One week after the release of secretly taped videos of Mitt Romney from a private fundraiser sent his poll numbers into a tailspin, the Obama campaign is using the controversial comments in a new television commercial that began running Monday.

In the 30 second ad, the narrator gets straight to the point, saying “Mitt Romney attacked 47% of Americans who pay no income tax, including veterans, the elderly and disabled."

The narrator refers to the secret video clips released last Monday in Mother Jones of Romney at a private fundraiser in Florida in May. The material, recorded without the candidate’s knowledge, showed the Republican challenger telling the audience that 47% of voters are dependent on the government, see themselves as victims, and would “vote for the president no matter what.”

One of the clips is incorporated in the new spot. “My job is not to worry about those people,” Romney says while standing at the podium.

The narrator then asks viewers “Doesn’t the President have to worry about everyone?”

“Mitt Romney paid just 14.1 percent in taxes last year,” says the narrator, claiming that “he keeps millions in Bermuda and the Cayman islands.”

The spot ends with the narrator saying "Maybe instead of attacking others on taxes, Romney should come clean on his."

Just don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen!

Matt Taibbi is f*&^ing brilliant. This is today's "Must Read."

Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone:

Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. The sight was so disgusting that people everywhere were ready to drop an H-bomb on Lower Manhattan and bayonet the survivors. But today that same insane greed ethos, that same belief in the lunatic pursuit of instant borrowed millions – it's dusted itself off, it's had a shave and a shoeshine, and it's back out there running for president.

...

"But what most voters don't know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America's top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth."

"By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions - placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place..."

"If Romney pulls off this whopper, you'll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It's almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House."

Via OccupyWallSt:

(un)Occupy Albuquerque and allies are organizing a civil disobedience action on Hiroshima Day, August 6th, in Los Alamos as part of the wider three-day events planned by the Occupy Santa Fe Nuke Free Now Coalition. See here for a full events list for August 3-6 in Santa Fe and Los Alamos.

There is no single institution on earth that undermines the well-being of the world more than the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Northern New Mexico.

NUCLEAR WAR
As a tool of the U.S. empire, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) developed the only nuclear bombs to be used as weapons of war—in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and three days later in Nagasaki. At least 225,000 civilians were killed. Hundreds of thousands died later of cancers, and thousands more inherited birth defects. Today, the U.S. nuclear stockpile contains enough warheads to destroy 159,000 Hiroshimas. With threats of a U.S. strike against Iran and Israel’s U.S.-backed hegemony in the Middle East, it is time to shut down the war machine.

TOXIC EARTH
The development and maintenance of nuclear weapons displaces indigenous people, pollutes air, water, and land & degrades the health of all life on Earth. The U. S. has exploded over 1100 nuclear weapons in tests above and underground and in the ocean, exposing millions of unsuspecting humans and animals to damaging radiation. LANL is built on and is contaminating indigenous land “borrowed” by the U.S. government and never returned.

CORPORATE GREED
Los Alamos is NO LONGER operated by the U.S. government. In an egregious breach of world security, U.S. nuclear weapons industry operations have been managed by private, for-profit corporations since 2007. Among the largest of these, Bechtel Corporation—the engineering firm that built almost half of the nuclear plants in the world as well as the oil infrastructure of Saudi Arabia—now runs daily operations at LANL, and last year was awarded more than $55 million in pure profit for LANL management alone.

LOST EXPERTISE
The resources and scientific expertise devoted to nuclear bombs are critically needed to address such pressing issues as global warming, declining fossil fuel supply, overpopulation, species extinction, and poverty.

Join us in Los Alamos, NM Aug. 6, 2012 to put the Empire on notice:
No more nuclear weapons!
No more corporate greed! No more war!
!Ya Basta U.S. global domination!

Some facts on the U.S. nuclear weapons system, via the Environmental Solidarity Working Group at Occupy Wall Street:

* The U.S. maintains more than 10,000 nuclear warheads.
* Obama's FY 2012 budget request designates over $7.6 billion to programs directly related to nuclear warheads. This is an 8.9% increase from the previous year. The increase will be sustained and then increased further "in the later out years."
* Accord to a White House fact sheet: "The plan includes investments of $80 billion to sustain and modernize the nuclear weapons complex" ... and "well over $100 billion in nuclear delivery systems to sustain existing capabilities and modernize some strategic systems" by the year 2020.
*Federal spending for nuclear weapons between 1940 and 2007 was about $7.2 trillion, exceeding "the combined total federal spending for education; training, employment, and social services; agriculture; natural resources and the environment; general science, space, and technology; community and regional development, including disaster relief; law enforcement; and energy production and regulation."
*Nuclear weapons' relationship to human security was put on display in Japan 67 years ago. We know what they do.

For even more facts about nuclear weapons, see NukeFreeNow.org:

Every facet of the nuclear industry poisons our planet. The nuclear business is wildly profitable, yet it collects billions in taxpayer subsidies.

Nuclear subsides go beyond mere money. The biosphere and creatures who depend on a living planet pay the largest subsidy through illness and premature death.

Nuclear weapons manufacturing and testing has poisoned millions, but secrecy has keep us misinformed. Secrecy has blocked accurate measures of how much radiation we have been exposed to. Misinformation has allowed downwinders, uranium miners, defense workers and the subjects of secret tests to suffer and die without medical attention or compensation. The lack of medical care given to nuclear victims has impeded scientific study of the long-term effects of weapons development and testing.

In spite of this neglect, scientists do know that exposure to the fallout from nuclear weapons testing causes cancers, tumors, genetic damage, infertility, birth defects and death.

Plutonium is so poisonous that one inhaled microscopic particle can cause lung cancer.

A few reap billions in profits, while we, the 99%, have diminished futures. There is always money for more bombs and new wars, but we’re told there isn’t enough for healthcare, education, housing, pensions. Sustainable-energy projects languish. We live with the nightmare of nuclear war.

A major nuclear war — between the US and Russia —would leave Earth virtually uninhabitable. A regional war — limited to India and Pakistan would cause a global famine that would kill one billion people, according to Alan Robock and Brian Toon, two of the foremost experts on the climatic impact of nuclear war.

It’s time. We must make this end. Read the rest at NukeFreeNow.org

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via Occupy Los Angeles

We are occupying!!!

Join LA CAN, Occupy the Hood, Occupy Skid Row and Occupy Los Angeles at Wilshire/Hope (626 Wilshire Blvd.) at 8:30pm tonight to fight gentrification and the corrupt practices of the lobby group Central City Association. BRING TENT.

We are peacefully gathering to protest the Economic Development Meeting and the downtown 2020 plan to build new high rises, the AEG Stadium and further criminalize and push out the homeless. The CCA is the localized manifestation and microcosm of everything wrong with policy, the 1% and obsession with wealth and prestige. In this hyper-localized resistance, everyone must fight the bully in their respective backyards, as a community.

We have power in numbers and will be OCCUPYING the CCA, who monitors the public spaces of downtown with private security for the one percent. Red shirt, green shirt, purple shirt, police all working together to criminalize the homeless, communities of color and more recently, to patrol protesters in the area.

Facebook event | Twitter: @OccupyLA

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