Tagg, You're It.

Misha Siegfried Band at Wild Tymes

Well, this was a big weekend. The Misha Siegfried Band rolled in Saturday in time for another gig at Wild Tymes in downtown Saint Paul. All the best people were there….family, friends, total strangers…and half a wedding party in tuxedos and boutonnieres. It was a great gig, they sounded so on top of the music, and what may have been  bit rough over the summer was smooooooth. They bunked over at the Junior Son and Spouse house, but band breakfast was here. They wanted bagels and lox, so they got bagels and lox. And a huge spinach and Gruyere frittata. And a giant apple crisp. Oh, and doughnuts. You can't have band breakfast without doughnuts. I was too busy to take pictures…but let’s just say there isn’t even the tiniest scrap of lox or smoked trout for the lone remaining bagel. But Keyboard Dan tickled our piano for bit and having live music in the house was totally cool. But I digress.

I waltzed in from the gig at about 1:30 a.m. and I still had a fair amount of prep work to do. I was so wired it didn’t much matter. However, my 3 a.m. Zen floor washing experience was rudely disturbed when I happened to catch  a news flash on my computer: Tagg Romney bought a voting machine company????

Now, I was immediately dubious. I mean, how stupid do these people have to be? Haven’t they ever heard of morit ayin….the reality of doing something that is technically okay but just looks totally wrong. Like a Romney owning a voting machine company. It’s gonna raise a lot of questions.

Tagg Romney

Being the naturally suspicious sort, I stopped washing the floor and started looking for supporting material on this one. Lots of left wing websites and news sources bring it up, but other than a teeny tiny article in The Cleveland Leader, a paper that bills itself as “Greater Cleveland’s Premier Independent News Source,” I could find nothing in the major news organs. It was, however, interesting to read what the Cleveland Leader had to say on the subject, which was very little. Instead, the referenced left leaning PoliticolNews.com:

As Lee Fang points out in his detailed analysis of the Romney investments

“Many of these private equity–owned companies rely on federal and state contracts, from HIG Capital’s Hart Intercivic, a voting machine company, to EnviroFoam Technologies, a biological and chemical decontamination firm that does business with the US military and is owned by Peterson Partners, a private equity firm listed in the Solamere prospectus.”

Solarmere’s tangled web of investments now includes Hart Intercivic voting machines which will be used in Cincinnati Ohio says Truth Out which could guarantee Mitt Romney the White House.

The State of Ohio is Ground Zero for the White House, in particular Hamilton County a repeat of the George Bush election in 2004.

So I figured the next place to look was at Solarmere’s website. After all, this was Tagg’s company. Follow the link above. It’s a nice looking homepage. There are tabs: HOME/ABOUT US/TEAM/STRATEGY/CONTACT US/PARTNER LOGIN.  

Click on the ABOUT US tab.

What? It didn’t go to the next page? Did you check the other tabs? I tried it in 3 different browsers: Chrome, Firefox, and Explorer. Didn’t work in any of them.  

So, I wondered if the same thing would happen at Bain Capital. Now there’s an interesting website.  There are 165 pictures on  their “team” page, and not a single African American face in the lot. So I counted…and here’s how it turned out:

Does anyone else see this as exceptionally weird?

Yeah, yeah, Romney’s no longer involved with  Bain, but he remains its founder and these numbers reflect a certain mind set. Yeah, yeah, they do have offices in Mumbai, Tokyo, and Hong Kong as well as Boston and London. Still, out of 165 principals in that firm, not a single black person? And just to make sure this is not some kind of aberration, let me mention there is not a single Hispanic surname, either.

Somehow, I don’t think this is okay. I’m not talking about affirmative action here, I’m saying that it’s just too high a number of team members not to have at least a couple of  members from American’s two largest minorities in that mix.

Reflecting on the binder debacle of the last debate, I have to wonder if there is a pattern here. It's not exactly one of inclusion. If Bain Capital doesn’t want to be diverse, that’s their business, but if Mitt Romney wants to be president of this country, his history on the subject is our business since he tells us it's his business acumen that makes him qualified for the post. We have no history with which to measure his ability to work and play well with others different from himself...even unto personal plumbing. The whole binder story sets up a failure of inclusion which would not be a positive attribute for this nation.

But getting back to the Tagg and the voting machines. Like his father’s problem with minorities, it doesn’t matter whether or not he really owns a company that supplies voting machines to Ohio. Regardless, it just looks wrong.

And y’know…there’s just too much wrong history for We, The People, to just ignore it. 

Wifely Person's Tip o'The Week

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Go visit. 

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