Blog Archive: September, 2012

• MORNING MESSAGE: The Self-Made Myth
• Romney Calls His Tax Rate "Fair"
• Breakfast Sides

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In real life, working hard only takes you so far. Those who go all the way — to grand fortune — typically get a substantial head start. So documents an entertaining, baseball-themed new analysis of the Forbes 400.

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Now Mitt Romney is using another selectively edited video to make it sound like President Obama is a communist who wants to seize all the wealth of the rich and hand it out to ... negroes and communist party members? more »

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Yesterday, I posted a compilation of the responses of 47-Percenters to the now infamous Romney fundraiser video, in which Mitt Romney basically writes off as lazy moochers the 47 percent of Ameiricans who don't earn enough to owe federal income taxes. Both the Romney video and the responses from ordinary Americans show how much has changed.

Not long ago, Americans who couldn't afford the $50,000 ticket price would never have heard Romney's remarks to Florida donors. (Nor would "the help" — the invisible ordinary Americans in the room — have been able to bring those words to wider notice.) We would have heard from Mitt Romney only what his campaign wanted us to hear. Nor would those Americans have had a chance to "speak truth to power," in the growing number of responses to Romney's rhetoric.

To quote Moms Mabley: things sure ain't what they use to be, and I'm damn glad; because now we can hear Sara Zacharias. Today, nobody is "speaking truth to power" (in the person of one Willard Mitt Romney) louder than her.

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In a 1994 science-fiction novel called Interface, a Presidential candidate has an electronic chip in his brain that links his mind to real-time polling data. His words, deeds, even his thoughts are immediately responsive to the public mood. Mitt Romney seems a lot like that - except that Romney's chip is connected to money. more »

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By: Stephen Miles and William Hartung
(Crossposted at The Huffington Post and Win Without War)

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• MORNING MESSAGE: 4 Reasons Romney Might Win
• 47% May Deny Romney Majority
• Congressional GOP Signals Surrender On Taxes
• Senate Prepares To Push Volcker Rule
• Warren Hits Brown's Voting Record In First Debate

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The following was originally published at RobertReich.org.

Can Romney possibly recover? A survey conducted between Sept. 12 and Sept. 16 by the Pew Research Center — before the “47 percent victim” video came to light – showed Obama ahead of Romney 51% to 43% among likely voters. more »

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Bloggers and pundits have completely picked apart what Mitt Romney had to say about "the 47 percent" in that secret video leaked by Mother Jones magazine. As I posted yesterday, we know that nearly 47 percent of Americans don't pay federal income taxes, because they don't earn enough to owe federal income taxes. We know that those 47 percent of Americans pay plenty of other taxes: local and state taxes, payroll taxes, and sales taxes. Some pay up to nearly 25% of their income those taxes.

We know what Romney was talking about when he reached out to donors. We know what he got right and wrong, according to the numbers. But what may cause serious and lasting trouble for the Romney campaign is that millions of Americans now know who Romney was talking about, behind the safety of closed doors. They know he's talking about them and their loved ones — and they don't like it. Not one bit.

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Republicans won't abandon the Obama's-gutting-welfare-reform lie, no matter how often it is discredited.

Today Republicans took the lie to the House floor, in the form of a resolution that would block the implementation of a Health and Human Services memorandum that would give states more flexibility in how they move welfare recipients into meaningful jobs.

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