I wonder how many Pinocchios Glenn Kessler will give this ad:
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by DougJ| 66 Comments
This post is in: Election 2012, Going Galt
I wonder how many Pinocchios Glenn Kessler will give this ad:
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Yutsano
Infinity +1.
PeakVT
The truth is uncivil. Priorities USA should be polite and accept Romney’s lies as factual.
suse
4, because Rombot didn’t get 100M$ his own self.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
It’s his own damned fault for not starting a hedge fund.
Comrade Mary
Well fucking done. More ads like this, please.
YellowJournalism
The audacity of having the employees build their fucking stage…sickening.
Violet
Wow. That was powerful. Building your own coffin is an excellent comparison. More, more, more like this please.
MattR
@Yutsano: With the justification that Romney only made $95 million out of the deal and not more than $100 million like the commercial claims.
Yutsano
@MattR: See? Distortion of the truth! MOAR LIBRUL LIES!!
Cassidy
OT: anyone have a solution for fleas? The dogs are dying. I bathe them regularly, we’ve tried the liquids an pills. Florida is just bad this year.
Zack!
Brilliant.
Zack!
@Cassidy: Tried the name brand Frontline? It’s always worked for our dog. The off-brand stuff, never.
shortstop
@Cassidy: We once had such a bad infestation we had to give up and use a flea bomb. It works, but it’s SO bad for everyone, and you have to leave the house for hours, then come back and wash every dish in your cabinets (plus your cabinets), every surface of the house, etc. This was 17-18 years ago, so hopefully someone will have a safer and easier solution these days.
shortstop
@Zack!: It works for us, too, but I’m told that once a dog is really infested, it’s not so helpful.
TenguPhule
Move to a state not infested with teh crazy?
Violet
@Cassidy: Diatomaceous earth kills fleas by cutting up their outsides and they dehydrate and die. Check before using it on pets to know how to use it. Also, don’t get the kind for pools as that has other stuff in it that’s toxic.
Cassidy
Weve tried frontline and the cheap knock off from Walmart. We were having our husky take a pill but that isn’t working. We don’t seem to have a lot in the house; I grab a couple every now and then. When I bathe them I only find a small amount, about 5. But they’re still chewing the hell out of themselves. I was looking up feedin them garlic today, but the info on that seems sketchy.
Jennifer
@Cassidy: You can get parasitic nematodes from Gardens Alive for spraying the yard – they kill the fleas before they can ever jump on your pets.
Cassidy
@TenguPhule: Yeah. That’s another whole conversation.
Jennifer
Also, too: I’ve heard from lots of folks that the fleas have become resistant to Frontline. You might try Advantage instead – they have not yet developed resistance to it.
robertdsc-PowerBook
Great ad.
andy
Too bad they built a stage and not a gallows. And it’s funny how people like Mittens demand that their asses get kissed right to the end like that.
A fucking stage.
Violet
@Cassidy: Diatomaceous earth in the house, in the carpet, along baseboards, etc. Leave it for awhile, maybe 24 hours, then vacuum up. Use a mask when you sprinkle it out as inhaling it can be dangerous for your lungs. Eating it is not.
shortstop
@Cassidy: Talk to your vet before giving them garlic.
Cassidy
Feell dumb saying this: any natural solutions? I feel like a shit dumping pesticide on my dogs. I’ll do it if it kills the fleas, but I don’t want to keep escalating our little war.
Violet
Diatomaceous earth works when you sprinkle it in the yard too, but not when it gets wet. Don’t waste your money if you’ve got rain coming and wait until after the dew dries before you apply it.
Todd
@Cassidy: Brush them a couple of times a day with a wire undermat brush. It disrupts flea eggs.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@Violet:
I’ll second the Diatomaceous earth. We don’t have fleas, but we do get these nasty little larder beetles that go after the cat food.
Sprinkling a little around the cat food area whenever they come back sends them away again for a few weeks… but poses no threat to the cats (just don’t let them breathe it).
Cassidy
@Violet: Thanks. I’ll look into that today. After the haircut I’m heading to petco.
FlipYrWhig
Boom goes the dynamite.
Jennifer
Back on topic: it’s a good ad, but I still want to see the one that lays out how much of Romney’s wealth came from looted pension funds, that the rest of us then ended up bailing out. Where’s the oppo research on that? If it hasn’t been done, then we deserve to lose, because I can’t imagine a more effective ad than one that says “$50 million (or $20 million, or whatever) of Mitt Romney’s fortune came from pension funds that Bain Capital looted when shutting down companies, and the rest of us picked up the tab so workers would get the retirement benefits they were legally entitled to collect. You helped pay for Mitt Romney’s car elevator in his $11 million California mansion and his wife’s fancy dancing horses with your taxes. Now Mitt Romney is promising to bring his expertise at helping himself to your money to the presidency.”
Or something to similar effect. Something that draws the line between who lost and who won, and exactly what Romney “produced” that made him stinking rich.
Jennifer
@Cassidy: If you’re concerned about pesticides, you really should look into the parasitic nematodes. It’s a species that only attacks fleas and flea eggs, and you don’t have to re-apply after rain.
Linda Featheringill
@Cassidy: #9
Fleas:
Ohio seems to have some very resistant fleas this year. Apparently they like cats and dogs. Don’t know what’s happening.
But I do the medications from the vet plus anti-itch spray, plus the occasional antihistamine, plus spraying my house with some nasty stuff, plus grooming with a comb.
I can claim only moderate success.
Valdivia
very powerful ad. I hope they put it on rotation heavily.
Have you guys seen the piece about how many of the big money people on the left are not giving to this SuperPac because they feel it’s dirty to give to a SuperPac somehow? Can we please just for once not fight with our hands tied behind our backs?
Martin
If Rmoney didn’t destroy all of those businesses he couldn’t have afforded his fancy Team USA olympic horses.
Why does that man in Indiana hate horses? Why does he hate Team USA?
cat48
@Valdivia:
But, Valdivia, their Pony has not arrived & they’re too good to give to a Superpac. Sad.
Also, the only way Mitt can win is to spend Obama Dry. They’re gleeful b/c he spent more last month than he raised.
Maude
@Cassidy:
Take them to the vet. I’d be very careful about flea products.
dp
He says it made him sick, but Kessler wants to see some medical records, dammit.
Jennifer
Parasitic nematodes. The other option is insect growth regulator, which stops fleas from maturing and so from multiplying. They’ve got it at the same website.
jl
Looks like a good commercial to me.
The WsPo’s wooden dummy
fact checkerhair splitter will spend the summer choking on gnats and swallowing camels, seems to me.Shell games are rigged, and you lose if you accept the premises. The evolution of what we call today private equity firms started back before I paid much attention to this kind of stuff.
But I do have vague memories of something called leveraged buyout firms. There was a a public controversy back in the 80s and 90s about whether leverage buyouts were productive enterprises or corporate schemes (or limited partnership versions of the same thing) that played shell games. Some rich bigshots take on huge amounts of debt and using that buy companies who were financially vulnerable in our system of capital allocation (even though many of them were perfectly profitable) and then using the borrowed money to play financial and legal liability shell games. The goal was to mine the victim, target, (sorry, I meant valuable acquisition) for the parts that would yield cash, while avoiding the liabilities.
I remember a debate about whether leveraged buyouts was a clever way to increase the productivity of firms by injecting better management, or a way to privatize profits and socialize losses. That was back when you would hear actual attempts at reporting in the big media, and seems long ago.
I have been trying to catch up, and doing some reading. The Wikipedia machine says that the term ‘private equity’ covers a wide range of firms: leveraged buyouts, venture capital and growth capital. The last two seem to do something useful for the most part, from what I have read so far. The leveraged buyout, that was the controversial business model.
What did Bain capital do? Was it mainly venture capital? How many brave innovative entrepreneurial ventures did it risk money on? Was it mainly growth capital? How many established companies invited it in to reshape their business models?
Or is Bain just one of the old leveraged buyout type companies, hiding under a nicer name?
I say, full steam ahead. Good time to have the leveraged buyout debate again.
And if Romney decided that leveraged buyouts were his professional life calling, that should part of the debate about whether his attitude and viewpoint is the better one for a president.
Anyone have some info or links, let me know. I just started with ‘private equity’ on the Wiki and followed the links.
Shinobi
I was seeing some comments by republicans on twitter yesterday about how if Obama was so opposed to “outsourcing” he should just abandon all our free trade acts. And how the democrats opposed free trade.
Which just goes to show that the Republicans really don’t get it. It’s not that free trade is wrong. It’s that this guy didn’t care about american workers when he was
ruiningrunning businesses. Why would he start to care about them now? He sold out hundreds of americans just to make himself slightly more obscenely rich, and now he wants to run the country?Marc
@Violet: But the man is clearly not dead, so the analogy of building his own coffin is inflammatory and uncivil. We rate this ad Three Pinocchios!
…what do you mean, there was an actual plant that actually closed? We’re in the business of ruling whether discourse is appropriate, not whether it’s true.
Tonal Crow
Mitt Romney: fixing the economy like you fix a dog.
Valdivia
@cat48:
What cracks me out about them being gleeful is that Obama is spending all that money on his ground operation, while these guys are busy carpet bombing the air and not very much engaged with what happens on the ground.
jl
@Shinobi:
That is a good point, but I think more complicated than at first glance. Problem is that much of the recent so-called free trade acts are not about trade at all. There is usually a couple lines about tariffs or barriers to trade someplace in the agreement.
But most of these recent agreements (CAFTA is an example) are bout expanding corporation’s rights, giving them quasi sovereign status, protecting any type of intellectual property that corporations own, and making it easier to appropriate intellectual capital than they do not currently own, and making leveraged buyout type shell games easier to perform on an international stage.
They should be called ‘mystery meat trade agreements’ not ‘free trade agreements’.
Or maybe they should be called the United State East India Company Modernization Act.
jl
@Valdivia:
If the GOP GOTV operation is mainly voter suppression and riling up their base, they just need to cover the polling places. And where the local government is corrupt enough, a few police actions for some obscure semi emergency or other in certain sorts of neighborhoods.
Valdivia
@jl:
I think they truly believe they don’t have to do any work on the ground, it’s the kind of Romney entitlement vibe I get aside from the tilt the balance of voters by repression tactics you mention. They think Obama is going to let them get away with it, as we see that’s not the case.
cat48
@Valdivia:
I read last winter that the Kochs were going to have a new techy info system w/wingnut’s locations & a gotv ground system that would cost $2B. That sounded unbelievable to me & I haven’t heard anymore about it. Now there are people campaining for Americans for Prosperity. Cain is doing 20 Seminars for them on “policy” which I can’t imagine. Don’t know. I’m going look more later.
cat48
@jl:
I read yesterday that Obama’s Election Atty has that covered. There’s 25 attorneys in the process checking polling places, etc. right now. No wonder Obama is broke!
Valdivia
@cat48:
yeah I remember something too. I take comfort in the fact that Kay once mentioned that outsorcing GOTV operations (Kerry did this in Ohio in 2004) was a total mess. Since they can’t coordinate with the campaign. I think registration drives, etc can be useful but on the day of it’s the campaign that needs to be on top of everything and if the Romney team is just thinking ads will do the trick, oh well better for us.
jl
@Valdivia: Ha! That would be interesting if they think they can just blow through a couple of billion and ‘have someone’ do their election week GOTV for them. That would be good news too, I think.
gbear
I took a look at some of the other ads that that pac has produced, and I just went to their site and donated $30. I know it’s not much given the millions that are being thrown around, but some of those ads they’ve produced are great, and it’s all I can afford.
jl
@gbear: Thanks for link. I will give something too.
Valdivia
@gbear:
yes thanks for the link. and from what I heard they’re not getting that many millions thrown at them.
gbear
@jl: @Valdivia:
I didn’t realize it when I made my donation, but it’s the PAC that Bill Maher gave a million dollars to.
salvage
Nice.
rikyrah
this ad is BRUTAL.
BRUTAL.
And, what it says about the fuckers at Bain…
well, it says just about everything that people like me think is wrong with Willard, and why he should NEVER be President.
jl
@gbear: Not a fan, but what the heck. I’ll give some dough anyway.
russ
Mitt’s toast if this gets on the teevee.
gbear
@jl: Yep. Not a big Maher fan here either, but I can sure stand behind videos like the one at the top. I hope they get a shitload of views.
JayJohnstone
They need to get this on TV often. I’m donating.
TheOtherWA
Dang. Nice ad! This needs to run a lot. Especially in small towns.
celticdragonchick
Maybe the stage should have burned that night along with all the company buildings. It’s time for workers to start going old school. It was the only way they got shit changed back in the 19th century.
Burn the place and/or dump as much nasty toxic shit you can find all over to make it an EPA issue superfund issue.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
On the subject of fleas:
When I was a kid, our cat was being eaten alive by fleas—they ate a pound of meat out of his back where he couldn’t reach, seriously. On a friend’s recommendation, we bought a Shell No-Pest Strip and hung it up, and the fleas deserted the house that day. We didn’t vacuum up their dead bodies, they just…left. Immediately.
I’m sure whatever was in No-Pest Strips 45 years ago was banned or something, because I tried the same thing 20 years later and it didn’t work. So do I have anything to contribute to the discussion? No…except that there used to be something that worked!
becca
@Cassidy: If your dogs hang out in a yard, treat the lawn. My vast experience with flea infestation leads me to the conclusion they can only be eradicated by bombing and treating everything and every place the dogs inhabit for any length of time.
After that it’s a fairer fight.
grondo
Hit ’em again, hit ’em again, HARDER, HARDER!