EV: Our Al Gore meets Ahab.
P.S. Where's that solution to our healthcare dilemma you've been so busily working away on? Or I hope your white whale hasn't disturbed your pursuit of truth and justice for us all! The world awaits!
Posted on 08/14/2007 9:36:24 PM PDT by EternalVigilance
It only took the Democrats a few hours after Mitt Romney released his personal financial filing to dig up an interesting tidbit from Romney's 1994 challenge of Senator Ted Kennedy.
During that campaign, Romney objected to Kennedy's blind trust's purchase in 1981 of a property in Washington D.C., which the trust then leased to federal tenants. Romney called it "a conflict of interest, pure and simple" and rejected Kennedy's argument that he was knew nothing about the trust's investments.
"The blind trust is an age-old ruse," Romney told the Boston Globe in October of that year. "You give a blind trust rules. You can say to a blind trust, don't invest in properties which would be in conflict of interest or where the seller might think they're going to get an advantage from me."
Romney's personal financial filing showed that Romney's trust owned some potentially controversial stocks, including China Petroleum & Chemical, which has links to Sudan, and several gambling companies(including MGM and Harrah's, which were sold). It also showed that the trustee, Ropes & Gray's Brad Malt, got rid of some stocks that he thought clashed with Romney's political views, including two foreign oil companies with connections to Iran. (At some point, however, Malt was making money for Romney -- or trying to make money for him -- by investing in those companies.)
Like Kennedy, Romney's campaign has responded to questions about those investments by saying that Romney was not aware of the blind trust's contents until yesterday, when the FEC filings were made public.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
It's always some liberal trash who is out to get him... The Boston Globe may as well be DailyKos in political motives and credibility.
Gosh, Romniacs LOVED the Boston Globe back in the day. You know, when they were helping him get out his message about how liberal he was...
By the way...thanks for helping me win a bet from a good friend of mine. I wagered that the first post on this thread from a Romney supporter would be one that whined about the Boston Globe. Y’all are so predictable...
Apples and oranges
Wow! So it is really not about social issues then for you? I guess this just proves it.
Proves what? All this article does is again highlight Romney’s hypocrisy.
Do you think straightforwardness and honesty in a politician is a “social issue”?
If they find his blind trust owned stocks in companies doing business with MA while he was Governor then you’ll have a reasonable comparison.
Who do you support?
Since Romney won Ames, some people seem to be running scared and working extra hard here.
Not Mitt Romney, that’s for sure. Ever.
Wow. Given millions of dollars, months of TV ads, and a natural base of pliable attendees, a guy could turn out 4500 voters for you.
Actually, it doesn’t. His complaint in 1994 was NOT that you can’t invest in blind trusts, or that you are a hypocrit for saying you don’t know what is IN the blind trust, but rather that what Kennedy INVESTED in was wrong.
Even this biased liberal news source couldn’t say anything bad about Romney’s investments except to say they were “potentially” embarrasing. There’s no conflict of interest in owning oil stocks unless you are a liberal in which case you think anybody who owns oil stocks is evil.
I doubt he did it for me. Nor did he do all his advertising in Iowa simply to get people to come to Ames.
I was just noting that there’s been a rash of “news stories” by liberal media attacking Romney in the past week, and being posted here by his opponents. I don’t think it’s coincidence, the media see Ames as a positive for Romney and is trying to counter that with these news stories.
Well, you’re making subjective value judgments about the stuff Kennedy and Romney owned. I’m not.
Of course. Politicians who try to play both sides of the road - and it’s hard to imagine one who does it more than Romney - always end up being despised by both sides. No surprises there.
Unfavorable 31
No Opinion 47
Spread: Negative 9!!
Yep. He’s the GOP’s Hillary. In more ways than one.
Of course, he’s much more accomplished than her...at advancing the Left’s agenda...
I don’t trust Mitt. He seems to have a tendency to say what he thinks will help get him into office. Either he was lying about some of his core beliefs to further his political ambition and get elected as governor or he is lying about some of his core beliefs to get elected to the White House. He strikes me as a very smooth and polished snake-oil salesman.
Considering that it matched the current sitting Presidents numbers from the 2004 straw poll I'd say he did well. He beat the second place by a higher margin of error than Bush did in 2004.
Since you seem to be asserting your "expert" opinion on the intricacies of straw polling in Iowa I just wanted to ask, How did Keyes do this go round? Oh wait....
I like your tagline. Romney has had difficulty in the past admitting that he is a Republican. If he can’t answer that easy question, I doubt his solutions regarding illegal aliens will be that stellar.
That would be him alright.
It doesn’t surprise me that several times tonight Romney supporters have taken gratuitous shots at Dr. Keyes, completely unprovoked and unprompted. After all, he’s a conservative and always has been a conservative...
I can do that without apology. I'm a former member of the Iowa Republican State Central Committee. What are your credentials?
________________________
Republicans Independents Democrats
Mitt Romney +16 -13 -27
He hasn’t asked for Divestment from the Sudan or China. He is consistent on this issue. Show me where there are investments in Iran? I don’t see a double standard in this blind trust. He has asked the blind trust to make sure its investments are consistent with his policies which as far as I can tell they have been.
The only problem I see is that you are very much reaching with this article. But go ahead, knock yourself out. People are smart, they can see the error of your reasoning and they will look at Mitt more favorably because of this unfair attack.
Since you love the Globe so much, here’s another informational article from today:
Romneys are worth up to $250m
Personal finance data are detailed
August 14, 2007
Mitt Romney, by far the wealthiest presidential candidate, and his wife, Ann, are worth $190 million to $250 million, his advisers said yesterday after filing a personal financial disclosure statement with the Federal Election Commission.
The statement filed yesterday offers the most detailed look at Romney’s finances available yet. Massachusetts did not require Romney to disclose information about his blind trust, which he created when he became governor in January 2003. Romney has not released his tax returns.
The FEC statement shows that Romney has a portfolio that includes a wide range of investments, from hedge funds to real estate to blue chip stocks to holdings in foreign companies, and that he continues to earn millions from a retirement deal with Bain Capital, the venture firm he started in 1984 and left in 1999. And it shows that he has plenty of cash on hand — one of his joint checking accounts holds between $5 million and $25 million, according to the filings.
The Romneys’ assets are held primarily in blind trusts, which are controlled by R. Bradford Malt, a partner at Ropes & Gray and chairman of the firm’s investment management company, with the guidance of an investment adviser at Goldman Sachs.
Malt said yesterday that Romney had no knowledge of their contents until yesterday, when they were made public. Romney also has a separate trust for his five sons and their families that is worth about $100 million, which was not required to be reported under federal disclosure requirements and is not part of the filing, his advisers said.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/08/14/romneys_are_worth_up_to_250m/
Do you have a rattail? Be honest.
Gosh, I bet the poor guy doing the investing has a hard time keeping up from week to week...
Not really.
I am really proud of Mitt. He consistently signed legislation which came down on the side of life.
I think you have inconsistency problem. You say you are for the pro-life cause, BUT BUT you can not even give Mitt his due for taking pro-life actions while he was Governor.
You discount these actions and you equate him with a tyrant in the league of Joseph Stalin.
So, it is clear that actions in the last 4 years don’t matter to your, but words 6 years ago and 14 years is more credible. That kind of behavior is two-faced. To reasonable people your criticism is losing its potency. Frankly, I am glad, because usually the person on the side of truth usually comes up on top. And you my friend are increasingly finding yourself on the bottom.
I can somehow see you refreshing the Boston Globe site repeatedly at 12:01 AM, hoping they have printed yet another Romney hit piece that you can hurriedly post for our edification.
I didn’t read any of your replies, and I never will.
Baloney. He consistently and strongly advocated for abortion "rights" for many years.
And he signed a socialized medicine scheme into law that forces taxpayers to pay for abortions.
Even his current, latest, position is a bad joke.
Very misleading to cherry-pick like that. However, you do bring up an excellent point, though not what you had in mind --
Mitt Romney's favorable spread in his own party is lower than every single other candidate polled! Even slightly lower than John McCain, who has spent months and years telling Republicans to F off.
Hillary +71 (among Democrats)
Giuliani +64 (among Republicans)
Gore +56 (D)
Edwards +53 (D)
Obama +45 (D)
Fred Thompson +35 (R)
McCain +17 (R)
Romney +16 (R)
Yet another excellent point that you raise is that Independents, the key swing voters, don't like Romney. In fact, Independents have a worse view of Romney than of any candidate!
Rating spread among Independents
Obama +18
Giuliani +17
Edwards +14
Fred Thompson +4
Al Gore +3
McCain 0
Hillary -9
Romney -13
It turns out Independents dislike Romney even more than they dislike Hillary.
Perhaps that's why Romney supporters remain so ignorant of Willard Mitt's actual record.
One of the stated benefits covered in Commonwealth Care (Romney’s baby) is abortions. And Planned Parenthood is written into the law, as part of the “payment policy advisory board.”
Is that enough Pro-Choice for you?
This article is not much. Just one more pebble in the avalanche that is coming as base Republican conservative voters learn Romney’s actual record, and his current rhetorical and political attempts to deceive them.
Blah blah blah. Romney’s on a roll. Nice try.
I see you’ve still got your fingers in your ears, and can’t comprehend that the government has no business in the health care business.
Which, as I’ve said before, makes you an ideal Romney supporter: ie willfully deaf and dumb.
Ahhh...this nonsense again. Alright, Pan_Yans_Wife, why don’t you tell us on what date taxpayer funded abortion was made legal in Mass. And then tell us when Romney was governor.
Because if the former precedes the latter, you’re suggesting that Romney could have convinced an 85% Democrat Legislature that it should change its laws out of the goodness of their collective hearts to be nice to a Republican Governor who had a nasty habit of vetoing their bills.
These little slander games you play really don’t hold up to scrutiny. Really, if you’re going to try to make a point, you need to do better than what is at best a tertiary connection.
It’s the equivalent to claiming that increasing the funds to a state’s Medicare progam is evidence of a politician’s support of abortion. It makes no sense.
>>>I see you’ve still got your fingers in your ears, and can’t comprehend that the government has no business in the health care business.<<<
No, but I see you’ve once more refused to even provide the framework for a viable, private-run healthcare system that the public could support.
One need only look at the VA system to realize why socialized medicine is bad, why Romney’s medicine is not socialized, and why it is infinitely better.
George Bush had some great ideas not too long ago on the matter—one that dealt more with incentives. Perhaps you’d like to look at those.
Romney Care, like all socialized medicine schemes, is going to crush the economic life out of Massachusetts, whatever is left, and eventually crash and burn.
It only took the Democrats a few hours after Mitt Romney released his personal financial filing to dig up an interesting tidbit from Romney's 1994 challenge of Senator Ted Kennedy.
During that campaign, Romney objected to Kennedy's blind trust's purchase in 1981 of a property in Washington D.C., which the trust then leased to federal tenants. Romney called it "a conflict of interest, pure and simple" and rejected Kennedy's argument that he was knew nothing about the trust's investments.
"The blind trust is an age-old ruse," Romney told the Boston Globe in October of that year. "You give a blind trust rules. You can say to a blind trust, don't invest in properties which would be in conflict of interest or where the seller might think they're going to get an advantage from me."
Like Kennedy, Romney's campaign has responded to questions about those investments by saying that Romney was not aware of the blind trust's contents until yesterday, when the FEC filings were made public.
The campaign has also said that Malt tried to align the trust's holdings with Romney's politics "to the best of his ability."
Asked about Romney' s 1994 remarks, Romney spokesman Kevin Madden wrote:
"The governor's trust is in fact a blind trust.
There is an important distinction bewteen the references you cite.
The trustee in charge of executing the governor's assets made it very clear during his explanation of the terms of the administration of the trust that he made transactions that, to the best of his ability, (were) consistent with the governor's public positions and statements.
"For instance, in order to avoid the appearance of any conflict or impropriety, the trustee did not invest in Massachusetts municipal bonds."
Fiduciary (dictionary)
1. A person legally appointed and authorized to hold assets in trust for another person. The fiduciary manages the assets for the benefit of the other person rather than for his or her own profit.
Of or relating to a holding of something in trust for another: a fiduciary heir; a fiduciary contract. Of or being a trustee or trusteeship.
Held in trust.
Of or consisting of fiat money.
Of, relating to, or being a system of marking in the field of view of an optical instrument that is used as a reference point or measuring scale.
n., pl. -ies.
One, such as an agent of a principal or a company director, that stands in a special relation of trust, confidence, or responsibility in certain obligations to others.
So you don't have enough courage to answer my question? How pathetic is that? I will let you in on a little secret. There are no perfect candidates. We are talking about politicians.
It is easy to be negative. What is hard is to take positive action or to actively support someone. If you don't support someone, don't complain when you don't get the government that you want.
That is nasty that Planned Parenthood is on the board, but there is not language in this piece of legislation which furthers abortion.
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