Mitt Romney - prep school bully

[Teatownclown]

You have to have an inner knowledge of how business works to help business succeed.

Force companies to stand on their own two feet and give the workers no incentive to find a job.  Check.  Obama talks a good game, but what has he done significantly different than President Bush in terms of corporate welfare?

You left out that you need a little luck. How has RMoney been lucky?

You keep ignoring the fact that it was under Obama's leadership that the banking system stabilized. QE1 and QE2 may have been brought on by the FED but the coordinated effort between treasury and the President brought about the confidence necessary to stabilize a situation that will come to be known as the edge of the abyss. You must have a short memory not to recall what was taking place in 2008. The GOP/Teabaggers, for their own political benefit, used obstinacy as their method which has had a negative effect on confidence in government and stalled any recovery.

You think people don't see this charade? Doesn't it look like you are just a participant in the "set up" portion of the failed GOP/Teabagger Sting?

If I've got this straight. You are criticizing Romney for not really being a business man as much as a government insider, yet you support the quintessential political insider? Is Romney just not enough of a political hack?

.

No, he's a dick.....with a christian conscience....

It's going to be alright. You can all sleep with the light on for the next four years if you like.

[Conan71]

You left out that you need a little luck. How has RMoney been lucky?

You keep ignoring the fact that it was under Obama's leadership that the banking system stabilized. QE1 and QE2 may have been brought on by the FED but the coordinated effort between treasury and the President brought about the confidence necessary to stabilize a situation that will come to be known as the edge of the abyss. You must have a short memory not to recall what was taking place in 2008. The GOP/Teabaggers, for their own political benefit, used obstinacy as their method which has had a negative effect on confidence in government and stalled any recovery.

Whomever the next president was, the banking situation had to be and would be stabilized.  That's sort of the same thing as acting like Obama giving the okay to bag Bin Laden was something any other sitting president wouldn't have done last year.

I'm not aware of any prior superior finance experience which would suggest POTUS Obama acted alone in stabilizing the banking system.

He's had a couple of great opportunities to take credit for other people's work.  Meh. Must run in the administration.

[Conan71]

I came across this on Wikipedia over the weekend, Conan.

Romney worked to ensure the safety of the Games following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by coordinating a $300 million security budget. Overall, he oversaw a $1.32 billion budget, 700 employees, and 26,000 volunteers. The federal government provided $382 million of that budget, much of it because Romney lobbied Congress to provide money for security- and non-security-related items. An additional federal $1.1 billion was spent on indirect support in the form of highway and transit projects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitt_Romney

One positive note, and that's Mitt and his wife donated $1 million of their own money to the Olympics and he donated the $1.4 million he received in salary and severance to charity.  But there's no denying that the federal government (and presumably the state though it's not mentioned) contributed more than half the money to support the Olympics.  Transit projects are a good use of federal funds in such an effort because they don't go away when the Games are over, yet I could see the tea party fundamentalists being in a lather over it.  And I wonder if our current Republicans in the Senate would filibuster a similar use of federal funds just to deny Mr. Obama any kind of positive accomplishment.

The Olympics is a major global tourism draw and communities also wind up with more than just new roads, they get new stadiums and arenas and improvements to sporting facilities.  Those are the kinds of things which improve the livability of a region.  Yes, region.  I think most people realize an Olympics may encompass a 100 mile or so radius for all the sporting events to take place.

To me, it's along the lines of cities building arenas which have a tangible value well beyond any monetary payback.

I've been doing more reading on Romney and I see some very good leadership tendencies from his tenure as the Massachusetts governor, as well as a pretty good ability to gain bi-partisan cooperation.  If you have the time:

http://www.clubforgrowth.org/whitepapers/?subsec=137&id=905

[AquaMan]

Whomever the next president was, the banking situation had to be and would be stabilized.  That's sort of the same thing as acting like Obama giving the okay to bag Bin Laden was something any other sitting president wouldn't have done last year.

I'm not aware of any prior superior finance experience which would suggest POTUS Obama acted alone in stabilizing the banking system.

He's had a couple of great opportunities to take credit for other people's work.  Meh. Must run in the administration.

Translation: he may not accept responsibility for successes or improvements and he must take responsibility for all failures and negativity.

Take a fishing trip. Whomever goes fishing will find that there are fish in the lake so catching one is no big deal. They are there for everyone. If you use your guts and skill to shoot a water moccasin while running your trout line, well, anyone would have done that, just aim and fire, so no big deal. Absolutely no evidence that you have any fishing or defensive skills whatsoever.

But come home on a stretcher with a snake bite and no fish and sure enough you ain't no fisherman.

[RecycleMichael]

That's sort of the same thing as acting like Obama giving the okay to bag Bin Laden was something any other sitting president wouldn't have done last year.

Bush said he wasn't important anymore. McCain said we shouldn't go into Pakistan to get him. Romney said it wasn't worth spending money to catch him. Of course, three days later Romney reversed his position and said Bin Laden is going to pay and he is going to die.

[Conan71]

Bush said he wasn't important anymore. McCain said we shouldn't go into Pakistan to get him. Romney said it wasn't worth spending money to catch him. Of course, three days later Romney reversed his position and said Bin Laden is going to pay and he is going to die.

Please, you are making yourself look ridiculous.  Aside from being a top security priority, it was a once-in-a-lifetime PR coup for any leader that no president would have refused to act on- especially after how hard Clinton got crapped on for not acting on the opportunity to seize or kill him in the 1990s.

Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. is a 31-year veteran of the CIA and the author of "Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives."

As we mark the anniversary of Osama bin Laden's death, President Obama deserves credit for making the right choice on taking out Public Enemy No. 1.

But his administration never would have had the opportunity to do the right thing had it not been for some extraordinary work during the George W. Bush administration. Much of that work has been denigrated by Obama as unproductive and contrary to American principles.

He is wrong on both counts.

Shortly after bin Laden met his maker last spring, courtesy of U.S. Special Forces and intelligence, the administration proudly announced that when Obama took office, getting bin Laden was made a top priority. Many of us who served in senior counterterrorism positions in the Bush administration were left muttering: "Gee, why didn't we think of that?"

The truth is that getting bin Laden was the top counterterrorism objective for U.S. intelligence since well before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. This administration built on work pain­stakingly pursued for many years before Obama was elected — and without this work, Obama administration officials never would have been in a position to authorize the strike on Abbottabad, Pakistan, that resulted in bin Laden's overdue death.

In 2004, an al-Qaeda terrorist was captured trying to communicate with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the terror organization's operations in Iraq. That captured terrorist was taken to a secret CIA prison — or "black site" — where, initially, he was uncooperative. After being subjected to some "enhanced interrogation techniques" — techniques authorized by officials at the most senior levels of the U.S. government and that the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel confirmed were consistent with U.S. law — the detainee became compliant. He was not one of the three al-Qaeda operatives who underwent waterboarding, the harshest of the hard measures.

Once this terrorist decided that non-cooperation was a non-starter, he told us many things — including that bin Laden had given up communicating via telephone, radio or Internet, and depended solely on a single courier who went by "Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti." At the time, I was chief of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. The fact that bin Laden was relying on a lone courier was a revelation that told me bin Laden had given up day-to-day control of his organization. You can't run an operation as large, complex and ambitious as al-Qaeda by communicating only every few months. It also told me that capturing him would be even harder than we had thought.

Armed with the pseudonym of bin Laden's courier, we pressed on. We asked other detainees in our custody if they had ever heard of "al-Kuwaiti." Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, reacted in horror when he heard the name. He backed into his cell and vigorously denied ever hearing of the man. We later intercepted communications KSM sent to fellow detainees at the black site, in which he instructed them: "Tell them nothing about the courier!"

In 2005 another senior detainee, Abu Faraj al-Libi, told us that this courier had informed him that Libi had been selected to be al-Qaeda's No. 3 official. Surely that kind of information is delivered only by highly placed individuals.

A couple of years later, after I became head of the National Clandestine Service, the CIA was able to discover the true name of the courier. Armed with that information, the agency worked relentlessly to locate that man. Finding him eventually led to tracking down and killing bin Laden.

With some trying to turn bin Laden's death into a campaign talking point for Obama's reelection, it is useful to remember that the trail to bin Laden started in a CIA black site — all of which Obama ordered closed, forever, on the second full day of his administration — and stemmed from information obtained from hardened terrorists who agreed to tell us some (but not all) of what they knew after undergoing harsh but legal interrogation methods. Obama banned those methods on Jan. 22, 2009.

This past weekend, Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin attacked statements made in May 2011 by me, former CIA director Michael Hayden and former attorney general Michael Mukasey regarding what led to bin Laden's death. They misunderstood and mischaracterized our positions.

No single tactic, technique or approach led to the successful operation against bin Laden. But those who suggest it was all a result of a fresh approach taken after Jan. 20, 2009, are mistaken.

[RecycleMichael]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/books/manhunt-by-peter-l-bergen-about-the-bin-laden-killing.html?pagewanted=all

On March 14, 2011, Mr. Bergen reports, several possible courses of action were presented to Mr. Obama, including a B-2 bombing run (which would incur civilian casualties and wipe out any proof of Bin Laden's death), a drone strike (favored, Mr. Bergen says, by Gen. James Cartwright) and the SEAL raid, which the president eventually embraced.

As has been reported, the director of central intelligence at the time, Leon E. Panetta, argued for going through with the raid; Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. advised against it; and Robert M. Gates, then the secretary of defense, was worried that evidence that Bin Laden was even in the compound was circumstantial. But whereas Mr. Biden has been reported as saying that all in the room hedged their bets besides himself and Mr. Panetta, Mr. Bergen writes that — based on interviews with senior administration officials — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton followed "a long, lawyerly presentation that examined both the upsides and downsides of the raid option" with this summary: "It's a very close call, but I would say: Do the raid."

Mr. Bergen also says that the national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon; the deputy national security advisers Denis McDonough and Benjamin J. Rhodes; Michèle Flournoy, then an under secretary of defense; and the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., among others, endorsed the raid too. He quotes Mr. Obama's top military adviser at the time, Adm. Mike Mullen, who strongly advocated the plan, as saying that it was the president who insisted on additional backup for the SEALs — a prescient call, given that one of the two primary Black Hawk helicopters crash landed, and another Chinook had to be called in to help extract the team.

[RecycleMichael]

...it was a once-in-a-lifetime PR coup for any leader that no president would have refused to act on-

Then why didn't Bush?

Don't tell me that you believe the family ties between the Bush and Bin Laden families kept him from acting?

[Conan71]

Then why didn't Bush?

Don't tell me that you believe the family ties between the Bush and Bin Laden families kept him from acting?

Uh gee, I dunno, something about not having a confirmed location on Bin Laden until well over two years after Bush left office. 

[nathanm]

Uh gee, I dunno, something about not having a confirmed location on Bin Laden until well over two years after Bush left office. 

Rumsfeld had intel equally as strong, but he or someone else nixed plans to go get him.

[guido911]

Rumsfeld had intel equally as strong, but he or someone else nixed plans to go get him.

I think I get it now. When Bush had bin Laden cornered in Tora Bora, Bush intentionally called off the pressure in order to let the guy go.

[nathanm]

I think I get it now. When Bush had bin Laden cornered in Tora Bora, Bush intentionally called off the pressure in order to let the guy go.

That's not at all what I wrote.

[Conan71]

Rumsfeld had intel equally as strong, but he or someone else nixed plans to go get him.

Care to post any direct quotes from Rumsfeld saying as much?

[nathanm]

Care to post any direct quotes from Rumsfeld saying as much?

No, but I do have a news story from 2007:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/world/americas/08iht-web.0708intel.6547158.html?pagewanted=all

[T]he mission was called off after Donald Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, rejected an 11th-hour appeal by Porter J. Goss, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, officials said. Members of a Navy Seals unit in parachute gear had already boarded C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan when the mission was canceled, said a former senior intelligence official involved in the planning.

Pretty rich for a guy who has since stated that such a call was an easy one, now that it's politically expedient. I take no stance on that part of it.

[guido911]

That's not at all what I wrote.

It was really directed to RM, but it applies equally to all those who honestly believe Bush wasn't interested in getting/killing bin Laden. Cripes, all we heard about Bush was that he was a warmonger, killer, etc., yet he had no interest in killing the one guy probably most deserving???