It’s why Mitt Romney didn’t beat Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate race in 1994.

In 2012, if nothing else does, it will keep him away from the White House.

“It” is Mitt Romney’s real track record as a “businessman.”

Read on, via Josh Kosman at the New York Post:

Romney’s past is more a working class zero

… Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, bought companies and often increased short-term earnings so those businesses could then borrow enormous amounts of money. That borrowed money was used to pay Bain dividends. Then those businesses needed to maintain that high level of earnings to pay their debts.

A lot of them couldn’t “maintain that high level of earnings.” When they didn’t, they were cast aside — not because they weren’t viable businesses, but because they couldn’t withstand how Bain bled them dry:

… Bain and Goldman Sachs, for example, put $85 million down in a $415 million 1994 leveraged buyout of Baxter International’s medical testing division (renamed Dade Behring), which sold machines and reagents to labs.

… In August 2002, Dade filed for bankruptcy.

This was not an isolated case.

• Bain in 1988 put $5 million down to buy Stage Stores, and in the mid-’90s took it public, collecting $100 million from stock offerings. Stage filed for bankruptcy in 2000.
• Bain in 1992 bought American Pad & Paper (AMPAD), investing $5 million, and collected $100 million from dividends. The business filed for bankruptcy in 2000.
• Bain in 1993 invested $60 million when buying GS Industries, and received $65 million from dividends. GS filed for bankruptcy in 2001.
• Bain in 1997 invested $46 million when buying Details, and made $93 million from stock offerings. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2003.

Romney’s Bain invested 22 percent of the money it raised from 1987-95 in these five businesses, making a $578 million profit.

What Bain practiced in these instances wasn’t capitalism. In these cases, Bain acted as a late 20th century pack of robber barons. Mitt Romney was a lead robber.

Add this to the reasons Mitt Romney can’t win, shouldn’t win, and does not deserve to win.

If Mitt Romney prevails in the 2012 primaries, the establishment press will love him to death … until mid-September 2012.

If GOP primary voters are crazy enough to ignore all of the reasons why Mitt Romney is unfit and hand him the nomination, the press will nail Romney with the business deals described above. Then it will be curtains.

Just like with Ted Kennedy in 1994.

Write it down.

Gateway Pundit: “Tea Party Movement Brings in 15,000 Protesters to Madison With 24 Hour Notice, Embarrassing Left” — “It was an amazing turnout considering the Saturday rally was only announced on Friday morning. Oh… And we paid our own way.”

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A lot is being written about doctors writing up phony excuses for teachers who were absent from school. This is the kind of thing with the potential to resonate very negatively with the general public.

A small coverage sample: Althouse, Rebel Pundit, Instapundit, MacIver Institute (“Another woman, who wished to remain anonymous, said they were handing out excuses like they were leaflets”), and FreeRepublic (with visual evidence), Gateway Pundit (with video evidence), Charlie Martin, Big Gov, Big Gov again (“Doctors Give Andrew Breitbart a ‘Sick’ Note”), Doug Ross, and Pundit Press (“Physicians Betraying Their Oath and Their Professionalism!”).

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Michelle Malkin, as expected, had great coverage yesterday, and had this tease at the end:

You know who’s seeing red? Working parents who have to pay for child care because of illegal teachers’ strike.

I’m hearing class-action lawsuits to recoup those costs may be in the works.

They should be.

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Sarah Palin (paragraph break added by me):

Union Brothers and Sisters: Seize Opportunity to Show True Solidarity

… I am a friend to hard working union members and to teachers. I come from a family of teachers; my grandparents, parents, brother, sister, aunt, and other relatives worked, or still work, in education. My own children attend public schools. I greatly admire good teachers and will always speak up in defense of the teaching profession. But Wisconsin teacher unions do themselves no favor by closing down classrooms and abandoning children’s needs in protest against the sort of belt-tightening that people everywhere are going through.

Union brothers and sisters: this is the wrong fight at the wrong time. Solidarity doesn’t mean making Wisconsin taxpayers pay for benefits that are not sustainable and affordable at a time when many of these taxpayers struggle to hold on to their own jobs and homes. Real solidarity means everyone being willing to sacrifice and carry our share of the burden.

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Patrick McIlheran notes how FDR felt about public-sector unions. On Friday, I wrote that I thought it was clever triangulation by FDR. But McIlheran has compelling evidence that it was a position of the vast majority of Democrats until the late 1950s at least.

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Pelosi Backs Wisconsin Protesters. First Jesse Jackson, now Nancy Pelosi. This is Scott Walker’s dream come true.

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Best places to keep current: Drudge, Memeorandum.

They’re the ones who fired her, “The Great One” notes (HT Rebel Pundit):

Discovery in this one should be fun. Please … let it be videotaped.

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Previous Related Posts:

• Jan. 2 — 2010 a Banner Year for MSM’s Winston Smiths and Their Ministries of Mistruth (accurately describes Sherrod as having received “the free press ride of the year”)
• August 7, 2010 — Zombie’s ‘Slave Labor Conditions at Shirley Sherrod’s Farm?’
• August 5 — The Sherrods’ New Communities 1960s and 1970s Plantation
• July 26 — AmSpec’s Jeffrey Lord: ‘Sherrod Story False’ (Update: The Definition of ‘Lynch’)
• July 26 — Charles Sherrod Explains It All (Sort of)
• July 23 — Shirley Sherrod’s Race-Based Grievance-Mongering: Right at Home With Team Obama
• July 22 — Shirley Sherrod’s Disappearing Act: Not So Fast
• July 20 — At WEOZ — ‘Shirley Sherrod’s Disappearing Act: Not So Fast’
• July 19 — Racism on Display at the NAACP (Update: Shirley Sherrod Resigns, Then Gets an Apology From Those Who Fired Her)

The horror perpetrated on farmers by envirozealots in California’s Central Valley during the past few years has been inexcusable.

It also turns out that the entire premise for the water cutoffs that have occurred is bogus.

Thank goodness there are folks like the editorialists at Investors Business Daily who can boil it down. Read the whole thing. Here are a few excerpts:

Consequences: The green lobby assured everyone it knew what it was doing when it got a judge to cut water to Central Valley farmers to save the delta smelt. But while the Valley economy is now ruined, it hasn’t helped the smelt.

… Back in 2007, they convinced federal Judge Oliver Wanger to rule that the Endangered Species Act gave the federal government the right to cut water to thousands of farmers in California’s Central Valley to protect a 3-inch baitfish called the delta smelt.

That ruling turned many of the Valley’s prized vineyards and almond groves into wastelands. Jobs were lost, family farms were shut, fields went fallow and food prices rose.

But there’s been just one problem with this overreaching of the law: Cutting off water didn’t save the smelt.

A draft of a new study from the Delta Stewardship Council shows the water cutoffs had no effect on the smelt. The smelt remains endangered even as farmers have been punished with a policy that cut off as much as 90% of their water.

“Environmentalists claimed the sky was falling in Delta, and the only way to save smelt was to flush more fresh water to the ocean,” said Andrew House, spokesman for Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif. “So they embarked upon a narrow path of diverting water from (San Joaquin Valley) farmers by using science to confirm their predetermined assessment of what was going on.”

But it didn’t work. Similar evidence is now coming out from the Pacific Northwest stating that shutting down the logging industry never did save the spotted owl.

… This was never about science anyway. “It was … about re-engineering the development of California, particularly the San Joaquin Valley,” said House. “They don’t think the west side should be farmed at all, they want it removed from production, gone to a natural state, re-engineered as a socialist Utopia.”

This should be a national scandal that discredit those who use the Endangered Species Act as a dishonest club to shut down commerce — which, as House noted, is the real goal.

From Vatican City:

Feb 10, 2011 / 03:00 pm

The vitality of the Church depends on individual Catholics fostering vocations in their homes and parishes, the Pope says in his annual message for the May 15 World Day of Prayer for Vocations.

“It is essential that every local Church become more sensitive and attentive to the pastoral care of vocations,” the Pope writes in his new statement issued by the Vatican on Feb. 10.

He speaks of the role of the Church in helping children and young people to grow in a real friendship with Jesus, to increase their familiarity with the Scriptures, to understand the truth of his message and to be generous in creating relationships with others.

The theme of this year’s prayer for vocations day is “Proposing Vocations in the Local Church.” The Pope says this “means having the courage, through an attentive and suitable concern for vocations, to point out this challenging way of following Christ which, because it is so rich in meaning, is capable of engaging the whole of one’s life.”

Answering Jesus’ call of “Follow me!” is “no less challenging” today than it was for the disciples 2,000 years ago, says the Pope.

“It means learning to keep our gaze fixed on Jesus, growing close to him, listening to his word and encountering him in the sacraments” and “learning to conform our will to his.”

The Church is called to protect and love the gift of God’s call to people to share in his mission and serve as ordained ministers and consecrated religious, he says.

“Particularly in these times, when the voice of the Lord seems to be drowned out by ‘other voices’ and his invitation to follow him by the gift of one’s own life may seem too difficult, every Christian community, every member of the Church, needs to consciously feel responsible for promoting vocations.”

According to a report from the U.S. bishops, there are currently 5,131 men enrolled in the U.S. seminaries. The number is up from 4,973 in 2009. …

Go here for the rest of the story.