Mitt proves his campaign stops DO go better with coke

Mitt Romney held a campaign event Monday evening at a Miami juice shop owned by a convicted cocaine trafficker, according to a report on the CBS News web site.

 Romney appeared at El Palacio de los Jugos, which is owned by Reinaldo Bermudez. Court records show that Bermudez pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute cocaine in 1999 and served three years in federal prison.

Stumping for now-elusive Florida votes after his pick of Paul Ryan as his running mate, Willard and Marco Rubio managed to pick the one juice joint in all of Miami belonging to a guy who can't even vote for either due to his felony conviction and Florida law.

And it wasn't just you regular old campaign stop either. The Romney campaign was actually memorializing the visit by filming a political campaign ad at the juice bar. Bermudez was busted for shipping nearly 500 pounds of coke concealed in containers filled with fish that were imported from Trinidad.

The two guys seem to have common ground in their affinity for tiny Caribbean islands: Romney has money hidden in Bermuda to avoid US taxes; Bermudez got busted for shipping cocaine from a nearby south Caribbean island. Guess campaigning is a lot more fun when you can swap stories of solidarity concerning your off-shore activities.

But it's all good, Bermudez notes.

"Here in Miami there are a lot people with money who have had problems with the law."

Willard's Titanium Dioxide opacity

"No disinfectant for you" seems the mantra by which Willard Romney has lived his adult life.

The most stunning find by ABC News is that the tax release dodger's Olympic effort to give the public an "unprecedented level of transparency about the historic event" turned into an misadventure in opacity, rivaling that most opaque of pigments, Titanium Dioxide.

A decade after Romney parachuted into the 2002 scandal-ridden Olympics, their alleged savior risks tainting his own participation in them by hiding archival records behind a veil of secrecy.

... the archival records from those games that were donated to the University of Utah ... remain off limits to the public. And some of the documents that may have shed the most light on Romney's stewardship of the Games were likely destroyed by Salt Lake Olympic officials, ABC News has learned. 

Willard's inability to stand behind the records he habitually destroys before they can be reviewed, falls right into a pattern his administration began following his governorship of Massachusetts.

Willard's filthy mitts

As Slick Mitt slithers his way down the presidential path, one constant marks his trail of lies and deceit -- his abject refusal to release his tax returns.

Turns out, the candidate himself calls such obfuscation a dirty proposition.

In 2002, the would-be Bay State governor sicced his attack dogs on opponent Shannon O'Brien, screeching, "Her hands aren't clean!" because she disclosed her personal tax returns but not those of her husband. The stunning sanctimony of the proclamation was reported at the time, as it came one day after Romney refused to release his own taxes.

His 2002 campaign manager Eric "Etch-a-sketch" Fehrnstrom whined, "Her hands aren't clean. She can't claim to be disclosing anything until she discloses the returns of her husband, the Enron lobbyist. Under Shannon O'Brien, the state Pension Board lost millions by buying Enron stock when it was collapsing -- what is she hiding?"

Great question, considering this nugget from the same campaign:

Romney, who has pumped nearly $ 5 million of his own money into the campaign, has refused repeated requests by O’Brien’s campaign to follow her lead and make his income tax returns public. [Salt Lake Tribune, 11/4/02]

So we fast-forward a decade and where do we find ourselves?