The General American Politics Thread

[The Kid]

I say they let him open the window. If we're lucky the rapid decompression would suck him out of the plane where no one would have to hear his babbling.

...

It's just a thought...

[Conando]

That apparently does not happen but, he'd get a serious case of diving sickness.

[SuperStingray]

I say they let him open the window. If we're lucky the rapid decompression would suck him out of the plane where no one would have to hear his babbling.

...

It's just a thought...

[The Kid]

That apparently does not happen but, he'd get a serious case of diving sickness.

Edited September 25, 2012 by Grizzly-Kun (The Kid)

[SenEDDtor Missile]

I say they let him open the window. If we're lucky the rapid decompression would suck him out of the plane where no one would have to hear his babbling.

...

It's just a thought...

Actually he would probably be dead by then, since the sudden decompression could rupture his lungs and kill him before he even goes out of the plane (See BOAC Flight 781 for reference)

[The Kid]

Actually he would probably be dead by then, since the sudden decompression could rupture his lungs and kill him before he even goes out of the plane (See BOAC Flight 781 for reference)

Wouldn't that be the difference between "explosive" decompression and "rapid" decompression. There have been cases of people being partially sucked out of the cabin head first only to remain unharmed. In that Flight 781 instance, the damage and initial hole in the cabin seemed much greater than a window being opened. In a case of "rapid" decompression, the lungs can adjust.

[SenEDDtor Missile]

Wouldn't that be the difference between "explosive" decompression and "rapid" decompression. There have been cases of people being partially sucked out of the cabin head first only to remain unharmed. In that Flight 781 instance, the damage and initial hole in the cabin seemed much greater than a window being opened. In a case of "rapid" decompression, the lungs can adjust.

Yeah, realized that after I posted it. But eh, would you really miss Romney either way?

[Solkia]

Nope!

[Balding Spider]

Jesus Christ...

http://thinkprogress...-plane-windows/

I can't

I really hope this is fake.

I-I don't... good God how is this man a candidate?

[The Kid]

At this point I think Obama can just refuse to say anything and Romney will eventually destroy himself.

[-Robin-]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msJeBt0T3G8

Sure didn't take Youtube people long to make related comments for this. But taking Peter Griffin's example as a lesson may be worthwhile now.

[Autosaver]

Did Mr Romney NOT watch GoldFinger?! I mean, come on. That is like one of the best James Bond films.

[Tornado]

Or the ending of Alien Resurrection. That was one of the best Alie-

That was a pretty goo-

That was a film.

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

Okay, NO ONE can be this stupid not to know why you can't open windows on a plane.

I'm calling propaganda on this one, but I can't say I wouldn't be surprised if that was true.

[Solkia]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/24/mitt-romney-airplane-windows_n_1910930.html?utm_hp_ref=travel

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/post/mitt-romney-wants-to-know-why-airplane-windows-do-not-open/2012/09/24/1fdf30be-068c-11e2-a10c-fa5a255a9258_blog.html

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/09/romney-wonders-why-airplane-windows-dont-open.html

[turbojet]

So Romney gave his speech at the Clinton Global Initiative today and his solution to all the unrest in the Middle East is pretty much Globalization 2.0. I love how he mentioned Africa and did not mention the fact that they are pretty much the living definition of corporate exploitation or how capitalism only benefits the 1% and does not create jobs in the international community. He failed to realize that capitalism may just underdevelop these countries just as well help develop the industrialized countries. He mentioned Africa and failed to point out how not a single cent stays in the continent nor does the indigenous population ever profit. He likened it to Reagan's plan except people aren't too fond of the whole exploitation bit. I mean really. The speech is pretty much, "Give up your culture and beliefs for work so I...err...I mean you can prosper."

[Barry the Nomad]

Here's a story:

So a friend of ours (my wife and I) had this image on her wall, placed there by a friend of hers that we do not know:

Now I took one look at this and found it to be pretty offensive. I totally get that these stupid cards make the rounds are are meant to be funny. But I just find it stupid. It speaks down to people who share their political opinons on social networks, specifically women, and it enforces the stereotype of women being more interested in beauty products and fashion than, you know, having a political opinion. Doesn't help that this friend of ours has stated in the past her annoyance with people sharing political opinions on Facebook. Well, I showed the image to my wife and she shared it on her own wall with this comment:

Moments later, my wife gets a private message from the friend of our friend (a person we don't even know, mind you) with this message (I removed the names):

Dear (name withheld),

I greatly appreciate you sharing the picture I posted on (name withheld)'s wall and degrading my intelligence. This brand of e cards are JOKES. As in, people who post them have a sense of humor, so I suggest you get one. It will help you through life, especially in the current state of our political world. Which, by the way, I avidly follow.

Sincerely,

(name withheld)

PS. Obama sucks.

Now I was ready to share the PM on facebook so everybody could see what an asshole she is, but my wife said that would just make us as bad as her. So we're just ignoring her and maybe my wife will send her a kind reply. Still, it pissed me off.

[Nepenthe]

It's sad that she doesn't see the inherent irony in telling someone who spoke sarcastically to "get a sense of humor." She comes across as immature, both in handling criticism and in dealing with being distant from political discussions on the service, especially if her consistent complaining about the matter is true.

Meh, block her. Who cares? xP

[Solkia]

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/romney-commits-gaffe-wants-to-know-why-airplane-windows-dont-open-its-a-real-problem/

The Los Angeles Times story that relayed Romney’s airplane remark to the world was based off a pool report written by the New York Times‘s Ashley Parker. When we asked Parker this morning whether it seemed as if Romney made the mark in jest, she left no doubt. “Romney was joking,” she e-mailed. Parker told us that while the pool report didn’t explicitly indicate that Romney was joking, it was self-evident that he was.

I don't buy it, but whatever.

[Tornado]

That makes a lot more sense than the alternative. Romney is out of touch with most of the country. He's a self-serving hypocrite who holds an opinion only long enough for people to get angry about it. And he is very likely (literally) a sociopath.

But he's not dumb. That's a Sarah Palin witticism. Not a Romney one.

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

I figured that no one could be that stupid over something like Airplane windows. Some people are just too quick to blow these things out of proportion.

[Solkia]

I figured that no one could be that stupid over something like Airplane windows. Some people are just too quick to blow these things out of proportion.

Imagine that, people blowing things out of proportions during an election :U

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

Imagine that, people blowing things out of proportions during an election :U

Yeah, I think blowing something like "This guy doesn't know why you don't open airplane windows" out of proportion is entirely different (if not out right nitpicking) than something actually, I dunno, political?

[Sapphire]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829

I love this article. It goes way in depth about Romney's days with Bain Capital. They're a bunch of crooks.

And what they did to K.B. Toys really hits home. When I was little, I LOVED that store. I always went there at the end of mall trips with my mom. I remember one time, probably 5 or 6 years ago, I walked into that store and the shelf behind the cashier was FILLED with Sonic 15th Anniversary statues. Floor to ceiling, no joke. My mom and I bought 6! But that's all besides the point.

I'll post the part about what Bain and Mitt Romney did to bankrupt K.B. here though, because the entire article is super long. I know even this part is really long, so I bolded some of the big points.

I'm not a Romney guy, because I'm not a Bain guy," says Lenny Patnode, in an Irish pub in the factory town of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. "But I'm not an Obama guy, either. Just so you know."

I feel bad even asking Patnode about Romney. Big and burly, with white hair and the thick forearms of a man who's stocked a shelf or two in his lifetime, he seems to belong to an era before things like leveraged debt even existed. For 38 years, Patnode worked for a company called KB Toys in Pittsfield. He was the longest-serving employee in the company's history, opening some of the firm's first mall stores, making some of its canniest product buys ("Tamagotchi pets," he says, beaming, "and Tech-Decks, too"), traveling all over the world to help build an empire that at its peak included 1,300 stores. "There were times when I worked seven days a week, 16 hours a day," he says. "I opened three stores in two months once."

Then in 2000, right before Romney gave up his ownership stake in Bain Capital, the firm targeted KB Toys. The debacle that followed serves as a prime example of the conflict between the old model of American business, built from the ground up with sweat and industry know-how, and the new globalist model, the Romney model, which uses leverage as a weapon of high-speed conquest.

In a typical private-equity fragging, Bain put up a mere $18 million to acquire KB Toys and got big banks to finance the remaining $302 million it needed. Less than a year and a half after the purchase, Bain decided to give itself a gift known as a "dividend recapitalization." The firm induced KB Toys to redeem $121 million in stock and take out more than $66 million in bank loans – $83 million of which went directly into the pockets of Bain's owners and investors, including Romney. "The dividend recap is like borrowing someone else's credit card to take out a cash advance, and then leaving them to pay it off," says Heather Slavkin Corzo, who monitors private equity takeovers as the senior legal policy adviser for the AFL-CIO.

Bain ended up earning a return of at least 370 percent on the deal, while KB Toys fell into bankruptcy, saddled with millions in debt. KB's former parent company, Big Lots, alleged in bankruptcy court that Bain's "unjustified" return on the dividend recap was actually "900 percent in a mere 16 months." Patnode, by contrast, was fired in December 2008, after almost four decades on the job. Like other employees, he didn't get a single day's severance.

I ask Slavkin Corzo what Bain's justification was for the giant dividend recapitalization in the KB Toys acquisition. The question throws her, as though she's surprised anyone would ask for a reason a company like Bain would loot a firm like KB Toys. "It wasn't like, 'Yay, we did a good job, we get a dividend,'" she says with a laugh. "It was like, 'We can do this, so we will.' "

At the time of the KB Toys deal, Romney was a Bain investor and owner, making him a mere beneficiary of the raping and pillaging, rather than its direct organizer. Moreover, KB's demise was hastened by a host of genuine market forces, including competition from video games and cellphones. But there's absolutely no way to look at what Bain did at KB and see anything but a cash grab – one that followed the business model laid out by Romney. Rather than cutting costs and tightening belts, Bain added $300 million in debt to the firm's bottom line while taking out more than $120 million in cash – an outright looting that creditors later described in a lawsuit as "breaking open the piggy bank." What's more, Bain smoothed the deal in typical fashion by giving huge bonuses to the company's top managers as the firm headed toward bankruptcy. CEO Michael Glazer got an incredible $18.4 million, while CFO Robert Feldman received $4.8 million and senior VP Thomas Alfonsi took home $3.3 million.

And what did Bain bring to the table in return for its massive, outsize payout? KB Toys had built a small empire by targeting middle-class buyers with value-priced products. It succeeded mainly because the firm's leaders had a great instinct for what they were making and selling. These were people who had been in the specialty toy business since 1922; collectively, they had millions of man-hours of knowledge about how the industry works and how toy customers behave. KB's president in the Eighties, the late Saul Rubenstein, used to carry around a giant computer printout of the company's inventory, and would fall asleep reading it on the weekends, the pages clasped to his chest. "He knew the name and number of all those toys," his widow, Shirley, says proudly. "He loved toys."

Bain's experience in the toy industry, by contrast, was precisely bupkus. They didn't know a damn thing about the business they had taken over – and they never cared to learn. The firm's entire contribution was $18 million in cash and a huge mound of borrowed money that gave it the power to pull the levers. "The people who came in after – they were never toy people," says Shirley Rubenstein. To make matters worse, former employees say, Bain deluged them with requests for paperwork and reports, forcing them to worry more about the whims of their new bosses than the demands of their customers. "We took our eye off the ball," Patnode says. "And if you take your eye off the ball, you strike out."

In the end, Bain never bothered to come up with a plan for how KB Toys could meet the 21st-century challenges of video games and cellphone gadgets that were the company's ostensible downfall. And that's where Romney's self-touted reputation as a turnaround specialist is a myth. In the Bain model, the actual turnaround isn't necessary. It's just a cover story. It's nice for the private equity firm if it happens, because it makes the acquired company more attractive for resale or an IPO. But it's mostly irrelevant to the success of the takeover model, where huge cash returns are extracted whether the captured firm thrives or not. "The thing about it is, nobody gets hurt," says Patnode.

"Except the people who worked here."

Edited September 27, 2012 by Sapphire

[Tornado]

So a private equity firm bought into a company that was headed into obsolescence anyway, and after a year or so they stripped it's assets and apparently hastened a fall that probably would have happened regardless. The article even says that the KB Toys was on the way out because of its own inability to compete in the modern world, but then tried to spin that as being the fault of Romney's company too because they didn't try to save it.

I'm just not seeing the problem here.

Edited September 27, 2012 by Tornado