Dreaming

“So my dad never had the money or time to get a college degree. Without a college degree, became head of a big car company and ultimately a governor. And believed in America, believed in the opportunity in this country, never doubted for a moment that he could achieve his dreams. And Ann's dad, my wife's dad, was born in Wales. His dad was a coal miner. This coal miner got injured in a coal mining accident; realizing that there was no future there for him or his four children, he came to Detroit and worked in the auto factories until he could save enough money to bring his kids over, which he did. And then they got together as a family and said, you know, to be successful in America, you've got to get an education. And they couldn't afford an education. And the kids and the parents said you know, if we all work, and we all save, we could afford to send one of us to college. And they, they sent my wife's dad.”

Mitt Romney said the above statement during a fundraising event in Boca Raton, Florida in May 2012 and which was secretly videotaped.

I find it amusing and repulsive that this man is against immigrants unless they have specialized skills. George W. Romney was born in Mexico and his family moved back to the U.S. during the Mexican revolution. As a child he worked the fields and helped his father in construction. G.W. Romney’s family was on welfare for many years to make ends meet. G.W. Romney was not a good student, went to many universities and never graduated from any of them. In high school, he was not exemplary actually he was far from it. Those humble beginnings is what made G.W. Romney a more compassionate man, much more than his son will ever be. 

Ann (Davies) Romney’s parents were immigrants too. Ann’s father was Edward R. Davies and he came to the United States after his father, David Davis, a coal miner who had acquired black lung disease and who had been injured in a mining accident had migrated to the United States in 1929 and after working at a Ford plant he sent for his wife and son, Ann’s father, shortly after. Edward R. Davies was an avowed atheist until the day he died, he despised religion and never changed his mind about it. However, not even a year had passed after his death (September 8, 1992) when Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann ignored the essence of the man and baptized him post-mortem. In my opinion this is just one more example of how disrespectful and selfish these two individuals are, they can’t even honor the wishes of a dead man.

Both their own families came to this country in search of a better life for themselves and their family. Neither one of these families were wealthy when they got here or possessed any extraordinary skills: one a carpenter the other a sick coal miner. Yet, the desire for a better life drove them here and this country welcomed them, allowed them to work and to prosper. 

They were just the previous generation of Mitt and Ann Romney, not their great-grand fathers, not 3 or 4 generations ago. These people were their own parents. How can they now show so much disdain for the immigrants that come to this country in search of the same thing their parents came here for? Mitt Romney keeps repeating that he wants to bring people from other countries but only if they have special skills, I wonder what skills he is thinking off, will he accept carpenters, injured miners, wheat, potato and sugar beet field workers, or would any of those “skills” not be special enough for him? 

Mitt Romney has promised to veto the “Dream Act” which is allowing those that were brought to these shores as children by their parents and who are undocumented by no fault of their own. He will not think twice about it. He will destroy the dreams of these young men and women who are studying, trying to get ahead in life, serving our country and defending this country as their own – after all, they know of no other country – he will deny them the same opportunity his own father and his father-in-law had to succeed. What’s more, he will follow Arizona’s immigration law deporting more immigrants just because they come from South of the border and came here with no “special skills” but the ardent desire to provide their families a better life, to earn a decent living with the sweat of their brow, the work of their two hands and the strength of their heart… all to provide their children a better future than they had. 

That is what Gaskell Romney and David Davies did and no one kicked them out of this country. 

For Romney all of the above doesn’t matter, the opportunities his family had and he had were well deserved and they “earned” it… Perhaps, they “earned” it because they were white and spoke English, and the undocumented immigrants are brown and speak Spanish, and then he wants the Latino vote, in his dreams!

What is Romney Hiding?

It was a great feeling to see Lawrence O’Donnell present the inaccuracy of Mitt Romney claims about when he left Bain Capital in the exact same way that I did in Facebook for a few days before The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell aired with this basic math: 1977 + 25 = 2002.  In my previous post I presented a video where Romney says that he was at Bain for twenty-five years and I said the same thing but expressed it  differently.

Mitt Romney doesn’t want to submit his previous years tax returns and he just threw a "bone" at us by submitting only last year’s tax return and a projection of what his taxes might be for this year. Big deal! He is a true Wall Street guy, he is presenting a projection, not a tax return; a projection is nothing more than a mere speculation. 

It is my opinion that Mitt Romney might not want to release his tax returns for other years because we will see when he really departed Bain Capital and when he stopped receiving a salary from that company instead of dividends as he has claimed. Another reason might be that on previous tax returns, he either paid zero taxes or way below the miserly 15% shown on the only tax return he has provided. Think about it, if he knowing that he was going to run for the presidency and that he would have to provide his tax returns paid only 15%, imagine what he paid when no one was looking. This goes to show that he never thought he had a real chance to be the Republican contender and was unprepared and now he is caught “off guard” and doesn't know what to do but refuse to provide those records.

Even Ann Romney, his wife, admits that whatever it is in the tax returns will be used against them. Why? All the presidential contenders in the past have submitted several years of tax returns and there were no attacks by either party about those tax returns. Even if Romney's assumptions were true, the President provided 7 years worth of tax returns, why would a mere contender be allowed to give only one? The only possible reason why Romney is so adamant about submitting them must be because he has cheated on his tax returns, he has off-shored his money to countries like the Cayman Islands and Switzerland to evade paying his fair share of taxes.   And he dares to claim that he loves this country but not as much as he loves his money. 

Ann Romney said that Mitt Romney is a "very generous person" and as proof of his generosity she mentioned that he donates 10% of his income to the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints in Utah. Ok, 10% of what?  We have no idea because we can’t see his previous tax returns only the one for 2011. How can she say he is a generous man when all he gives is the minimum tithe required by his church and not a penny more? I'm sorry, but that is not generosity by any standard. Is that “donation” the only one that they can brag about? If this tithe is the only donation he does, then Mitt Romney is a penny-pincher who doesn't care for the needy and not only he is not generous, he is heartless.   Then, she stresses that since he is "so generous" why would he have anything to hide?  The fact that it was her, Ann Romney, the one that unrelated to being generous or not mentioned the fear that we might believe they are hiding something makes me believe they certainly are.

Romney... Have the decency of telling America what is it that you are hiding!

The Dog Dilemma

The not so new “news” about President Obama is that he has eaten dog meat; this is an effort by the Republicans to diminish how Mitt Romney treated his dog back in the 80s. The comparing of Romney, an adult father, who strapped his dog on top of the family car for a 12 hour trip at a speed of about 75 miles per hour, inflicting such terror into the poor dog that caused her gastrointestinal distress and horrified his own children by seeing the dog’s diarrhea running down the rear window of the family car.  Comparing that with what happened to a child less than 10 years old in a foreign land, who was being fed what the adults felt was a normal diet. There is an abysmal difference between the two occurrences: President Obama was a child, not responsible for the food choices of the adults that fed him, Romney was the adult who managed to horrify and probably traumatized his own children by his cruel and unnecessary treatment of their family dog.  He continues the fine example as Mitt Romney and his family are friends with a man that voluntarily barbequed and ate a dog as an adult and who today is his biggest political supporter, Fred Malek.

This claim is just another weak attempt from the Republicans to damage President Obama’s image, having nothing else that they could find. The funny thing is, that it was our own president who candidly mentioned it in his book “Dreams from my Father”. It is no secret that this book is an autobiography of President Obama before he became a Senator, let alone the President of the United States. Among the many things that President Obama shared with the world in this autobiography, it imparts to the reader what a young mulatto had to endure growing up in the United States in the 60s, in a country filled with racism and hatred. We can perceive this best when he so eloquently wrote “I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to the whites), I see the split-second adjustments they have to make, the searching of my eyes for some telltale sign. They no longer know who I am. Privately, they guess at my troubled heart, I suppose – the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds. And if I were to explain that no, the tragedy is not mine, or at least not mine alone, it is yours, sons and daughters of Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island, it is yours, children of Africa, it is the tragedy of both my wife’s six-year-old cousin and his white first grade classmates, so that you need not guess at what troubles me, it’s on the nightly news for all to see, and that if we could acknowledge at least that much then the tragic cycle begins to break down… well, I suspect that I sound incurably naïve, wedded to lost hopes, like those Communists who peddle their newspapers on the fringes of various college towns. Or worse, I sound like I’m trying to hide from myself”, I believe one does not have to be bi-racial to understand and feel what the President was trying to relay to the reader. It is a shame that the majority of Republicans can’t understand it; to be capable of this requires a heart and if they have one, is usually filled with hate leaving no room for anything else.

In order to lessen the negative impact of Mitt Romney’s cruel behavior towards what was supposed to be his beloved pet Seamus, the Republicans have dug out a phrase from that wonderful book, where President Obama describes in a few sentences, one of his many experiences while living in Indonesia. We must remember President Obama was around 6 years of age when he moved there. But it should come as no surprise to anyone that the Republicans are comparing a heinous act committed by an adult in front of his own children to what a child accepted from an adult. I guess that will allow the Democrats to blame Mitt Romney’s children of abusing their “beloved” pet too, if it applies to one then it should apply to the other as well.

For those who have not read the book and who might not know much about President’s Obama childhood I will try to set up the premises to the story and will let you judge for yourself. In 1966 after her divorce Ann Dunham, President Obama’s mother, married Lolo Soetoro and in 1967 she and her new husband moved to Indonesia taking her six-year-old son with her. In 1971, out of fear for her son’s safety, Mrs. Dunham sent President Obama back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents. Mrs. Dunham and her daughter born of that marriage joined President Obama a year later.

We can deduce that when President Obama ate dog meat, he could have been anywhere between 6 to 10 years of age. At that age, you are not responsible for what you eat, food is usually provided by either your parents or another adult.

This is how President Obama mentions the “exotic” culinary experience: “With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chill peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunch). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.” That passage of the book is what is being used to compare President Obama’s ill moment with dogs and that of Mitt Romney.

It is necessary in order to pass a sound judgment, that we compare both incidents from a source that is not biased. The following was taken from a supporter's website dedicated in its entirety to Mitt Romney: http://aboutmittromney.com/dogs.htm.

This is the story about Seamus, Mitt Romney’s unfortunate dog: “Before beginning the drive, Mitt Romney put Seamus, the family's hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon's roof rack. He'd built a windshield for the carrier, to make the ride more comfortable for the dog.” Just the thought of putting a dog on top of a car roof for a 12-hour road trip is enough to make by skin crawl, but that is not all. The story proudly continues as if that act was not bad enough.

“Then Romney put his boys on notice: He would be making predetermined stops for gas, and that was it."

"The ride was largely what you'd expect with five brothers, ages 13 and under, packed into a wagon they called the ''white whale.''

“As the oldest son, Tagg Romney commandeered the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. ''Dad!'' he yelled. ''Gross!'' A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who'd been riding on the roof in the wind for hours."

“As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management.”

Apparently, the Romneys thought of this incident as a joke. What it's so difficult for me to understand is that Mitt Romney had more than enough money to send Seamus by plane to Toronto, leave him in a reputable boarding facility or rent a damn van where the whole family and Seamus could comfortably fit but he chose none of them. Instead, he opted for the cheapest and cruelest one, strapping his dog on the roof of the car and, not content with that, when the poor dog vomited and defecated all over the car out of sheer terror the reward Seamus got was to be hosed down, not even dried and eight more hours of the same torture. That incident clearly reflects where Mitt Romney’s heart is, in his wallet.

For the Republicans that are trying to compare these two incidents, let me tell them that there is no comparison possible. One was an act of an adult inflicted on a child – the child should not be blamed. The other was the act of a cheap, cold hearten, irresponsible adult on an innocent dog.  So don’t you dare to compare!