THINK PROGRESS: Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney likes to sing about America the beautiful, but he mainly seems interested in mining it. In an interview with the editorial board of the Reno Gazette-Journal last night, Mitt Romney expressed his ignorance of why the United States owns and manages approximately 80 percent of Nevada‘s land, most of it uninhabitable mountains and desert. In response to a question about whether he would sell public lands back to the state, Romney stated that that “I haven’t studied it, what the purpose is of the land”: