The 2012 Three Ring Circus AKA The US Presidential Election

[Nightkill the Emperor]

Finally, a site listing the specifics of Romney's plan to simultaneously lower taxes across the board and cut the deficit.

Very informative.

[Cannot think of a name]

dammit thats addictive...i just spent 5 mins chasing that thing..

Yeah...me too...

[Yumyumsuppertime]

dammit thats addictive...i just spent 5 mins chasing that thing..

Well, we've spent over a year chasing the same specifics, so....

[New Chalcedon]

Finally, a site listing the specifics of Romney's plan to simultaneously lower taxes across the board and cut the deficit.

That's hilarious - and so very, very apt.

Now, if only the DNC would run ads in a dozen States or so, directing voters to this site....it'd be marvelous.

[New Chalcedon]

dammit thats addictive...i just spent 5 mins chasing that thing..

Well, we've spent over a year chasing the same specifics, so....

Hence the point. This is really a brilliant bit of nonverbal satire...it should go viral ASAP.

[Northern Dominus]

dammit thats addictive...i just spent 5 mins chasing that thing..

There's a metaphor in there somewhere, I'm sure of it...

[Free South Califas]

It's such a fun game because it's so, so real to so many of us.

[Cannot think of a name]

It's like your normal brain immediately gets the joke and is duly impressed, but the portion of your brain that plays all those %#$(^@ flash games is like, "Yeah, but I'm pretty sure I can catch it..."

[Smartass alcoholics]

How is it that people always blame presidents for things they couldn't have done? Recently, i saw a yahoo article with the conspiracy theorists slamming Obama for 9/11.
Why do politics bring out the worst behaviors?

[Khadgar]

It's like your normal brain immediately gets the joke and is duly impressed, but the portion of your brain that plays all those %#$(^@ flash games is like, "Yeah, but I'm pretty sure I can catch it..."

Bet I could hack it so it couldn't move and then click on it.

[Smartass alcoholics]

It's like your normal brain immediately gets the joke and is duly impressed, but the portion of your brain that plays all those %#$(^@ flash games is like, "Yeah, but I'm pretty sure I can catch it..."

Bet I could hack it so it couldn't move and then click on it.

Betcha it would have some form of a trollface on it.

[Khadgar]

Bet I could hack it so it couldn't move and then click on it.

Betcha it would have some form of a trollface on it.

I've seen games that do that if you try to futz with their memory addresses. I do enjoy a developer who thinks of things like that.

[Wikkiwallana]

It's like your normal brain immediately gets the joke and is duly impressed, but the portion of your brain that plays all those %#$(^@ flash games is like, "Yeah, but I'm pretty sure I can catch it..."

Bet I could hack it so it couldn't move and then click on it.

No good, you can get your mouse to catch up with it if you have sensitivity high enough. It's not actually clickable.

[The Steel Magnolia]

Finally, a site listing the specifics of Romney's plan to simultaneously lower taxes across the board and cut the deficit.

Very informative.

I remember a similar thing for Kerry in '04. The "vote" button kept on getting smaller and smaller, while George W's kept getting larger and larger, until finally they just switched places entirely, just as you finally clicked on the button.

[The Land Fomerly Known as Ligerplace]

Wait, why were they so late making this thing?

[PapaJacky]

Non-Romney voter: "What are the details to your tax plan, Mr. Romney?"
Mitt Romney: "Wot r u doin"
Non-Romney voter: "Uh, let me repeat that. What are the details to your tax plain?"
Mitt Romney: "nooooo stahp"
Non-Romney voter: "...I just want to know..."
Mitt Romney: "stahp"

[Freedom of United Trevor]

Bush and Obama didn't have to stand up to China,there's just bad presidents,

Under Romney it's a new era, we will get the cheaters lost and have Energy Independence.
Current speaker of the house says Obamacare is not working, therefore I agree with the speaker and Obamacare shouldn't be constitutional and we should hate Bush and Obama more and more and elect Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

[The Land Fomerly Known as Ligerplace]

Bush and Obama didn't have to stand up to China,there's just bad presidents,

Under Romney it's a new era, we will get the cheaters lost and have Energy Independence.
Current speaker of the house says Obamacare is not working, therefore I agree with the speaker and Obamacare shouldn't be constitutional and we should hate Bush and Obama more and more and elect Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

Poe's fucking Law

[PapaJacky]

Bush and Obama didn't have to stand up to China,there's just bad presidents,

Under Romney it's a new era, we will get the cheaters lost and have Energy Independence.
Current speaker of the house says Obamacare is not working, therefore I agree with the speaker and Obamacare shouldn't be constitutional and we should hate Bush and Obama more and more and elect Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

Well uh. Obamacare doesn't take into full effect until 2014, so. Are you from the Future?

[The Tiger Kingdom]

Bush and Obama didn't have to stand up to China,there's just bad presidents,

Under Romney it's a new era, we will get the cheaters lost and have Energy Independence.
Current speaker of the house says Obamacare is not working, therefore I agree with the speaker and Obamacare shouldn't be constitutional and we should hate Bush and Obama more and more and elect Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

Wat.
That wasn't even sequenced logically. "Get the cheaters lost"?
Is English your first language? Be honest.

And of course Cantor would say it's not working, he kinda has a VESTED INTEREST because he's a Republican. You think he would say it's working under ANY circumstance?
Really?

And your overtly hateful rhetoric is noted.

[Enadail]

Bush and Obama didn't have to stand up to China,there's just bad presidents,

Under Romney it's a new era, we will get the cheaters lost and have Energy Independence.
Current speaker of the house says Obamacare is not working, therefore I agree with the speaker and Obamacare shouldn't be constitutional and we should hate Bush and Obama more and more and elect Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

WTF?

1) Stand up to China how?
2) What the heck does "get the cheaters lost" mean? And energy independence? Ha. Only if to destroy the environment and private land to requisition all the oil the US has.
3) The current speaker of the house has stated his goal is to see Obama fail... hes by no means objective about any proposal Obama brings forward. Can you give any reason why the Affordable Healthcare Act should be repealed, or why its unconstitutional?
4) Romney/Ryan would be a great way to widen the economic gap, reduce government functionality, and basically screw over anyone who's not rich.

[The Nuclear Fist]

Is English your first language? Be honest.

He has said it is, but. . . well. . . I've always had doubts about that.

[The Black Forrest]

Bush and Obama didn't have to stand up to China,there's just bad presidents,

Eh? and do what exactly?

Under Romney it's a new era, we will get the cheaters lost and have Energy Independence.

cheaters? Romney isn't going to change anything. He made truck loads of money under the old system. Why would he change that?

Energy independence? That is a lie. We don't have enough resources to accomplish that. Unless we nationalize energy production; it goes to the open market. China has is buying that up like crazy.

Current speaker of the house says Obamacare is not working,

He is a damned liar then as it hasn't been fully implemented.

therefore I agree with the speaker and Obamacare shouldn't be constitutional and we should hate Bush and Obama more and more and elect Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

[The Black Forrest]

Is English your first language? Be honest.

He has said it is, but. . . well. . . I've always had doubts about that.

Product of homeschooling?

[New Chalcedon]

Hmm. David Stockman has some things to say about Romney. For those who don't know, Stockman was a Republican Congressman from Michigcan (1977-1981), Ronald Reagan's OMB Director from 1981-1985 and has since been a private equity investor. He quote Hayek and believes America should return to a gold standard.

I say this to establish that Stockman is hardly a candidate for the titles of "Democratic Shill" or "Liberal", which will no doubt be levelled at him by any conservatives who read what he has to say about Romney. It's brutal - some key highlights below.

Mitt Romney was not a businessman; He was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses.

He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned way—out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up as reborn “roll-ups,” and then deliver them back to Wall Street for resale—the faster the better

This meant that had a modern Rip Van Winkle bought the S&P 500 index and held it through the 15 years in question, the annual return (with dividends) would have been a spectacular 17 percent. Bain did considerably better, of course, but the reason wasn’t business acumen.

The secret was leverage, luck, inside baseball, and the peculiar asymmetrical dynamics of the leveraged gambling carried on by private-equity shops.

Overall, Bain generated an impressive $2.5 billion in investor gains on $1.1 billion in investments. But 10 of Bain’s deals accounted for 75 percent of the investor profits.

Accordingly, Bain’s returns on the overwhelming bulk of the deals—67 out of 77—were actually lower than what a passive S&P 500 indexer would have earned even without the risk of leverage or paying all the private-equity fees.

Bain got its money out at the top of the Greenspan boom in the late 1990s and then these companies hit the wall during the 2000-02 downturn, weighed down by the massive load of debt Bain had bequeathed them. In fact, nearly $600 million, or one third of the profits earned by the home-run companies, had been extracted from the hide of these four eventual debt zombies.

In September 1996, Bain Capital and some partners bought Experian, the consumer-credit-reporting division of TRW Inc., for $1.1 billion. But Bain ponied up only $88 million in equity along with a similar amount from partners; all the rest of the funding came from junk bonds and bank loans. Seven weeks later, they sold it to a British conglomerate for $1.7 billion, producing a $600 million profit for all the investors on their slim layer of equity capital and after not even enduring the inconvenience of unpacking their briefcases.

Quite obviously Bain generated zero value before it flipped the property. So the fact that it scalped a sudden and spectacular $165 million windfall has nothing to do with investment skill or even trading prowess. Instead, the Experian Corp.’s $600 million valuation gain in just 50 days was an inside job.

That it (Romney's record at Bain Capital) should be offered as evidence that Mitt Romney is a deeply experienced capitalist entrepreneur and job creator is surely a testament to the financial deformations of our times.

Wow. Stockman consistently frames the question in terms of central banking (he seems fixated on it), but also loses no opportunity to bash Romney and Bain Capital - I'd advise anyone who thinks Romney really was a "businessman" to mosey on over and take a look.

However, the upshot of this is: Romney shouldn't even be able to run on a "businessman" record, according to Ronald Reagan's closes financial advisor and budget chief.