some breeze of Summera snatch of golden theme,we'll know you live inside uswith love that never partsour good old Jack O'Diamondsbecome the King of Hearts.

I feel your silent laughterat sentiments so boldthat dare to step across the lineto tell what must be told,so I'll just say I love you,which I never said beforeand let it go at that old friendthe rest you may ignore.

Tuesday, August 07, 2012

One of the most unforgettable bloodthirsty audience reactions during last fall and winter's series of Republican primary debates was this one at the Reagan Library on September 7, 2011:

Rick Perry's personal death toll was only 234 eleven months ago when the video up above was recorded. Today he increased his deadly gubernatorial record to 245 with the execution of 54-year-old Marvin Wilson. Another important number? His IQ has been recorded at 61 (Wilson's, not Perry's).

I'm sure there are Teapublicans all around the country cheering again at the thought of one more execution and wishing they had America's deadliest governor as their GOP Presidential nominee today.

Saturday, August 04, 2012

... in which the man who refuses to release his tax returns from the last twelve years on the grounds it might incriminate him ... the man whose stock answer to every question seems to be "elect me on my business experience, but my business is none of your business" ... tells the Senate Majority Leader to "Put Up or Shut Up" with hard evidence about Mitt Romney's low tax rates when all the evidence is in Mitt Romney's hands.

Please watch this video from last night's Rachel Maddow Show in which we see gubernatorial candidate Mitt Romney badgering his opponent for her husband's returns when he wouldn't release his own (she, of course, had released hers). Revisit the questions about his state tax returns and residency. See his (faux) tough talk on the one issue (his personal financial secrecy) on which he has shown any consistency. This is worth watching in full. And ask yourself when it's done, Do you trust Mitt Romney more than Harry Reid?

Wednesday, August 01, 2012

It's August 1st. Jerry Garcia would have turned 70 years old today.
Here he is playing and singing "So Many Roads", a Hunter/Garcia composition that never appeared on a studio album, with a lot of power and soul during the Grateful Dead's last concert one month before he died in 1995.
Still so sad.

So many roads I tell youNew York to San FranciscoAll I want is oneto take me homeFrom the high road to the lowSo many roads I knowSo many roads - So many roads

About Me

According to the results of free non-scientific online tests, TBL found that he was "Existentialist", "Communist", and "A Grammar God," i.e., if he were a short wall-eyed Frenchman rather than a 6'3" blond American, he would be constantly mistaken for Jean-Paul Sartre!