Time to set the record straight...

We are 7 months out, but I'm tired of waiting. The false notion that the left AND right have been pushing about Romney being a liberal needs to be skewered. I don't generally care for Coulter, but any port in a storm....

http://news.investors.com/article/60...tm?src=SeeAlso

(excerpts)
When Reagan took office, the top marginal tax rate in this country was a staggering 70%. Lowering that to 28% was an enormous shot in the arm to the economy.
Cutting the top tax rate today from 35% to 30% — or even 20% — cannot possibly have the same dramatic effect. Republicans, as the only responsible party, are going to have to do something that's never been tried before in Washington: Cut government spending.



For at least the last half-century — probably since Abraham Lincoln ran — there has always been liberal Republican pain in the ass in the GOP primary race. (You can tell who the liberal is by whom the New York Times calls a "pragmatic" or "moderate" Republican.)


In 2000, we had conservative George W. Bush against liberal John McCain. In 2008, it was liberal McCain vs. Mitt Romney, the conservative.
You will note that liberal Republicans have always stayed liberal Republicans and conservative Republicans have always stayed conservative Republicans. Only their match-ups change.
Until this year.
For the first time, the last cycle's conservative has been rebranded a "liberal" by right-wingers eager to resume their battle against liberal Republicans. This year's actual liberal Republican, much admired by the Non-Fox Media, was Jon Huntsman. But he dropped out after the New Hampshire primary.


Mitt Romney isn't a liberal. He isn't even a moderate. And he certainly isn't liked by the Times.
Liberals so loathe Romney that in 2008, their most Christian-phobic columnist, Frank Rich, was forced to write admiringly about pro-life Christian conservative Mike Huckabee. He may have been a Christian, but at least he wasn't Mitt Romney!
Conservatives know perfectly well Romney isn't a "moderate" — he was our conservative hero just four years ago!


By contrast, when Romney was governor of Massachusetts, every single budget he submitted to the 85% Democratic legislature included tax cuts. He became a pro-lifer when it mattered — while he was governor — and vetoed a stem cell research bill. He slashed government spending in one of the most liberal states of the union. He is the rare elected Republican who is tough on illegal immigration. He has forcefully denounced Obama's dangerous foreign policy.
But the facts are irrelevant to people busy fighting the last war. It's not about Romney at all, but their own posing. Romney is the Emmanuel Goldstein of GOP primary voters looking for a moderate to hate because they fell down on the job last time.
Liberal Republicans always lose. Because he is not a liberal, Romney stands a good chance of beating Obama this fall. But if the fantasist posers keep turning this presidential race into their personal "Dungeons and Dragons" battle against "moderates," Romney's victory will go into the "Liberal Wins" column, when it is anything but.

http://www.policymic.com/articles/32...s-not-deserved

True, Romney was a more liberal guy when he was younger, and yes he has grown more conservative as he has gotten older. If libertarian and Tea Party conservatives are going to hang someone for that, are they then precluding the possibility that anyone can grow, change their mind, learn, and discover new things? Maybe it appears too convenient, but others have followed a similar path, including Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
Reagan was once a proud Democrat, and even as a Republican Governor of California, he signed into law one of the most liberal abortion laws at the time. He later regretted that decision, and led a pro-life charge while president.


Romney’s stances today are almost identical to where he stood in 2007. If anything, he has moved more over to the right. Here is where Romney stands today:
Pro-Life
Pro-Second Amendment
Anti-Gay Marriage
Less Regulation
Lower Taxes
Favors repealing Obamacare
Opposes Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants
We all understand that no one wants to be bamboozled, but there comes a point when you have to take a step back and realize that every candidate is going to have things in their past that you won’t agree with, and everyone has made mistakes. The candidate who has never had to change their mind on anything was either born incredibly lucky or incredibly stubborn. It is unlikely to exist and would be impossible to believe.

I've ignored this, and I want to come back to it now. I'm going to start with Obama's record, and I'm going to start in the Senate.

Obama voted between 95-96% straight party Democrat (when he bothered to vote) while in the 109th-110th Congress. In the 110th, Obama voted for small business 50% of the time. In the 109th, only a dismal 13%. This is according to the National Federation of Independent Business. I think this is an important place to start since it's pretty much universally recognized that small business drives the economy. Obama never was, is not, and will not ever be a friend to small business, even when he takes GIANT leaps towards the center on this issue, he still comes up very short.

As President, the GOP led Congress (his prime target for the whole "do-nothing Congress" ad hom) presented the Democratic-led Senate with at least 23 jobs bills (and there may be more since I did my research). ALL of them were either killed in committee or ignored. Several were threatened with vetoes if they were to make it out of the Senate. Bear in mind, this is the same Senate that has not bothered to submit a budget in years. Of course, Obama's own budget he just submitted (that even his own Senate killed) called for a 1.5 trillion dollar tax increase that INCLUDE small business owners, who have already literally been taxed almost to death...and it STILL raised the deficit by 1.3 trillion, and the overall debt to nearly 16 trillion. It also assumed that the economy would grow a whopping 3.9% even while he taxes the shit out of business.

I made this case 4 years ago when people were saying the same thing ("Obama and McCain are the same") and it seemed to be largely ignored. It's important to note that at the same time Obama was mostly against small business initiatives in the Senate, McCain voted WITH SBO 100% of the time. That's a distinction that is difficult to understate...it's a radical difference that needs to be heeded.

And yet Ron Paul and his supporters are delusional enough to actually think that Romney and Obama are similar. Given the facts, it is actually quite disturbing that Paul will not let Romney go after Obama unfettered and try to improve among Hispanics

Anybody buying this? If so, please PM me. I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you :D

As far as Romney vs. Obama economic plans, there's a pretty clear model going on in Europe right now...if we back-up and forget about what happened in France, and look at PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain) there's a clear model of what happens when the government goes on reckless spending sprees and then bucks austerity measures (sadly, ALL of these Countries, as shoddy as their economic situations are, have lower debt-to-GDP ratios than the US does now that Obama shot our well over 100%). Obama's plan is to roll back Bush's tax cuts, raise taxes on highest earners (which is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to what we need to pay down our debt and deficit), and try to spend, spend, spend our way to prosperity.

It won't work.

If you look at two economies that are recovering nicely in the the Eurozone, both Scotland and Germany embraced austerity. Greece bucked it, refused to implement the mandates imposed on it that were coupled with it's bailouts, and now they are on the verge of collapse. Greece also sets a model that follows dangerously close to Obama's, in that while they leeched money from the EU, the US has been leeching the dollar reserve standard. This can't go on, zero yields, or even negative yields. But this is what we can look forward to (and worse) under another 4 years of the current regime.

The contrast is clear and stark. As Romney has said, he'd examine the budget line-by-line and ask "Is this program worth borrowing money from China for?", and if it's not, it gets cut or axed. Anyone think that's going to be Obama's plan, too? The same guy that JUST submitted another budget that was 40% higher in spending then revenues?

Oh, and Romney DOES have a history of balancing budgets. Some people won't like the way he did it, but he did it. Ya gotta do what you gotta do...

This gets easier as we go. Some low-hanging fruit:
-Abortion (obvious)
-Gay marriage (obvious and contemporary)
-Immigration (look at Romney's endorsement of Arizona's law versus Obama trying to sue it away)
-Medicare (Romney uses Ryan's voucher plan, Obama......well, Obama does nothing but let it collapse under it's own weight AFTER he's long out of office)
-XL Keystone. Does anyone in their right mind think that Romney would have stonewalled or delayed this? This is a gateway issue on the HUGE difference in domestic fossil fuel policy.
-Bush tax cuts. These will be rolled back or sun-setted in term II for Hopey. Romney will probably make them permanent.
-Judicial appointments. Duh.
-NRA? Duh.


There will be more, but this is a good start.

Sic 'em, Suit. I can't stand liberals.

Suit is on FIRE today , lol

Some others:

Obama's spending cuts he's proposed aren't real, well, one of them is: The military. The rest is balanced on false promises to cut Medicare and Medicaid which are lies, and everyone knows they are lies. He's already done this once, set up FUTURE cuts, then pushed them off because he wants to get re-elected. in the second term, it would be more of the same because all the House and Senate D's will want to get re-elected, too. So, basically, he'll cut the military and grow everywhere else. Romney will spend more on the military and take the threat of China and Russia seriously. He's also not about to give up on missile defense in Europe, which Obama has already practically given away as a gift to Putin for nothing in return.

Romney is riding the "cut, cap and balance" plan, where government spending is capped at20% of GDP, cut the Federal work force by 10%, and advance a balanced budget amendment that would restrain spending and, most importantly, BORROWING.

Another key difference: Obama wants to dump more spendulous into hiring, BUT, like the last time, he's only going to give that money to unions, i.e. teachers, cops and firefighters. While on it's face, this seems fine, there are some problems: One, this is still, at the end of the day, simply a sop to his unions. Secondly, the teacher workforce actually needs CUT, as in the bottom 10%, the shit that's dragging down the whole US education system that is protected and sheltered by the unions. Finally, the last spendulous showed how ridiculous the "return on investment" (actually loss on investment) turned out. If you give Obama credit for half of the jobs that he says he "created", it still cost about $400,000 for each job that was (really just) saved. that's an unacceptable price to pay. As I've stated before, we could have, with the same money we borrowed from China, given each man woman and child in the US a check for $3000.

Healthcare is another. i'm ignoring the false narrative about how obamacare and Romneycare are one and the same, because I've already pointed out the many, many differences, but moving beyond that, Obamacare did NOTHING to rein in the costs of the existing system, just dumped 30 million more people into it. Romney is at least addressing that by buying into the Ryan plan. Obama's fallback position for when his healthcare POS is ruled unconstitutional next month is..................nothing.

Obama will also bravely do.................................nothing about SSI. It's one thing to hide behind the election before addressing this, but there simply is no plan at all to tackle this. It, like the other "entitlements", will simply die a slow death under Obama's "plan", but he'll be long gone so what does he care? Romney has proposed some common-sense changes, like raising the age and making wealthier people contribute more.


You know, other than those like 45 glaring and wildly differing views on things, they are otherwise just like twins...

One more thing, and then I need to do some actual work.

The news out of the EU wasn't that bad...instead of the predicted .2% drop (which would have technically put the Eurozone into a double-dip recession), output was flat. While zero growth sounds sucky, with the current state of things in Europe, it's actually good news. I'm not sure what will happen in Greece...they have failed like 9 times in a row to form a coalition government. Still, I'm not sure that their collapse will mean that much in the overall scheme of things, as they only make up 2% of the whole EU economy. Depends on if there are runs on banks in the other PIIG's...anyway, the key takeaway is that while all the Keynesian doom-and-gloomers predicted the end of Europe because of austerity, it has not come to pass...

I posted this under the Rev Wright thread, but it belongs here, as well...

This is also interesting...I've been thinking about the false narrative that Romney has no solid beliefs, no core from which he operates. Think about that in relation to Obama. Obama was a member of this kooky church since the 80's. Jeremiah Wright MARRIED Obama, and officiated Obama's kids baptisms. These people were close. They were more than pastor/member, they were friends. And, almost exactly 4 years ago to the day, the Obama's, for PURELY POLITICAL REASONS, withdrew their membership from Trinity United Church of Christ, ostensibly because they had an epiphany that, even though they had been preached to by, and espoused this race baiting, 9/11 revisionist history spewing, accusing of the US as terrorist bigot for 20 years, they suddenly decided, just FIVE MONTHS BEFORE THE ELECTION, that Wright was wrong.

Please. This would be akin to Romney coming out and stating that Mormonism is wrong, and that he had a miraculous vision and decided to convert to Christianity. The media, of course, would crucify him, and the left would portray this as more flip-flopping, but they gave Obama a pass for the exact same type of "conversion".

Romney has stuck with the harder path, and, in fact, highlighted his faith when he spoke at Liberty last week, calling for ways to unite, not divide, over differences in faith. It's OBAMA who is a coward with no core values, NOT Romney.

Quote:

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The news out of the EU wasn't that bad...instead of the predicted .2% drop (which would have technically put the Eurozone into a double-dip recession), output was flat. While zero growth sounds sucky, with the current state of things in Europe, it's actually good news. I'm not sure what will happen in Greece...they have failed like 9 times in a row to form a coalition government. Still, I'm not sure that their collapse will mean that much in the overall scheme of things, as they only make up 2% of the whole EU economy. Depends on if there are runs on banks in the other PIIG's...

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Meanwhile, back in the real world...
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...84G0MG20120517