Free Republic

Conservative super-PACs are attempting to gin up disillusionment among President Obama's supporters and keep their turnout low in November's election, in part by highlighting his ties to Wall Street.Within the past month, three separate ads — two from the American Future Fund and one from Crossroads GPS — have assailed Obama from broadly comparable perspectives. Especially striking are the American Future Fund ads which make the kind of anti-Wall Street argument heard largely on the left. The outside groups' message contrasts with the one being pushed by Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate, who has called the Obama's "the most anti-business...

The ham-handed Barack Obama campaign attack ads on Mitt Romney's former firm Bain Capital have drawn a lot of ire from other Democrats. And not just because they were sloppily fact-checked (the ads hit Romney for layoffs long after he left Bain) and because a leading Obama money bundler is a Bain executive himself. Chiming in with various degrees of disapproval were Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker ("nauseating"), former Rep. Harold Ford, Obama car czar Steven Rattner, Sen. Mark Warner and former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell. There are other signs of unease among Democratic elites. Obama contributions from Silicon Valley...

The Obama campaign’s latest attack tells the story of workers at an Indiana office supply company who lost their jobs after a Bain-owned company named American Pad & Paper (Ampad) took over their company and drove it out of business. Here’s what the Obama Web video doesn’t mention: A top Obama donor and fundraiser had a much more direct tie to the controversy and actually served on the board of directors at Richardson, Texas-based Ampad, which makes office paper products. Jonathan Lavine is a long-time Bain Capital executive and co-owner of the Boston Celtics. He is also one of President...

Though the Obama campaign has repeatedly attacked Mitt Romney for his career at Bain Capital, President Obama still accepted $7,500 in campaign contributions from three Bain executives. His campaign press secretary, Ben LaBolt told The Politicker the president has no intention of giving the money back. “No one aside from Mitt Romney is running for President highlighting their tenure as a corporate buyout specialist as one of job creation, when in fact, his goal was profit maximization,” said Mr. LaBolt. ”The President has support from business leaders across industries who have seen him pull the economy back from the brink...

It’s amazing what a few competitive polls can do to concentrate the mind. Democrats had taken comfort for months in the Republican Party’s seeming inability to get behind Mitt Romney, Obama’s healthy lead in the polls, and equally healthy job growth. And for a few, fleeting, moments, Democrats thought the election might just be easy. But Republican division appears to have been merely an artifact of primary politics, and Mitt Romney has proved a consistent, if unglamorous campaigner… “There was this sense maybe a month or two ago that Obama was really riding high — that he had gotten his...

Though the Obama campaign has repeatedly attacked Mitt Romney for his career at Bain Capital, President Obama still accepted $7,500 in campaign contributions from three Bain executives. His campaign press secretary, Ben LaBolt told The Politicker the president has no intention of giving the money back. “No one aside from Mitt Romney is running for President highlighting their tenure as a corporate buyout specialist as one of job creation, when in fact, his goal was profit maximization,” said Mr. LaBolt. ”The President has support from business leaders across industries who have seen him pull the economy back from the brink...

Barack Obama’s campaign had planned all the way back to September to attack Mitt Romney for his wealth. The “Buffett Rule� and constant references to income inequality were more than just a dogwhistle for Occupiers to launch their protests last fall. It was a strategy to shape the battlefield for a political attack that Team O rolled out explicitly at the beginning of last week. After that much of a windup, the pitch had to be a blazing fastball over the plate … right? According to CBS News, wrong: President Obama is losing ground in the latest polls to Republican...

Why not just call Romney racist? In the most tortured twist of logic this blogger has seen so far during this campaign, Al Sharpton somehow managed to equate Mitt Romney's refusal to roll over and accept Barack Obama's attacks on Bain Capital with, yes, birtherism. I know what you're thinking: what the . . . heck? Don't ask me to explain how or why Sharpton came to his nonsensical suggestion. Just sit back and watch the Reverend Al at work. It was too much even for liberal Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. View the video here.

Democrats know their supporters are generally not very smart. They know that to get their base to remember and understand a point they have to reduce it to a “four legs: good, two legs: bad” mantra. In recent years they have been very successful with this “reduce it to a bumper sticker” approach. By using Pavlovian conditioning they have trained their followers to foam at the mouth at the words “Gingrich” “DeLay” and “Halliburton.” Now they are trying to train their base to throw things at their TV sets when they hear the words “Bain Capital.” So far they have...

Celebrate good times, liberals -- President Obama has again vaulted ahead of Mitt Romney in a national poll:   After months of aggressive campaigning on jobs and the economy, President Obama and Mitt Romney, his likely Republican challenger, are locked in a dead heat over who could fix the problem foremost on voters’ minds, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. The parity on economic issues foreshadows what probably will continue to be a tough and negative campaign. Overall, voters would be split 49 percent for Obama and 46 percent for Romney if the November election were held now. On handling...

Ironically, despite making Mitt Romney’s former company Bain Capital and other private equity firms the target of its latest attack, the Obama campaign held a near-$36,000 per plate fundraising dinner at the home of Tony James, president of the nation’s largest private equity firm, Blackstone Group. Citing the president’s latest Romney-hit-piece, Glenn Beck blasted the hypocrisy shown by the president when it comes to private equity firms. Obama’s condemnation of private equity hinges on the familiar narrative that the industry is renown for commandeering companies and slashing jobs, leaving untold numbers jobless — which is why it is doubly ironic...

The problem isn’t with private equity or, er, “raping” companies, he says, it’s simply a matter of challenging Romney’s claim of being a job creator. Which, of course, is a lie: Go back and watch Obama’s brutal ad about GST Steel, replete with a worker comparing Romney and Bain to a “vampire.” It’s an attack on Romney’s character, not his job-creating prowess, which is in keeping with the whole tenor of the battle over Bain. Ostensibly it’s an argument over employment numbers but in reality each side wants something deeper out of it. Romney wants voters to come away thinking...

"I'm a surrogate for the Obama campaign," said Newark Mayor Cory Booker during an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press, "I'm not about to sit here and indict private equity ... I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people are investing in companies like Bain Capital. If you look at the totality of the record of Bain Capital, they've done a lot to support businesses, to grow businesses."Many a conservative commentator seized on Mayor Booker's pronouncement as a sign of weakness - that some within Obama's camp see the discussion of economic matters as a losing...

In a blistering new ad, the Republican National Committee catches the Obama Campaign lying to the press about their influence in strong-arming Newark Mayor Cory Booker into taking back his criticism of President Obama's attack on Bain Capital.

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D) defended Bain in an interview with CNN Tuesday, saying, “I respect what Bain does and its role in the free market system.” KING: [Clyburn] said Bain Capital rapes companies. He says he can’t support companies that go around “raping companies.” PATRICK: Look, the question is whether Mitt Romney has what it takes—the preparation and the experience and the empathy—to serve as president of the United States. It’s not about whether Bain is good or bad. I have friends at Bain; I have friends who supported the other candidate in my own campaigns. I respect what...

This morning on MSNBC, former venture capitalist Sen. Mark Warner D-Va. admitted that Bain Capital was "very successful" and "did what they were supposed to do." When asked about whether attacks on private equity were fair, Warner said that he was "proud" of his previous career in the private sector but noted that public service required a "different skill set." "Bain Capital was a very successful business. They got a good return for their investors. That is what they were supposed to do," Warner said. Warner, is the founder of Columbia Capital Corp. in Alexandria, Va. which made him a...

Will the strategy of highlighting Mitt Romney’s track record at Bain Capital do more to damage the Republican nominee, or Barack Obama? A poll released yesterday by Rasmussen suggests that it might do more damage to Obama’s re-election efforts than it will to his challenger. Only 33% of a sample of 1,000 likely voters say that Romney’s record at Bain was a reason to vote against him, while 44% believe it boosts his candidacy: Democrats have begun criticizing Mitt Romney’s business record, but a plurality of voters view the Republican’s business past as a positive. A new Rasmussen Reports national...

Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a Democrat who landed in hot water with his party on Sunday after criticizing President Obama’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s time at Bain Capital, may have found an unexpected ally in left-wing activist Van Jones. “An urban mayor who nearly DIED saving neighbor from a fire, has earned right 2 demand integrity & courage from other leaders,” Jones tweeted on Tuesday in a message addressed to Booker’s Twitter handle. Booker, who indeed did save a neighbor from a burning building earlier this year, has been on the receiving end of much criticism from Democrats and liberal...

Anderson Cooper interviewed Obama super-PAC chief Ben LaBolt on the new Bain Capital attack strategy, and the only enlightenment that results from the exchange is an understanding of why LaBolt no longer works in the White House media room. LaBolt refused to even acknowledge Cooper’s repeated questions of how Barack Obama and his team can justify attacks on Mitt Romney’s work at Bain while holding fundraisers with Blackstone and other private-equity firms that do the exact same work as Bain. Instead, LaBolt just keeps repeated campaign talking points ad infinitum, making it clear he and the campaign have no idea...

Rep. James Clyburn (D., S.C.) described Mitt Romney and Bain Capital’s record as one of “raping companies” in a Tuesday interview with MSNBC. ANCHOR: But, congressman, what about the counterargument to that? What about the counterargument that these attacks on Bain Capital — many see them as an attack on free enterprise as well. CLYBURN: This is not an attack on free enterprise. I would say to you, [unclear] free enterprise–I don’t take contributions from payday lenders. I refuse to do that. That’s free enterprise. but there’s something about that enterprise that I have a problem with. And there’s something...

Ed Rendell joins Harold Ford and Cory Booker as critics within Barack Obama’s own party of his electoral strategy of demonizing private equity. In a BuzzFeed article that focuses on the larger disconnect between Obama and Democratic Party institutions, Zeke Miller gets the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania — a state critical to Obama’s re-election hopes — on the record as decidedly uncomfortable with the tone of Team Obama’s attacks on Bain Capital: Rendell joined the chorus of criticism of Obama’s attacks on finance, whose leaders have written checks to many members of both parties. “I think they’re very disappointing,”...

Bain Capital has been used as a political weapon against Mitt Romney since 1994, but now his opponents might be rethinking ads about attacking him for his time at the private-equity firm as the ads are being criticized by some Democrats as well as Republicans. President Obama planned to set the political tone for the week with a new ad about an Indiana company that was bought by Bain and then shuttered, as the firm made millions of dollars and workers lost jobs. The biggest problem with the online video: Even Democrats say it attacks the business of private equity...

Obama raised most from private equity, hedge funds in 2008 By Jonathan Easley - 05/22/12 09:52 AM ET President Obama raised far more cash from hedge fund and private equity donors than any other candidate in the 2008 election cycle. According to an analysis by the nonprofit group Open Secrets, Obama took in nearly $3.5 million from large private-equity donors that year — nearly twice what his general-election rival, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), pocketed. The data bring into focus the thin line Obama must walk in attacking presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s background in the industry, which has sparked...

One almost has to feel sorry for Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt.  He showed up on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 yesterday probably expecting the type of softball questions that MSNBC hosts would toss at him. Instead, Anderson Cooper took a page from Cory Booker's criticism of  "nauseating" attacks on private equity firms such as Bain Capital and kept asking LaBolt how the Obama campaign can criticize Bain while simultaneously raising funds from the same type of companies. The clearly unprepared LaBolt spent the interview filibustering with a flurry of words that were designed not to answer the questions about the...

Campaign 2012: Newark's mayor succumbs to administration thought control after going off-script and praising the private-equity firm that succeeded in creating net jobs, unlike presidential investment Solyndra. The White House must have had a bad case of the vapors when Newark Mayor Cory Booker, viewed in some quarters as a practical, non-ideological problem-solver, praised the record of Mitt Romney's former private firm Bain Capital, before a national audience on NBC's "Meet The Press," and eschewed attacks of a type he found "nauseating." "I have to just say from a very personal level, I'm not about to sit here and indict...

China's Dalian Wanda Group and AMC Entertainment announced Monday a $2.6 billion deal to take over the U.S. theater group, forming the world's largest cinema chain, according to a new release on the deal. The move is the latest in a raft of deals between U.S. entertainment companies and Chinese firms, linking the world's largest theater market with the world's fastest growing. "This acquisition will help make Wanda a truly global cinema owner, with theatres and technology that enhance the movie-going experience for audiences in the world's two largest movie markets," said Wang Jianlin, chairman and president of Wanda.

This week the Obama campaign debuted its attack on Bain Capital, the private-equity firm Mitt Romney founded. Its two-minute ad purports to tell the story of GS Technologies, a Kansas City-based Bain investment that went bankrupt in 2001. To hear the Obama campaign, this is a tale of greed: GST was a healthy, happy, quality steelmaker until Bain plundered its worth and stripped its 750 workers of their due. "It was like a vampire," laments one former employee in the ad. "They came in and sucked the life out of us." GST is a tragic tale, though in a different...

No sooner had President Obama released a "Bain Capital Video" which highlights the hatcheting job Mitt Romney did to poor performing companies, that he attended a high roller fundraiser at Black Stone Investment which awarded the President with a cool million bucks at the $36,000 a plate dinner. Note: Black Stone Capital has been responsible for firing untold thousands of workers through various "investment" programs. Here is a record of 800+ who were placed on the chopping block via Black Stone: IN THE TRENCHES How a Blackstone Deal Shook Up a Work Force Layoffs at Travelport, Dividend for Investors; 'On...

Mitt Romney went into the wrong line of work. If only he had been a lecturer in constitutional law, he wouldn’t have a business record vulnerable to distortion by a desperate incumbent president. Barack Obama’s hands, in contrast, are clean. He taught at the University of Chicago Law School and didn’t make the mistake of attempting to start, acquire, or turn around companies. He has no business failures because he has no business successes — if you don’t count selling books about himself to the adoring multitudes. The president’s reelection campaign is out with a scorching advertisement hitting Romney for...

The Obama campaign is out with a new two-minute attack ad, hitting Mitt Romney on his past at Bain Capital. The ad, set to run in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Ohio, Virginia and Colorado, plays up the “vulture capitalism” angle. “It was like a vampire,” says a former GS Steel worker named Joe Cobb. “They came in and sucked the life out of us.” The Romney campaign is expected to push back aggressively on what they view as a major distraction from the president’s disastrous economic record. It shouldn’t be terribly hard. The bankruptcy and layoffs occurred in 2001, two years after...

Mitt Romney has taken quite a hit for his time at Bain Capital. Advertisements were run and movies were made (check out the trailer for King of Bain, if you have not already) depicting Romney as a job-killer. They portray him as a ruthless, greedy, and absolutely ravenous capitalist. This view is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of private equity, leveraged buyouts, and their role in a developed economy. When understood correctly, it is clear that Romney’s time at Bain was actually quite beneficial to the economy. Private equity keeps the economy flowing, and there is no...

Mitt Romney’s release of his tax returns has pushed the arcane issue of “carried interest” — the share of an investment fund’s profits given to its managers as payment for their services – back into the headlines. Critics have renewed their calls to tax the carried interest as ordinary income. Unfortunately, the populist rhetoric used by some critics can obscure the facts about how carried interest is actually taxed.

Activists are expressing serious concerns that Mitt Romney’s private equity firm Bain Capital owns one of America’s largest media conglomerates, Clear Channel Communications, Inc., which broadcasts numerous popular talk-show hosts with incalculable influence in the 2012 GOP primary. Among the radio personalities syndicated by Clear Channel or aired on hundreds of stations it owns nationwide are Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and many others. Because of the San Antonio-based media giant’s enormous influence — it is the largest owner of radio stations in the United States, and experts point out that it essentially owns what...

Bain Capital is a classic “strip and flip” shop — a private equity firm that made its money buying businesses and sucking profit out of them by any means possible that often resulted in a stack of pink slips for everyday Americans. Romney “made fortunes by bankrupting five profitable businesses that ended up firing thousands of workers.” Here’s how it often went down. Romney’s Bain would buy a company and increase its short-term earnings through firing workers and shuttering plants in order to borrow enormous amounts of money. The borrowed money was used to pay Bain dividends, however, those businesses...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has criticized rival Newt Gingrich for earning more than $1.6 million in consulting fees from Freddie Mac even though he has as much as $500,000 invested in the U.S.-backed lender and its sister entity, Fannie Mae. A day before Romney planned to release his income tax returns, his old investments in two controversial government-backed housing lenders stirred up new questions at the same time his campaign targeted Gingrich for his work for Freddie Mac. The dimensions and the sources of Romney's wealth, which he has estimated to be as much as $250...

Say it ain't so.....truth is Stranger than fiction In 1992, Bain Capital, with Mitt Romney at the Helm, bought American Pad and Paper from the Meade Corporation. In 1999 American Pad and Paper was bankrupted. Bain, with Mitt still in leadership, sold Ampad to a Bahrainian company, Crescent Capital Investments, now named Arcapita. The company is headed by Muslims who make all of their investment decisions based on Sharia law. So Chickenhawk Romney fears radical Muslim Jihadists now after he was perfectly comfortable with them before. Are we reminded of a continuing pattern here?

We are of course putting forth "Bain Capital" as not merely the Romney private-equity house but as the stand-in for the period of American economic history that ran from 1980 to 1989. Back then it was called the Greed Decade, with asset-stripping barbarians at the gate. Virtually everything about this popular stereotype is wrong. Properly understood, the 1980s, including Bain, were the remarkable years when an ever-resilient America found a way to save itself from becoming what Europe is now—a global has-been. After centuries of First World status—and all the perquisites of prestige and power that came with it—Europe is...

I don’t like Mitt Romney. At all. I don’t trust Mitt Romney. That said, I have to thank Mitt Romney. Because of his capitalist connections with Bain Capital, we are able to watch (and identify) the anti-American socialists as they come apart at the seams. Through the attacks on Romney and his building and dismantling businesses for profit, we are watching the attempted rise of the Socialist European workers model. This is Obama’s vision of America, this is the message his “occupier” groups have been created to spread. These people have somehow come to believe that once you are hired,...

Jeffrey Zients will serve as President Obama's new acting director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), but the president's decision might undercut attacks on Republican Mitt Romney's career as a venture capitalist, because Zients and Romney are both alumni of Bain & Company. "I'm pleased to designate Jeff Zients to lead the Office of Management and Budget. Since day one, Jeff has demonstrated superb judgment and has provided sound advice on a whole host of issues," Obama said in a statement accompanying the announcement today. Zients previously served as Deputy Director of OMB under Jack Lew, who became...

When I heard Michael Douglas, portraying Gordon Gekko in “Wall Street,” deliver the line, “Greed is good,” my date that evening was horrified. I, on the other hand, wanted to stand up and cheer. I totally understood what he was saying. Greed is good. Last week, when Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and Jonathan Huntsman ganged up on Mitt Romney for being a predatory capitalist during his tenure at Bain Capital, I assumed the posture of my date of 25 years ago; I was horrified. When I use the term “greed,” I don’t mean the unfettered...

COMPLETE TITLE BREAKING: Palin Urges Romney to Release Tax Returns, Provide Proof of 100,000 Jobs Created at Bain Capital ### Former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has called for Gov. Mitt Romney to release his tax returns, as well as the data that could substantiate his claim of having created 100,000 jobs as CEO of Bain Capital. Romney has resisted releasing his tax returns, and his campaign has thus far refused to provide the hard proof to back up his claims about Bain. “Governor Romney has claimed to have created 100,000 jobs at Bain, and people are wanting to know:...

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said Saturday that Republicans will err if they don’t scrutinize Mitt Romney’s role in a private equity firm called Bain Capital. Gingrich, the former House speaker, said President Barack Obama will hammer away at Bain if Romney is the nominee this fall. “I don’t see how you can expect us to have a presidential campaign in which an entire sector is avoided,” Gingrich said on a Fox News program that included five of the six Republican candidates. Each fielded South Carolina voters’ questions for almost 20 minutes. Many Republican and conservative leaders have...

GREENVILLE, S.C. - Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum sharpened his messages of populism and electability in South Carolina Saturday morning, saying "the grandson of a coal miner" is better equipped to relate to blue-collar voters in swing states than "a Bain executive." ...."You want to win this election?" Santorum said to a crowd at Tommy's Country Ham House in Greenville. "Then we've got to go to the states where you win the election, and it's Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, North Carolina, Missouri, Wisconsin. "I respect Mitt Romney's career in business, but the grandson of a coal miner who grew up...

Want to see what America would look like without private equity? Move to Detroit and contemplate the ruins of a city ruined by the placid conformity of auto industry executives. The economic impact of the corporate takeover business can’t be measured by the outcome of takeovers as such. Private equity transformed the way American business thought about the world. If managers did a lousy job, outside investors could raise money (a lot of it from trade union pension funds as well as university endowments) and kick them out. Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry should be ashamed of themselves for bean-counting...

Via Jake Tapper, who notes that this is conveniently timed to complicate any opportunistic Democratic messaging on Romney’s Bain record and that the spot is not, shall we say, strictly accurate in all its particulars. The Obama quote at the end, for instance, is truncated to make it sound like he’s talking about Solyndra specifically rather than Energy’s green-loans program generally.Not sure about these objections, though: The ad depicts the president as giving “Solyndra half a billion in taxpayer money. Politics as usual. Within the administration, the company’s potential collapse had long been discussed. Knowing all along Solyndra would have...

A terrific 2010 movie that examines the heartbreak caused by corporate downsizing has come to cable TV. The Company Men follows the lives of three executives fired by a conglomerate trying to prop up its stock price and fend off a leveraged buyout. If you care about the future of American business in the brave new world of globalism, this movie is for you. Set in the present, the main focus of The Company Men is on the personal adjustments each exec must make in coping with the loss of a job. The film treats personal bankruptcy, foreclosure, and even...

... Under Romney's leadership Bain bought majority control of World Wide Grinding Systems in 1993. It put up $8 million of the $75 million purchase price and borrowed $125 million by issuing bonds. Bain immediately sent investors $36 million in dividend checks... A steel business is capital-intensive and sensitive to economic conditions. That's why it needs to conserve money for the lean years. When the economy did go south, so did GS Technologies. GS Technologies went bankrupt in 2001, the plant closed and 750 workers lost their jobs. Bain skipped out on a previous agreement to provide severance pay and...

John McCain heartedly defended Mitt Romney's private sector record today. "These attacks on, quote, Bain Capital is really kind of anathema to everything we believe in" said John McCain. "We believe in job creation, and the record of Bain Capital is to take companies that would otherwise fail and restore them to some kind of viability, and sometimes that doesn't work, but you know, when it always works is a thing called communism." But that's exactly not what McCain was saying in 2008, when the rapaciousness of Bain was part of the end game he and his aides pressed against...

Wouldn't it be great if a Republican presidential candidate could just buy the support of just about every major conservative talk show host in America? Well, it may not be as far-fetched as you may think. Clear Channel owns more radio stations (850) than anyone else in the United States. They also own Premiere Radio Networks, the company that syndicates the radio shows of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, among others. Needless to say, Clear Channel basically owns conservative talk radio in the United States. So who owns Clear Channel? Well, it turns out that Bain Capital is...

It wasn't really a TARP style bailout - worse - Romney's Bain placed a $10 million dollar liability with the taxpayers. All this while he benefited $4 million dollars directly... The facts of the Bain & Co. turnaround are a little more complicated, but a Bostin Globe report from 1994 confirms that Bain saw several million dollars in loans forgiven by the FDIC. Fact remains an FDIC bailout only occurs when the Fed and politicians agree, not to mention the bailoit comes from funds paid by every bank customer who eats highet costs as a result of funds going to...