The American Politics thread

[Spikey]

'Of course they add up. I balanced budgets...businesses, Olympics'

hmmmm

[Turbinator]

Lol, Romney claiming he’ll bring in the Keystone pipeline from Canada on day 1 and gain energy independence for North America.

It’s a pity our government failed to have the foresight, two decades ago, to get Canada equipped with the essential processing and refining infrastructure to establish our own value-added production, gain Canada alone the independence in the refining industry, and ship overseas. To hell with increasing corporate bottom line. All this does is make American businesses happy.

[Burgey]

Few good zingers here.

Haha, the American view on immigration is soooooooooo different to ours.

[Spark]

Mitt Mitt Mitt...

[Burgey]

Wow, Romney fact-checked by the moderator.

How could he conspire to stuff up the Libya question of all things? Extraordinary.

[Turbinator]

Romney's gonna have a lot to do on Day 1...

[Spikey]

Originally Posted by Burgey

Wow, Romney fact-checked by the moderator.

How could he conspire to stuff up the Libya question of all things? Extraordinary.

hahah yeah.

[nightprowler10]

Not entirely happy about the 47% comment at the end. Seems sneaky. I would've actually loved to see Romney try and defend that. Also, the big bird references need to stop already.

[Spikey]

i'm really relieved that twitter finds romney's capital gains tax policy for the middle class as big a joke as i do

[silentstriker]

Originally Posted by Burgey

Few good zingers here.

Haha, the American view on immigration is soooooooooo different to ours.

Interested in this - in what way?

[Burgey]

Originally Posted by silentstriker

Interested in this - in what way?

America embraces its immigrant heritage as who it is. Australia sort of days "We're an immigrant nation too, but we aren't happy about it, and no more please!"

Meanwhile, in keeping with the last debate post-script, here are the candidates if they swapped hair with their respective wives.

[Spikey]

so if you missed the debate the most importa - BINDERS OF WOMEN

[Spikey]

oh **** he wasn't really telling the truth anyway

So we've all had a laugh at the "binders full of women" thing. But it turns out that Mitt Romney wasn't telling the truth about that, either.

Here's the transcript:

Mitt Romney: An important topic, and one which I learned a great deal about, particularly as I was serving as governor of my state, because I had the chance to pull together a cabinet and all the applicants seemed to be men.

And I went to my staff, and I said, "How come all the people for these jobs are all men." They said, "Well, these are the people that have the qualifications." And I said, "Well, gosh, can't we, can't we find some women that are also qualified?"

And so we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet.

I went to a number of women's groups and said, "Can you help us find folks," and they brought us whole binders full of women.

Here's what actually happened, according to the Boston Phoenix's David Bernstein:

What actually happened was that in 2002 – prior to the election, not even knowing yet whether it would be a Republican or Democratic administration – a bipartisan group of women in Massachusetts formed MassGAP to address the problem of few women in senior leadership positions in state government. There were more than 40 organizations involved with the Massachusetts Women's Political Caucus (also bipartisan) as the lead sponsor.

They did the research and put together the binder full of women qualified for all the different cabinet positions, agency heads, and authorities and commissions. They presented this binder to Governor Romney when he was elected.

I have written about this before, in various contexts; tonight I've checked with several people directly involved in the MassGAP effort who confirm that this history as I've just presented it is correct – and that Romney's claim tonight, that he asked for such a study, is false.

[silentstriker]

Inside Osama Bin Laden’s Final Hours—and How the White House Chose Their Assassination Plot | Vanity Fair

[silentstriker]

For all the details on Mitt Romney's 5 trillion dollar tax plan visit ROMNEYTAXPLAN.COM