Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for September 01, 2012

Numbers- like the media-  have a liberal bias.

2+2=22

And 333 + 333 = 666. That doesn’t make it right.

Forget it Roland- you would never be chosen as Rmoney’s press secretary if he won…

Post them next to the commie’s birth certificate.

Like the President’s college transcripts? Or the articles he wrote for the Harvard Review? Or why his biography said he was born in Kenya (despite the fact he was obviously born in Hawaii), for fifteen years? Or how about the Fast and Furious documents the DOJ is withholding – in contempt of Congress? Or a hundred other things…No? I’m sure yet more of Romney’s tax returns are FAR more important.

Or at least, you folks believe it to be so and that’s what’s really important. I truly do pity you people.

Orion

Responding to Orion, it took ten seconds and google to get the truth about the “Harvard Law Review” article (singular) that law-student Obama wrote before he himself became editor of that journal. As the review is readily available in bound volumes and anyone can go through it for the years Obama was in law school, the only thing that makes this article hidden is that it didn’t rate a byline, and a reporter had to go through the correspondence of the Review to verify the authorship. As a youthful foray into the thorny subject of reproductive rights, and as it was not written as a personal opinion piece anyway, Obama has avoided speaking about it. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0808/12705.html I think there is enough there to found a little mild criticism on. A little more forthrightness would be better. But if Orion has heard that there is something more to it than that, he is listening to a bogus source. As far as Romney’s tax returns are concerned, I am sure there is nothing illegal or even shady in them. Merely a tale of great wealth and all the perfectly legal devices available to the very wealthy to enable them to pay a lower federal tax rate than average people. Or perhaps he has made large contributions to the Mormon church, as fears how that will be viewed. Who knows? As will most cover-ups, it is the fact of his hiding these things rather than the things themselves that is damning. If the returns were as available to anybody as Obama Harvard Law Review article is available, and Romney refused to comment on them, then there would be some vague similarity. Orion also complains that colleges consider their students’ report cards to be confidential and Obama has not chosen to release his college report cards. If Orion can show that presidents and politicians in general do publish their report cards from school, he might have a point. Let’s see some information on that. As to the typo about his birthplace, that is simply a typo and everyone with the remotest degree of sense knows that.

On Romney and tax amnesties – I’ve posted some comparisons with UK tax amnesties on the bottom or yesterday’s thread, where the discussion was. Probably only of interest to the tax geeks among us, but hey, we’ve got rights too…

Doughfoot, I’d like to see some data which indicates whether Orion has the remotest degree of common sense. I suspect that he’s withholding that information, however…

My goodness, the trolls are out early today. Must be that they couldn’t sleep after that rousing speech by Mitt at the RNC. Or maybe, it was that brilliant bit of improv. done by Clint that has them all a twitter ?

If 333 + 333 = 666 does that mean that Romney is 333 and Ryan is 333? Added together are those two are one of the sure signs of the Apocolypse?

Sorkh Razil = Sarge? Or new troll who thinks he is funny is on the loose…

It is not ammunition if it doesn’t explode! The numbers don’t lie. Show the returns.

As I said quite late in the day yesterday:

I found this to be an informative article on Romney’s finances:http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/08/investigating-mitt-romney-offshore-accounts

Speculation about his returns will continue until he releases them.

Read your comment about skin cancer on Gray Matter. Sorry about your loss and the suffering your partner went through. Hopefully by sharing, other people will get go to the doctor early enough to avoid a tragic outcome.

The RR campaign doesn’t want to talk about certain things, because if they do, they will lose. This includes many things which are basic issues. War, reproductive rights, their voucher plan for medicare, their intention to privatize social security, tax havens for the ultra rich, etc.

Here is Obama’s birth certificate:

http://m.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/birth-certificate-long-form.pdf

His law review article can be found on page 823 of volume 103.

Now, where are the tax returns?

There’s lies, damned lies. Then they’re statistics.

Do Rush Limbaugh and his ilk ever attend new conferences?

The greatest presidents were elected and they did not release that kind of info. They were able to live their lives, have paramours, smoke and drink, just like any other man (rich man) of their time. Holding a man up to unreal standards just make the lies worse.

This is why nothing gets done in this country. Talk – debate – argue who is right. Dumb

The trouble is: There ARE NO tax returns. Only ‘little people’ pay taxes. Mitt is above all that.

Who is Roland talking to – the candidate or the other reporter?

This strip illustrates the campaigning principle, brought to its full glory by Sarah Palin, of promising to do “things” about “stuff”. Hard to debate vague.

Mitt’s dad, George Romney, set the standard for modern day presidential candidates to release their tax returns. George Romney did this in 1968. We have had many great leaders in the past 44 years and if they weren’t considered great by some, having less info about them certainly won’t help matters.

They’ll see his accountants used and stretched every tax avoidance rule in the books, personal to corporate, paper losses, etc. Pass any audit but…

Come on Garry, you’re smarter than this…

Somebody holding a gun to your head to read the strip and the comments? If you don’t like it, don’t read it. And don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

I find it interesting that the same people who were screaming “Leave Obama Alone” when all anyone wanted to see was his original birth certificate. And are still making fun of the people who wanted to see it. Are the same people screaming to see Mitt Romney’s tax returns. I wonder how many of them would want their financial records held up to such public scrutiny. I wonder how many of them would want any of their lives held up to such public scrutiny as a Presidential election can bring. You can’t have it both ways people. I for one could care less what is on Mitt Romney’s tax return. I also could care less about Obama’s birth certificate. I just want someone, anyone, to fix what is wrong with our economy. $4.00 a gallon for gas?!? The skyrocketing cost of feeding my family?!? The massive unemployment rate?!?! The Banking scandal?!?! Can’t the stinking, leftist, liberal media circus find anything better to do with their time than pry into Mitt Romey’s tax records. Get a life people!!!

Somehow the righties missed the whole economic meltdown in 2008. How can this be? How many times must it be reviewed for them? We were losing 750,000 jobs per month on the month Bush left office. 800,000 the next month. We are making up for that massive hole even now. We are making progress, but it won’t be fixed overnight. The ultra rich will have to begin to pay their share as they did under Clinton once again. We had a surplus when Clinton left office. Obama is proposing a tax increase on folks with an income of over $250,000 and a modest increase at that. The GOP just doesn’t want THEIR taxes to go up. They could care less about the middle class or working class. Just like they are against abortion when it is YOUR abortion, not when it affects them.

This birth certificate issue has been resolved. Oh, yes you can find whatever you want on the Internet, that does not make it true. I’ve seen the doctored certificates, you just seem to ignore the copies supplied by Hawaii, which the Governor has reviewed and authenticated. There did not seem to be a problem when Republican Schwarzenegger was made Governor of California.

Just to be clear, I am not a champion for Obama. His behaviour in the Middle East has been abhorrent. The U.S. should focus on her own issues. On this, I think we can agree. We are the People. Those who would depart from so a task, let him depart.

Romney’s whole business career involved creating debt for others and collecting millions for himself. meanwhile the Fed. pension Guarantee had to kick in to replace the pensions he sucked dry. That’s you taxpayers, paying pensions that he destroyed and got wealthy on. this is his business model for running the country? God save us!

rainbird’s frothy flurriness

I think I’ve finally figured it out. Guard SGT is really a plant for the party he pretends to revile. He/she wants us to get all het up over his/her apparent recalcitrance, thick-headedness, close-mindedness and just plain nut-job-ness, so that we will conclude that he is uber patriotic, under-educated and poorly informed by ravening talking heads on Faux Noise. Well, it’s not going to work, Sarge. Nobody could be that stupid. You’ve simply overplayed your hand, so give it up already. The game is over — you’ve been “made.”

I posted a couple days back about what Romney’s partial 2010 and 2011 tax returns already tell us – which that Romney has been hiding taxable income in offshore accounts, and has effectively been caught, but took advantage of an IRS amnesty program in 2009 on the one account (of Romney’s – several thousand other wealthy Americans also were revealed), an account that the IRS became aware of through a UBS (Swiss) bank whistleblower. That he, and the GOP, who have certainly seen his older returns, are supporting him in not revealing the now fairly standard 10+ years of returns is doubtless because those returns might reveal, indirectly, more tax evasion for those who can read between the lines, and possibly may reveal what is already pointed to by other legal documents, which is that he continued to head Bain, after 2000, despite his repeated denials he did so, and was there when the firm actively outsourced American jobs – not that what he did there before 2000 in terms of pillaging and indebting companies and stealing the worker’s pensions to pay Bain’s fat fees (leveraging is the preferred banker’s term) isn’t bad enough already..That both Romney, and by extension, the GOP NC are continuing the refusal despite how bad it looks is something of a confirmation that Romney’s taxes are a big liability – and probably one that would hurt him with the GOP core, because they know Dems, and independents are already largely lost to them, so it’s irrelevant to them what they think, or might find in the returns. It’s not likely just that he’s so wealthy few Americans can grasp or identify with him (just as he seems clueless about the concerns of average Americans), nor is it likely just that he’s shorted the LDS church of their required 10 percent of the take – the GOP wouldn’t back him hiding that, because he’d still bring in the LDS and religious conservative vote if that were all it is. He released 23 years of returns to the McCain campaign – it may, or may not be significant that McCain then made the bizarre choice of Sarah “I can see Russia” Palin, who was weak in every substantive way, save perhaps for being photogenic and mouthing conservative Christian platitudes. You really have to wonder what McCain’s team saw in Romney that made Palin look like a better bet.

@gokie…thanks for an interesting link on R’money’s Money. I liked reading the comments at the end.

x

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/08/investigating-mitt-romney-offshore-accounts

I hate the defiance of conservatives and Republicans. Why don’t they roll over for the superior liberals and Democrats?

@SUSAN NEWMAN:

@explorer543:

It was deliberate. I didn’t invent it, unfortunately. Several political message boards I read use it.