From The Thom Hartmann Show -- How Ronald Reagan killed the American Dream:

Thom Hartmann rants about the policies of Ronald Reagan that allowed large corporations like Mitt Romney's Bain Capital to turn the American Dream into a nightmare for so many.

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Former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland delivered a barn burner of a speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention this Tuesday night and landed some body blows to Mitt Romney for everything from his offshore tax havens to his vulture capitalism at Bain to wanting to allow Detroit to go bankrupt, which would have devastated Ohio's economy.

The HuffPo has the entire speech, but here's the portion from the clip above:

Now, Mitt Romney, he lives by a different code. To him, American workers are just numbers on a spreadsheet.

To him, all profits are created equal, whether made on our shores or off. That's why companies Romney invested in were dubbed "outsourcing pioneers." Our nation was built by pioneers—pioneers who accepted untold risks in pursuit of freedom, not by pioneers seeking offshore profits at the expense of American workers here at home.

Mitt Romney proudly wrote an op-ed entitled, "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt." If he had had his way, devastation would have cascaded from Michigan to Ohio and across the nation. Mitt Romney never saw the point of building something when he could profit from tearing it down. If Mitt was Santa Claus, he'd fire the reindeer and outsource the elves.

Mitt Romney has so little economic patriotism that even his money needs a passport. It summers on the beaches of the Cayman Islands and winters on the slopes of the Swiss Alps. In Matthew, chapter 6, verse 21, the scriptures teach us that where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. My friends, any man who aspires to be our president should keep both his treasure and his heart in the United States of America. And it's well past time for Mitt Romney to come clean with the American people.

On what he's saying about the president's policy for welfare to work, he's lying. Simple as that. On his tax returns, he's hiding. You have to wonder, just what is so embarrassing that he's gone to such great lengths to bury the truth? Whatever he's doing to avoid taxes, can it possibly be worse than the Romney-Ryan tax plan that would have sliced Mitt's total tax rate to less than one percent?

My friends, there is a true choice in this election. Barack Obama is betting on the American worker. Mitt Romney is betting on a Bermuda shell corporation. Barack Obama saved the American auto industry. Mitt Romney saved on his taxes. Barack Obama is an economic patriot. Mitt Romney is an outsourcing pioneer. My friends, the stakes are too high, the differences too stark to sit this one out. Let us stand as one on November 6th and move this country forward by re-electing President Barack Obama.

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As Dave Johnson at Campaign for America's Future noted last week, even though Mitt Romney's been running nothing but one dishonest campaign ad after another since announcing his recent run for president, the media has finally found a campaign ad they can "cluck tongues at" and it's not a Romney ad:

After a series of blatantly dishonest Mitt Romney campaign ads have been saturating the airwaves -- one even editing audio to make it sound as if the President said something that he never said --our media elites have finally found an ad to click their tongues at. A pro-Obama ad from super PAC Priorities USA Action features Joe Soptic explaining what happened to his wife after the Bain Capital laid him off, taking away their health insurance. The ad has not even been run on TV [...]

Note, this is not an Obama campaign ad. It is illegal for a campaign to coordinate or even communicate or coordinate with these outside groups.

The Romney campaign responded with an ad saying that this ad came from the Obama campaign itself -- yet another in a series of lies from the Romney campaign. [...]

Again, this was not an Obama campaign ad, and has never been aired on TV. Contrast the elite media reaction to this ad with their reaction to the dishonest ads that the Romney campaign has been running on TV, using doctored audio, claiming Obama is "gutting welfare reform," accusing Obama of "war on religion," accusing Obama of corruption, etc. The media elites say this ad, showing what happens to families when they are laid off and lose their health insurance, "crossed a line." Not calling a sitting President a "Marxist" ot the lie about "death panels" or "palling around with terrorists" or doctored audio in an ad from a presidential candidate -- but explaining the tragedy of being laid off and losing health insurance is what "crosses a line."

Case in point, this Sunday's Meet the Press and David Gregory doing his best to add to the list at Dave's post. I was glad to see some push back from Axelrod though.

DAVID GREGORY: Those of us who cover these campaigns understand that even though there's a big choice here it's not as if some of the personal destruction back and forth is going to go away. And we've seen a lot of that this week. And Governor Romney has taken particular aim at an ad that's being run by the president's own Super PAC run by a former press aide to the campaign and in the White House. And this is a campaign about Mitt Romney's tenure at Bain, even though the story that's highlighted in the Super PAC ad happened after Mitt Romney left. Let me play a portion of this and also show you how Mitt Romney's responding to it. Watch.

(VIDEO NOT TRANSCRIBED)

DAVID GREGORY: Disrespecting the office of the presidency is the charge from Mitt Romney about ads like that with the implication that somehow Bain and Mitt Romney was responsible for that woman's death. How do you respond to that?

DAVID AXELROD: Well, I certainly don't think that would be a fair implication. That isn't stated in the ad. It's not a fair implication. But what is true is that Governor Romney and his partners loaded that company with debt, walked away with millions of dollars and left the workers there bereft, without the healthcare they were promised, without the pensions and other benefits that they were promised. And that is emblematic of the kind of--

DAVID GREGORY: You don't think that ad-- (OVERTALK)

DAVID AXELROD: --of work that he did. That is important.

DAVID GREGORY: It doesn't cross the line--

DAVID AXELROD: But let me ask you--

DAVID GREGORY: --in the debate?

DAVID AXELROD: --ask you something, David. How does Mitt Romney, in the very week that he's running an ad that he approves. At the end he says, "I'm Mitt Romney and I approve this message." Millions and millions and millions of dollars accusing the president of removing the work requirement from welfare, which every single person who's looked at it, every expert, every news organization, every fact checker has said is patently false.

And he is lecturing people on the quality of campaigns? He ought to be ashamed of himself. He ought to tell his own campaign in the commercials that he controls, "Take that off. It's not true. It's not fair." When he does that, maybe he'll have some standing to lecture other people on the quality of the campaign.

DAVID GREGORY: We're in a new gear in this campaign, clearly. David Axelrod, thank you very much.

DAVID AXELROD: All right, thank you.

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Mitt and Ann Romney appeared on Piers Morgan's show this Thursday evening and when asked about his time at Bain Capital, Romney's response was to claim that people just want to demonize "success," or in other words, those people who are jealous just hate me because I'm rich. Sorry Mitt, but it's not a matter of whether you have a lot of money or not. It's a matter of how you acquired it.

People who've had their jobs, or their friends, family and neighbors' jobs shipped overseas aren't going to be particularly enamored with someone who made their fortune squeezing every dime they could get out of companies for their profit, with no regard for the circumstances the employees found themselves in once you made your money for yourself and your investors.

And as Donna Brazile wrote about this interview, sometimes facts about how you conducted your business and whether you've been honest with the public matter as well: Mitt Romney vs. stubborn facts:

John Adams once said, "facts are stubborn things." These days, another Massachusetts politician has found that saying to ring especially true. While it's still unclear how Mitt Romney can be the CEO, chairman, president and sole shareholder of Bain Capital, a company that he claims no responsibility for, it's become increasingly evident that candidate Romney simply doesn't want to talk about the facts of his business record. In an interview with CNN's Piers Morgan, Romney suggested that to question his experiences is to "attack success." If this is the case, and if we're also not supposed to talk above a whisper about Mitt's record as governor, including his signature accomplishment in health care reform, then which parts of his biography remain on the table?

Romney clearly prefers his largely undisclosed experiences in the private sector over his publicly poor record in Boston. At every turn, Romney and his campaign have attempted to steer the discussion toward business matters for just this reason.

But when the Washington Post took him up on it last month and published an article headlined "Romney's Bain Capital invested in companies that moved jobs overseas," the Romney campaign was caught flatfooted. The Post found that Bain Capital, the firm Romney spent much of his professional life building up, had invested in companies that had not only shipped jobs overseas -- a practice of some concern to working- and middle-class Americans -- but had pioneered the practice. Read on...

Transcript via CNN below the fold.

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David Brooks apparently believes that buying distressed companies, loading them up with debt, raiding their pensions, busting unions and outsourcing their jobs is the equivalent of someone being "the corporate version of a personal trainer." Here's David Gregory asking him about his recent column where he said just that:

GREGORY: David Brooks, you’re writing in part about just the-- the gamesmanship of the campaign, but it goes to something I think Michelle was saying about a real focus on alternatives. What the vision is? Why Mitt Romney wants to be president, after all? And you wrote this in a-- in a column on Tuesday that I’ll put up on the screen. You talk about his capitalist, you know, narrative. “It’s been the business of his life to take companies that were mediocre and sclerotic and try to make them efficient and dynamic. It has been his job to be the corporate version of a personal trainer: take people who are puffy and self-indulgent and whip them into shape.” You write about Romney, “That’s his selling point: rigor and productivity. If he can build a capitalist vision around that, he’ll thrive. If not, he’s a punching bag.” Is he more of a punching bag right now over releasing his taxes, o-- o-- over the years in his experience at Bain?

MR. BROOKS: Yeah, releasing the taxes won’t help. I-- I don’t care about the issue particularly. Can anybody think about a president who was either qualified or disqualified by some of the tax reform? That is irrelevant. What’s relevant is who the guy is? He has an amazing personal story. His family was really an (Unintelligible) going across the West, poverty, building an empire, poverty, building an empire. He can’t talk about it because it involves Mormonism. He is personally a decent guy. For some reason, he’s not willing to talk about it. He’s a hidden man. And so, one of the turning points in this campaign is when he comes out, and if he can come out, and I don’t know why they’re waiting so long.

The second thing is, as Michelle said, people are-- people-- I personally find this an incredibly consequential election and incredibly boring election because the two campaign staffs, they’re on their iPhones, they’re responding to whatever the campaign-- other campaign did five minutes ago and the rest of us just don’t care.

Both the Booman Tribune and The New Republic featured articles earlier this week explaining why Brooks' advice for Romney might not go over so well with most voters.

Mr. Brooks: Champion of Capitalism:

David Brooks' latest piece is quite offensive. It's also grossly inaccurate. [...]

So, now the president of the preeminent capitalist country in the world does not represent capitalism. How dishonest can you get? The president is saying that we should not incentivize plant closings and outsourcing through the tax code, and that we ought to have more reasonable CEO compensation. He's also suggesting that vulture capitalists like Mitt Romney have enriched themselves by loading up profitable companies with debt and fees until they go bankrupt. Where's the efficiency in that?

But we're getting to "efficiency."

Romney is going to have to define a vision of modern capitalism. He’s going to have to separate his vision from the scandals and excesses we’ve seen over the last few years. He needs to define the kind of capitalist he is and why the country needs his virtues.

Let’s face it, he’s not a heroic entrepreneur. He’s an efficiency expert. It has been the business of his life to take companies that were mediocre and sclerotic and try to make them efficient and dynamic. It has been his job to be the corporate version of a personal trainer: take people who are puffy and self-indulgent and whip them into shape.

That’s his selling point: rigor and productivity. If he can build a capitalist vision around that, he’ll thrive. If not, he’s a punching bag.

Good luck going into blue collar America and telling people that you're an "efficiency expert" who practices the kind of virtuous capitalism that puts rigor and productivity over the interests of the workers. But it's not even true. Mitt Romney was not a venture capitalist or an efficiency expert. He feasted on companies. A bankrupt company is not an outsourced company. It's just broke, with a broken pension plan and unpaid vendors.

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From ABC's This Week, after formally attacking Mitt Romney and saying if the Republicans nominate him, they're going to lose, Ann Coulter now says "Romney has had a Midas touch with everything he's done." I would imagine some of his investors might have felt that way. Not so much if you were unfortunate enough to work at one of the companies his firm took over.

COULTER: It's not just that I was magnificent at Bain and I should be president; it's that Romney has had a Midas touch with everything he's done.

RENDELL: Massachusetts?

COULTER: Hang on. You keep interpreting me. This is going to get through. First of all, yes, as governor of Massachusetts, with an 85 percent Democratic legislature, he -- he slashed spending, which is what our federal government needs.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you didn't like his health care plan in Massachusetts.

RENDELL: Great health care plan.

COULTER: Then, at Bain -- I mean, about, what 75 percent, 80 percent of the businesses that were going to bankrupt, he does turn around. He's a green eyeshade kind of guy. He will do what no president, not even Ronald Reagan, has ever done, and that is go through the budget and cut the spending. And there's a lot to be cut.

And the Olympics, which was also going bankrupt and is an enormous business. And the Midas touch man comes in and turns around this nearly bankrupt institution. It is not just Bain. It is everything he touches.

And these ads are unfair because -- and they keep changing, to my notice.

Because, if you look at what he's actually done and who's talking here, they're always the president of the union that shut down a plant in a business that was going out of -- bankrupt.

I'm not so sure the people who lived in Massachusetts would agree with her either.

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On this Sunday's State of the Union, when asked if Mitt Romney coming from a privileged background is going to harm him in the presidential election, Speaker of the House John Boehner did his best to try to pretend that Romney is just another example of how average Americans can work their way up the economic ladder, despite the fact that upward mobility doesn't really exist in the United States anymore.

Boehner thinks Americans "don't want to vote for a loser" but ignores the fact that Mitt Romney made his millions making sure that a whole lot of Americans were never going to have a chance at even earning a middle class living, much less achieving the sort of "success" Boehner was touting here.

If anyone has not read Pete Kotz's article on Romney at The Village Voice about his time at Bain, I highly recommend it -- Mitt Romney, American Parasite.

If being a "winner" means taking over companies, busting unions, destroying communities, sucking the benefits and retirement packages dry to line you and your investors' pockets, bringing in incompetent people to manage companies that only care about production and throw safety and good work practices out the window and moving on to your next target, then I guess Mitt Romney is your man. For most Americans, he was the guy that you live in fear of coming in and buying out your place of employment if you're still lucky enough to have any kind of retirement package, seniority rights, benefits, or are making a living wage.

Transcript below the fold.

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From the man whose policies are what amounts to "the Robin Hood story — only in reverse" for the poor, a man whose time at Bain represents everything most Americans hate about capitalism, we had him trying to "pivot" for the general election tonight with a message against government"unfairness" after this Tuesday evening's primary wins.

Mitt Romney Kicks Off The General With Crusade Against ‘Unfairness’:

Finally able to acknowledge what’s been plain for weeks, Mitt Romney seized the mantle of his party’s presumptive nominee after winning a series of primaries in the Northeast Tuesday night. Billed as one of his first major general election speeches, Romney pledged to combat government “unfairness” and challenge President Obama with a relentless focus on the economy.

“Tonight I can say, ‘Thank you, America,’” Romney told supporters in New Hampshire. “After 43 primaries and caucuses, many long days and more than a few long nights, I can say with confidence and gratitude that you have given me a great honor and solemn responsibility. And, together, we will win on Nov. 6.”

Romney warned that “because [Obama] has failed, he will run a campaign of diversions, distractions, and distortions.”

“That kind of campaign may have worked at another place and in a different time,” he said. “But not here and not now. It’s still about the economy — and we’re not stupid.”

Romney outlined an agenda aimed at combating what he called “unfairness” in government, spinning a phrase often employed by Democrats as they make the case that wealthier Americans and corporations should pay higher taxes. Earlier Tuesday, Obama said the rich should “pay their fair share” in a speech to college students in North Carolina. While other Republicans often debate these arguments by emphasizing “opportunity,” Romney adopted the “fairness” language to criticize federal spending.

As TPM noted, Romney was still attempting to run on his father's resume:

“I’ll tell you about how much I love this country, where someone like my dad, who grew up poor and never graduated from college, could pursue his dreams and work his way up to running a great car company,” Romney. “Only in America could a man like my dad become governor of the state in which he once sold paint from the trunk of his car.”

More there with the Obama campaign's response to the speech. Text of the portion of Romney's speech in the video above below the fold.

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The Washington Post's Greg Sargent took note of this interview over the weekend and I've got to agree with him on all of his points other than one thing. Calling Candy Crowley a "neutral journalist." She parrots Republican talking points constantly on CNN and is about as "neutral" or as much of a "journalist" as the talking head over at Fox.

Here's more from his post -- CNN amplifies Romney’s bogus jobs claims:

Yesterday the Romney campaign distributed a memo to reporters that attacked Obama’s record on jobs as a “failure.” To support this conclusion, the memo cited, among other things, the “net” job loss that has occurred on Obama’s watch.

This use of that “net” job loss number, which is technically true in the most narrow sense, is at best highly misleading and dishonest. That’s because it factors in the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs the economy was hemorraghing in the months just after Obama took office, when the economy was in free fall — before Obama’s policies kicked in. Yet the Romney camp has again and again presented this “net” job loss number as proof that those same policies have failed. Today on CNN, Candy Crowley confronted David Axelrod with this same number — and presented it as a meaningful one, just as the Romney camp continues to do. [...]

I hope Crowley takes a look at at Paul Krugman’s explanation and chart, which details how absurd it is to use this figure in isolation as a metric to judge Obama’s policies and as evidence that they destroyed jobs. Indeed, the statistics show that once the stimulus passed, private sector job loss declined from month to month and turned around in the spring of 2010, after which there have been over 20 straight months of private sector job growth. Crowley might also check out Steve Benen’s charts, which make all this very simple to understand.

Greg noted in his post that "If this is how this debate is going to be covered, it’s going to be a very long campaign." Get ready for a long campaign Greg, because the corporate media is going to continue to carry water for Romney. This is just the beginning. And Obama's policies do deserve some honest scrutiny, but I'm not expecting to get much of that from our beltway Villagers that thrive on conflict and fake balance to get ratings. Facts don't seem to be something they've got much concern for. If Democrats want those charts you linked to be shown, they'd better start showing up with them on their own poster board, or they're not going to show them on the air.

Full transcript below the fold.

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From this Wednesday night's The O'Reilly Factor, Monica Crowley is pretty desperate here with this ridiculous bit of hackery, claiming that it's actually President Obama that started the Occupy Wall Street movement in a coy move to help him beat Mr. One Percent Mitt Romney during the upcoming presidential election, because they were aware he was going to be the candidate all along and now they can use the issue of income inequality to run on.

I hate to break it to Monica Crowley, but with Romney's background at Bain Capital as a vulture capitalist, they weren't going to need any help to frame the debate that way should he become the Republican nominee. And if she's silly enough to think that the Occupy movement is supportive of President Obama as a whole and isn't as upset about a lot of his policies as a lot of conservatives are, or that a lot of liberals and Libertarians that are members of the movement are as well, then she obviously hasn't been following them. Or what's more likely is she knows they're not fully supportive of the President, much less some AstroTurf movement like those teabaggers they like to pretend are grass roots, and she's just lying and doesn't care because she knows the Fox-bots who watch O'Reilly's show won't know the difference.

Here's more from our friends at News Hounds -- Today In Monica Crowley Conspiracy Theories: Occupy Wall Street An Obama Re-Election Technique To Attack Romney:

Leave it to Monica Crowley to find a way to find some hidden evil in the scrutiny of Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital. The same Monica Crowley who thought CBS’ Bob Schieffer gave secretly coded campaign suggestions to David Axelrod, who saw attacks on Rush Limbaugh as a stealth way to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine and – my personal favorite – blamed the Obama administration for her decision not to eat a cheeseburger – that Monica Crowley has a new conspiracy theory, that the Occupy Wall Street movement was set up in advance to help President Obama attack Mitt Romney, his likely opponent.

Seems to be a habit with Ms. Crowley, doesn't it?