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At a campaign event in Glen Allen, Virginia on Friday, Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan said that Mitt Romney, who founded Bain Capital, had proven he knew that small businesses were the backbone of the American economy because he had started "small businesses" himself.

"[Mitt Romney] has proven, through starting up small businesses, through turning around struggling businesses, through creating businesses we all know -- Sports Authority, Bright Horizons, Staples -- this is a person who is living proof, and experience, that knows that if you have a small business, you built that small business. That's the backbone of our economy."

(h/t: Daily Kos)

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After taking a shot at Harry Reid last week for going after Mitt Romney for tax avoidance and refusing to release his tax returns, it appears The Daily Show's Jon Stewart may be having a change of heart over whether that criticism was deserved. He went after Mittens tonight for having his business practices being too shady for Italy.

Here's more on that from Bloomberg: Romney Persona Non Grata in Italy for Bain’s Deal Skirting Taxes:

Mitt Romney skipped Italy on his swing through Europe. That was probably prudent.

That’s because Bain Capital, under Romney as chief executive officer, made about $1 billion in a leveraged buyout 12 years ago that remains controversial in Italy to this day. Bain was part of a group that bought a telephone-directory company from the Italian government and then sold it about two years later, at the peak of the technology bubble, for about 25 times what it paid.

Bain funneled profits through subsidiaries in Luxembourg, a common corporate strategy for avoiding income taxes in other European countries, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg News. The buyer, Italy’s biggest telephone company, now has a total market value less than what it paid Bain and other investors for the directory business.

In Italy, the deals have spurred at least three books, separate legal and regulatory probes and newspaper columns alleging investors made a fortune at the expense of Italian taxpayers. Boston-based Bain wasn’t a subject of the inquiries, which didn’t result in any charges.

The sale of the government’s directory business is “a dark chapter in the country’s privatization history, one that has hurt Italians deeply,” said Bernardo Bortolotti, an economics professor at Turin University who advised the Italian Treasury on asset sales from 2002 through 2005. “It was a mistake from the start, damaged by a lack of transparency and the use of offshore funds.”

Personally Involved

While few ordinary Italians realize the link between Romney and the investor group, the deal symbolizes Italy’s economic woes and government futility as the nation struggles to convince investors that it can repay Europe’s second-largest debt without a bailout. The economy is in its fourth recession since 2001 and unemployment is at a 13-year high.

Romney himself probably earned more than $50 million, and possibly as much as $60 million from the Italian directory sale of Seat Pagine Gialle SpA, according to a person familiar with the matter. The deal turned into one of the biggest windfalls of his tenure.

“With this investment, Mitt Romney and Bain Capital, with its consortium partners, partnered with a new management team to transform this company, and grow it into a tremendous success,” said Michele Davis, a spokeswoman for Romney’s presidential campaign. “Mitt Romney is running for President to put that experience to work.” Read on...

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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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We've seen the Obama campaign going after Mitt Romney for his time at Bain Capital. I think with the Olympics approaching we're about to hear more about this story from them very soon. From Up With Chris Hayes: Mitt Romney and federal money for the Olympics:

Up host Chris Hayes and his guests talk to former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson about the federal assistance Mitt Romney sought as head of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics.

I clipped the interview down to the portions with Anderson. You can watch the entire segment at the link above. Here's more from the Daily KOS on Romney's time running the Olympic games: Romney's Olympics:

Much has been made recently about Mitt Romney's involvement with Bain while he was heading the Salt Lake Olympics Organizing Committee, but what about his actual involvement with the Olympics themselves? Romney has made his "turnaround" of the Olympics that had been tainted by an international bribery scandal a point of his campaign. He regards it as proof of his amazing leadership ability and patriotism. So, how did Romney bail out the Olympics. Well, he didn't. We did.

A September 2000 report from the United States General Accounting Office tells us that tax payers paid nearly $1.3 billion for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. The majority of that, 80% of that, in fact, $1 billion of that, was spent not on the game themselves, but on infrastructure upgrades. With 51% going to improving highways and 28% to improve mass transit. [...]

To put that into perspective, we, the taxpayers, spent roughly $75 million on the Los Angeles Olympics and $609 million on the Atlanta Olympics.

This prompted Senator John McCain to call the Salt Lake game a "pork-barrel" project.

“I think it is a disgrace,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who, along with U.S. Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., asked the government agency to investigate the escalating expenditures for hosting the Olympic games in American cities.“But this is a logical extension of what you get when you start pork-barrel spending.”

So, here is the question. Did any of that $1.3 billion of taxpayer's money go to benefit Romney or Bain? Read on...

As they noted, there are more questions which might be answered by Mitt Romney releasing his tax returns, which it seems more obvious day by day that he is never going to release. Romney seems to love that government "free stuff" when it benefits himself and his business buddies, but not so much for the working class and the poor.

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Here's what we get to look forward to if Mitt Romney wins the presidential election. More ex-Bushies making their way back on to our television sets, like Tara Wall, who I had hoped to never see on the air again after Bush finally left office. No such luck since Romney's hired her as an adviser, and not a very good one at that. How bad are you on the stump when you let MSNBC's little Luke Russert trip you up?

From Think Progress: Romney Adviser Stumped On How Romney Would Reduce The Debt:

Mitt Romney’s campaign has fired back at questions about his tenure at Bain Capital and his failure to release tax returns by blaming President Obama’s campaign for not wanting to talk about the economy. Given a chance to talk about the economy this morning, though, a Romney adviser failed to deliver specifics about how his plan would boost economic growth while also balancing the budget, as Romney claims he will do.

As ThinkProgress has noted, Romney’s plan to provide a massive tax cut to the rich would blow a hole in the federal budget Romney promises to balance by 2020. When MSNBC’s Luke Russert asked Romney adviser Tara Wall how Romney would offset the lost revenue, she failed to offer any specifics, telling Americans they could instead “research” his plan to find them. When Russert returned to the subject, Wall again failed to deliver an answer, saying Romney’s business experience is the reason he would balance the budget:

RUSSERT: What are the offsets? What are we specifically going to do to balance the budget?

WALL: Well, I believe Americans will hear a lot more about Governor Romney’s plan, and if you want to see in depth what his plan is, you can certainly research that and look at that more in depth. But overall, there have been a number of new regulations, over-zealous regulations, on small businesses enacted by this administration, and we have to look at those things. [...]

RUSSERT: Even with those small business cuts you’re talking about, they’re in the billions. We’re talking trillions with a T. Non-partisan: increase by the debt, Mr. Romney’s plan with these tax cuts, by $2.6 trillion. Why are there no specifics? You guys want to talk about big ideas, you don’t want to talk about Bain and the tax issues. I don’t want to talk about that. I’m asking you specifically: How does Mitt Romney’s plan balance the budget by 2020?

WALL: I think, if you look at the economic numbers, I’m not an economist and I’m not going to play an economist, I think that Mitt Romney has a proven record of bringing economies back. He brought down unemployment as governor, he created jobs as a governor, he was effective as a businessperson overall, and I think you have to apply those concepts. [...] You can’t discount that, and you can’t discount the fact that we have to be able to look at how we begin solving the debt problem and bringing that down, and to do that, number one, is to start with streamlining our tax code, bringing down our marginal tax rate, the regulations that have been overburdensome, and making real true spending cuts.

As they noted, the trouble with that is, Romney hasn't provided a plan with any specifics that would offset the tax cuts. We all know where he'd likely get the money, which is taking it out of the hides of the poor and the middle class. I'm sure he'd rather not put that in writing since it might harm his chances of being elected.

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You know how you can tell an attack ad from Democrats is working? The right wing and our corporate media start telling you to knock it off. CNN's Howard Kurtz gave the viewers of The Situation Room a preview of what we can expect on his show this Sunday and surprise, surprise, it's a big healthy dose of false equivalencies and pretending he's concerned about that nonexistent "liberal media" being seen as carrying water for the Obama campaign.

Sorry Howie, but telling the truth about Bain Capital and actual journalism and asking Romney to let people see his tax returns is not the equivalent of Fox noise running a recording of Rev. Jeremiah Wright in an endless loop. And the only types that are going to be "concerned" about that perception are Villager hacks like yourself, the Romney campaign and the right wing media at Fox, hate talk radio, right wing blogs and a whole bunch of outlets that are going to do their best to give cover to Mitt Romney, as you just did here.

Kurtz also throws out that right-wing canard that President Obama wasn't scrutinized by the press when he ran against Hillary Clinton in the primary last time around. I think Howie's been spending too much time paling around with Sean Hannity, because that's the type of crap we hear on his show night after night on Fox.

Lauren Ashburn, who appeared with Kurtz is exactly right, and it's the Romney campaign's fault for not seeing that this was going to be coming and being better prepared for how to deal with questions about his time at Bain. You know Kurtz is over the top when even Wolf Blitzer is telling him he's surprised by what he's saying and had to point out to him that if you're going to run for President, everything's fair game and Romney's using his business background as his "credential for running and saying he's going to fix the economy," not that it made most of the rest of this segment and Blitzer's comments any less hackish as well.

All of them poo-pooed the Romney's obvious race baiting at the NAACP, calling it a "conspiracy theory." Yeah, that's a "conspiracy theory" just like The Southern Strategy is a conspiracy theory, or in other words, it's not. Republicans have been race baiting to win elections for ages now, whether any of these birds wants to admit it or not.

Transcript below the fold.

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The Boston Globe's Christopher Rowland sat down with Rachel Maddow Thursday evening to discuss his recent article on Mitt Romney's time at Bain Capital which has been the latest source of controversy this week over when Mitt Romney actually retired from Bain and what role he still played there after he left to run the Olympics in 1999.

As Mediaite reported, Rowland is standing by those claims: Boston Globe Journalist Defends Report On Romney-Bain Capital Ties To Rachel Maddow:

Rowland explained that in spite of Romney using a claim that he left Bain in 1999 as a “line of defense” and a major talking point, the documents uncovered show he still had executive ties to Bain in the subsequent three years. He made it clear the report wasn’t trying to say he was in the boardroom every single day in the next three years playing an active role in decisions, but the papers show he still had “oversight responsibility.”

Maddow asked him if it’s commonplace or “legally sound” for someone who has departed a company to still be referred to in legal paperwork as still holding a position of power in the company. Rowland pointed to experts who have said it isn’t exactly “kosher.” He added that the Romney camp has tried to explain the documents were something akin to “legacy filings,” but given that new partnerships were being created at Bain up until 2002, Roland doubted this was the case.

Romney’s campaign, of course, has heavily objected to the Globe story and demanded an apology for implying Romney was directly managing things at Bain after 1999, which they argued wasn’t the case. Maddow read out the explanation to Rowland and asked him if that was alleged at any point. Rowland explained the report simply wanted to present the facts of the situation.

“Our story was really limited to looking at the discrepancies and the contradictions in the paperwork. So if you look at what the SEC filings show, that Bain on paper was calling Mitt Romney their president and their leader and chief executive after 1999 up until 2002… It’s really difficult for most laymen and most people in the political sphere as well to understand how both these things can be true.”

Brian Beutler has an op-ed over at TPM which gets to the heart of Romney campaign's arguments about whether he should be held responsible for what happened at Bain after he left to run the Olympics as well: Cutting Through The Bain Bamboozlement:

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As Think Progress noted today, the one thing the Romney campaign has been really good at is projecting their worst attributes onto President Obama, and we got another dose of that this Tuesday on Andrea Mitchell's show on MSNBC, where she let Romney surrogate, John Sununu walk all over her and tell lies about the stimulus money going to companies that did work overseas:

Andrea Mitchell Struggles To Respond To Claim Obama Outsourced Jobs Via Stimulus:

MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell struggles in her attempt to respond to a charge by guest John Sununu that President Obama is the job outsourcer, not Mitt Romney.

Andrea Mitchell, MSNBC: Isn't it a winning issue for the White House, fundamentally, granted that the PolitiFact folks and the Washington Post pointing out that the President's campaign ad on that issue had a lot of questions and a lot of questionable attacks?

John Sununu: But they said it was wrong. A lot of questionable tactics is not right, it was wrong.

Mitchell: But the point is, that isn't Mitt Romney more vulnerable than the President on this issue because there still is -- the whole question of private equity of outsourcing. Yo could argue about when he left Bain Capital and whether he was still getting money from Bain Capital and what some of the companies in Bain were doing, companies that did end up working overseas and sending jobs overseas. But isn't it a bigger problem for Republicans than for the White House?

Sununu: No. When you've sent $500 million to Fisker and it goes to Finland immediately. When you send the solar money and it goes to Mexico. When you send the turbine money and it goes to Denmark. And we can go on all day. There is $29 billion worth of purchases that came out of this administration, outsourced jobs to foreign countries.

Mitt Romney outsourced zero --

Mitchell: Zero?

Sununu: Zero. He wasn't there when those issues came up.

Mitchell: Well, first of all the $29 billion are not all outsourced from the administration because ---

Sununu: Sure they are.

Mitchell: A lot of those jobs still remained here. There are jobs -- when you do a grant, governor, there are jobs here as well as overseas.

Sununu: [laughing] You're struggling, Andrea. You're struggling.

Mitchell: First of all, these are competing claims and we will get back to you with all of the numbers.

As the Think Progress post linked above noted, Sununu's claims have already been debunked and surprise, surprise, he was reading off a list from an Americans for Prosperity ad buy: FACT CHECK: Americans For Prosperity Announces $6.1 Million Ad Buy To Push Totally False Green Jobs Claims:

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When asked why the Republicans' presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney was having a bit of trouble with the voters out there and why he might look just slightly out of touch to a lot of people he's supposed to be representing, Fox regular Charles Krauthammer responded by seeing how many lies he could pack in to his minute and a half response to guest host John Roberts.

How many lies did Krauthammer just tell here?

ROBERTS: You, know Charles, Romney was handed a home run ball, right there, straight across the plate today, right in the sweet spot. He hit the ball pretty hard, but for some reason, he cannot get the type of traction he needs to on the economy to make it stick to President Obama, and raise his profile. Why?

KRAUTHAMMER: It's I think incomprehensible. This is the one big issue, it's the one issue that affects everybody, it's number one on people's list and he's got all the arguments. Ironically what's happening is in states like Ohio, the President is running an ad campaign, which talks about Romney at Bain being an outsourcer in chief. The implication is, and it's a clever one, it's actually working in the polls, that somehow this minor employer, Bain Capital, headed by Romney, operating more than ten years ago, because of its outsourcing, is somehow responsible for the unemployment and the misery of people today.

Where as it's quite obvious that the economy has been in the hands of Obama for three and a half years, spending a trillion dollars, increasing our debt by five trillion dollars and getting us nowhere. He promised in fact at the time that our unemployment rate today would be 5.6 percent. It's at 8.2.

And Romney's inability to bring home the argument that it's that that's responsible and not, you know, the crisis in Europe, the tsunami in Japan, who knows, earth quakes and tsunamis all over the world, and the outsourcing by Romney in the 1990's is simply incomprehensible. If you can't make the argument he doesn't deserve to win the election.

I caught a few. Feel free to help me out with any I missed in the comments section. One, no one in the Obama campaign is claiming that Mitt Romney and Bain are personally or solely responsible for the unemployment numbers today. They are claiming that the practices they employed which have been used by so many other firms as well are a part of the reason for that misery, and that it calls into question Romney's claim that he was a "job creator."

The economy has not "solely" been in the hands of President Obama for the last three and a half years and Republican governors who are laying off public sector workers, busting unions and giving tax breaks to corporations are responsible for our economy, along with the Republicans in Congress who have refused to go along with anything the President has tried to do which would create jobs.

The President's staff believed unemployment would be lower than it is now, but that was before they realized just how badly the economy had fallen off a cliff, thanks to Krauthammer's buddy, he that shall never have his name spoken, George W. Bush.

And speaking of Bush, that deficit he's complaining about is primarily due to Bush's policies, and not Obama's. And sorry Charles, but the stimulus spending worked and brought us back off of that cliff Bush left us hanging on when he left office, despite the fact that conservatives forced it to be watered down.

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I caught this segment with MSNBC's Chuck Todd this Thursday morning and almost thought I was listening to a segment on Fox, because they've generally been the ones pushing this Washington Post story and carrying water for the Romney campaign, pretending that he wasn't still at the helm at Bain while they were shipping jobs overseas.

Karoli already broke this down for us here: Romney's Desperate Need for Counterspin Captures FactCheck.org. Never mind as Karoli explained in her post, and Stephanie Cutter in the clip above, that there is ample evidence that Mitt Romney was still at Bain Capital and the ads the Obama campaign has been running are factual -- Chuck Todd was going to badger her about whether or not they should be taking the ads down or not.

And there is absolutely no comparison between the two campaigns when it comes to the amount of lying they've been doing. As Blue Texan reminded us this week in his post on Ann Romney carping about negative campaigning, Steve Benen has been attempting to keep track of Romney's lies, and the list is so long it makes your head hurt. The latest edition is here: Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity, Vol. XXIV.