Romney campaign dishes first dose of truth

 President Barack Obama heads out of the national political conventions with a much clearer path to winning, top advisers to Mitt Romney privately concede.

FLASHBACKS

"I think we are going to get a bump; I think we have a better opportunity for the bump as a party, as a challenging party... I can't give you a scope, but I can tell you I think it's going to be real and it's going to be visible, but I don't know what it will end up being."

-- Reince Priebus (minus vowels=RNC PR BS)

Romney is going to have a great convention. It's going to be incredible. 

He should gain a 5 or 6 point lead.

-- Dick "People Are Stupid Enough to Keep Paying Me" Morris

As a result of all that positivity and the flood of coverage, Romney, like many before him (pretty much everyone other than John Kerry in 2004) will receive a post-convention bounce in the polls that will likely be short lived, but significant enough to make headlines.

-- Brian McGovern, SaveJersey.com

In case you thought this slipped our minds: #releasethereturns

Ghost of Visit Past haunts Team Willard in Jerusalem

Man in London points, laughs at Romney. Photo: Stephen Crowley/NYT

After receiving a public drubbing at the hands of the British press and public officials then earning his own humiliating hashtag (#Romneyshambles) on Twitter, Romney hastily retreated from London headed for Israel. There, he was immediately met with reminders of his very big, very bad couple of days developing a "special relationship" that was nothing short of an American embarrassment.

Then, as though cultivating a hostile press had inexplicably replaced the campaign's previous goal of cultivating good will among allies, the Mitt wits broke agreement with its traveling corps and barred them from covering a $50,000-a-plate fundraiser.

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 demands blind faith of voters

 

“I don’t manage them, I don’t even know where they are,” Romney told Radio Iowa Monday of his investment portfolio. “That trustee follows all U.S. laws, all taxes are paid as appropriate, all of them have been reported to the government. There’s nothing hidden there.”

So, how blind is Willard's allegedly blind trust? Not very according to CNN Money. "The trust is hardly blind," it reports.

For example, the trustee who manages the portfolio, Bradford Malt, is a friend of the candidate. A close personal relationship with the trustee, according to federal ethics rules, is most definitely out-of-bounds.

 You know who else thinks blind trusts aren't blind? Willard Mitt Romney. Listen to him tackle the issue in 1994, back when SODDI (Some Other Dude Did It).

He's a slick one, Mr. Dick

Romney gettin' whupped by Community Organizer

James Carville unloads on Hannity last night about Romney's gross campaign incompetence and dereliction of duty to the Republican Party:

"And you should be mad because that campaign and Romney is not standing up for you. How can a guy be running for president and know he was going to run for president and not get rid of Swiss bank accounts, because you know that's going to be an issue? He didn't want to do it. He didn't want to go to the trouble. So he gets the nomination and now he has these guys from Chicago outflank him and Republicans and conservatives are duly angry at Romney for not standing for them.

"I think the Republicans are mad. And you know why they [are] mad? Because a Harvard educated community organizer is beating them in a street fight. And they're mad about it because they're used to winning these fights. And Obama people are outflanking and outmaneuvering and beating the Romney people and everybody knows it and the people that are watching this network knows it," James Carville said on FOX News' "Hannity" tonight.

"Those people" and their free stuff

"But I hope people understand this, your friends who like Obamacare, you remind them of this, if they want more stuff from government tell them to go vote for the other guy -- more free stuff.

But don't forget nothing is really free. it has to paid for by people in the private sector creating goods and services, and if people want jobs more than they want free stuff from government, then they are going to have to get government to be smaller."

Bet this guy feels like Nostradamus, too!

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?