ROMNEY THE LIAR'S FORGOTTEN SCANDALS

As is the case with SO MANY Republicans and right-wingers in general, the facade of moral rectitude they put up is a pose, a lie, an attempt to gull people into seeing these wingers as ethical models for others. But we are reminded here  that Willard's facade is hiding a particularly corrupt individual. Items:

Profiting From 9/11

Romney’s involvement with an insurance startup called Endurance Specialty Holdings has largely been forgotten among the wave of questionable business deals that have come to light during the presidential campaign.

Endurance Specialty Holdings was designed to purchase debt from insurance companies that suffered huge losses in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. According to a report by Politicker’s Hunter Walker, Romney was invested in the company through Golden Gate Capital — a private equity firm started by one of his former colleagues at Bain Capital — and CCG Investment Fund, LP. By the end of 2003, Endurance Specialty Holdings was reporting a net income of over $263.4 million.

Sensitive to charges that he had profited from the 9/11 tragedy, the Romney campaign insisted that the Republican nominee had no control over his investments, as they were managed by a blind trust — an institution that Romney himself famously described as an “age-old ruse.”

Profiting From Disposal Of Aborted Fetuses

Another of Romney’s questionable Bain deals that has gone underreported is the firm’s profitable investment in the medical waste disposal firm Stericycle. Bain Capital sank $75 million into the company in 1999 — an odd investment for a staunchly anti-abortion Republican to make. After all, Stericyle has long been attacked by right-wing groups for disposing of aborted fetuses.

The investment raises serious doubts about Romney’s stated timeline of his exit from Bain Capital. Before Mother Jones’ David Corn broke the Stericycle story, Romney claimed that he had fully left Bain in February of 1999. The SEC documentation of the Stericycle deal proved that wrong, however, prompting Romney surrogates to explain that he had “retroactively retired” from the company in 2002.

Had the story garnered more attention, it could have irreversibly damaged Romney’s credibility regarding his business record.

Still Hiding Those Tax Returns (And That Over-stuffed IRA?)

The broader story of Romney’s financial history has gone largely unquestioned since he released two years of tax returns and a summary of tax rates from the previous 20 years in late September. The media is wrong to let Romney off the hook on this topic, however: voters still don’t know what rates Romney paid from 1990-2009 (if he paid any taxes at all,) or how his IRA grew to such massive proportions, among many other unanswered questions.

Read them all--and then rededicate yourself to GETTING OUT THE VOTE AGAINST WILLARD.

(HT: D)