UPDATE: BREAKING!
VANITY FAIR INVESTIGATES ROMNEY’S OFFSHORE ACCOUNTS
Where the Money Lives
On Romney’s mysterious Bermuda corporation: “To give but one example, there is a Bermuda-based entity called Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., which has been described in securities filings as ‘a Bermuda corporation wholly owned by W. Mitt Romney.’… Romney failed to list this entity on several financial disclosures, even though such a closely held entity would not qualify as an “excepted investment fund” that would not need to be on his disclosure forms. He finally included it on his 2010 tax return. Even after examining that return, we have no idea what is in this company, but it could be valuable, meaning that it is possible Romney’s wealth is even greater than previous estimates. While the Romneys’ spokespeople insist that the couple has paid all the taxes required by law, investments in tax havens such as Bermuda raise many questions, because they are in ‘jurisdictions where there is virtually no tax and virtually no compliance,’ as one Miami-based offshore lawyer put it.”
On Romney’s Cayman Islands funds: “Because of his retirement deal with Bain Capital, his finances are still deeply entangled with the private-equity firm that he founded and spun off from Bain and Co. in 1984. Though he left the firm in 1999, Romney has continued to receive large payments from it—in early June he revealed more than $2 million in new Bain income. The firm today has at least 138 funds organized in the Cayman Islands, and Romney himself has personal interests in at least 12, worth as much as $30 million, hidden behind controversial confidentiality disclaimers. Again, the Romney campaign insists he saves no tax by using them, but there is no way to check this.”
On Romney’s accounts in foreign tax havens, including his Swiss bank account:“These, plus the mandatory financial disclosures filed with the Office of Government Ethics and released last August, raise many questions. A full 55 pages in his 2010 return are devoted to reporting his transactions with foreign entities… The media soon noticed Romney’s familiarity with foreign tax havens. A $3 million Swiss bank account appeared in the 2010 returns, then winked out of existence in 2011 after the trustee closed it.”
On who Romney raised capital from for Bain’s first fund: “Private equity is one channel for this secrecy-shrouded foreign money to enter the United States, and a filing for Mitt Romney’s first $37 million Bain Capital Fund, of 1984, provides a rare window into this. One foreign investor, of $2 million, was the newspaper tycoon, tax evader, and fraudster Robert Maxwell, who fell from his yacht, and drowned, off of the Canary Islands in 1991 in strange circumstances, after looting his company’s pension fund. The Bain filing also names Eduardo Poma, a member of one of the ‘14 families’ oligarchy that has controlled most of El Salvador’s wealth for decades; oddly, Poma is listed as sharing a Miami address with two anonymous companies that invested $1.5 million between them. The filings also show a Geneva-based trustee overseeing a trust that invested $2.5 million, a Bahamas corporation that put in $3 million, and three corporations in the tax haven of Panama, historically a favored destination for Latin-American dirty money—‘one of the filthiest money-laundering sinks in the world,’ as a U.S. Customs official once put it. Bain Capital has said it did everything required by the U.S. government to check that the investors were not associated with unsavory interests. U.S. law doesn’t require Bain to enforce the tax laws of its investors’ home countries, but the presence of Swiss trustees, Bahamas trusts, and Panama corporations would raise red flags with any tax authority.”
On the special “carried interest” tax treatment Romney receives, allowing him to pay a lower rate than ordinary Americans: “Romney’s personal tax rate is a particular point of interest. In 2010 and 2011, Mitt and Ann paid $6.2 million in federal tax on $42.5 million in income, for an average tax rate just shy of 15 percent, substantially less than what most middle-income Americans pay. Romney manages this low rate because he takes his payments from Bain Capital as investment income, which is taxed at a maximum 15 percent, instead of the 35 percent he would pay on ‘ordinary’ income, such as salaries and wages.
Many tax experts argue that the form of remuneration he receives, known as carried interest, is really just a fee charged by investment managers, so it should instead be taxed at the 35 percent rate. Lee Sheppard, a contributing editor at the trade publication Tax Notes, whose often controversial articles are read widely by tax professionals… ‘Romney is the poster boy, the best argument, for taxing this profit share as ordinary income,’ says Sheppard.”
On the legality of it all: “The assertion that he broke no laws is widely accepted. But it is worth asking if it is actually true. The answer, in fact, isn’t straightforward. Romney, like the superhero who whirls and backflips unscathed through a web of laser beams while everyone else gets zapped, is certainly a remarkable financial acrobat. But careful analysis of his financial and business affairs also reveals a man who, like some other Wall Street titans, seems comfortable striding into some fuzzy gray zones.”
Hello, folks! More NINA
AIN’T GOT NO… I’VE GOT LIFE
Romney’s Message Gets Messier, Obama’s Simpler
By Francis Wilkinson Jul 3, 2012 1:14 PM CT
In this year’s presidential campaign, Mitt Romney has always had the easier argument: “The economy stinks, so vote for the new guy.”
At the moment, he’s not making that case. Instead, in addition to juggling questions about health care, the Romney campaign is running an ad accusing President Barack Obama of telling “vicious lies” about Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital.
Romney’s rhetorical sweet spot is probably right about here: “I don’t think the president is a bad guy,” he told a crowd in Connecticut. “I just think his political philosophy is entirely wrong and doesn’t work for the American people.” In other words, it’s OK to like Obama, but he’s not someone you want presiding over the world’s largest economy.
The road from “my opponent’s not a bad guy” to “actually, he’s a vicious liar” is not one traveled by campaigns on the upswing. Romney is off track — either because he’s overreacting to Democratic attacks on Bain or because those attacks are hurting him. At least one recent poll suggests the latter.
While Romney’s simple message (the economy stinks) has grown messier (never mind that health care thing, and besides, that guy’s a liar!), Obama’s is looking less complex.
Obama’s argument for his presidency requires caveats and extended explanations about the dire situation he inherited, the obstructionism he’s faced, blah, blah, blah. It’s not surprising that his campaign prefers something pithier. A rough distillation: My opponent belongs to a class of super-wealthy economic predators without empathy for the middle class.
Obama’s campaign seems to have a pretty straightforward strategy. First, use television spending and super-PAC allies to undermine Romney — insert Bain ad here — among working-class whites in swing states. Then, use technology to identify nonwhite and youthful voters and propel them to the polls.
Even if Obama maintains traction on the first part of his formula — and what campaign doesn’t backslide now and then? — we won’t know how he fares on Phase Two until Nov. 6. At the moment, however, his approach seems streamlined, while Romney’s message has grown unwieldy.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-03/romney-s-message-gets-messier-obama-s-simpler.html
Will Romney Pretend to Have a Health Plan?
By Jonathan Chait
The health-care ruling has exposed a delicate dance within the Republican Party. Romney does not want to run on the health-care issue. To the extent that he wants to invoke the issue, it’s to flay Obama for having focused on it as a distraction from the economy, not as an ideological crusade against Big Government. But conservative activists want to be sure that, if Romney wins, he will commit his political capital to repealing the Affordable Care Act. Thus their current focus on demanding that Romney pledge to repeal the law (see Avik Roy, Keith Hennessey, Rich Lowry, and David Brooks, among many others).
The interesting thing about these conservatives’ arguments is that they are all committed, to varying degrees, to upholding the pretense that the Republican Party really wants to impose a more technocratically sound version of health-care reform. To be sure, they insist they are advocating a vastly different philosophical vision centered around self-empowerment and free markets and other wonderful things. But all of them say, or imply, that they share the basic goals of the Affordable Care Act, which is to make coverage available to all Americans and to control cost inflation. So, for instance, Lowry argues, “The two central selling points of the law — insuring millions more people and keeping people with pre-existing conditions from getting locked out of insurance — can be addressed with policies that are cheaper and less disruptive (a tax credit for purchase of insurance and high-risk pools, respectively).”
I see two problems with this hopeful scenario, both fatal.
The first is that the mythical Republican reform plan is really hard to pass. Conservatives may think they have a cheaper way to fix the system, but it still costs money. And Republicans have never appropriated any money to cover the uninsured. Indeed, all their plans divert money that already exists to cover people who need health care for other purposes. Conservatives hopefully propose turning the health-care tax deduction into a more progressive tax credit. Great idea! Except the plans put forward by Romney and Paul Ryan plow the savings from eliminating that tax deduction back into lower tax rates. And it leaves no budgetary provision for high-risk pools or any other mechanism to subsidize coverage for the poor and sick.
Now, you could suppose that maybe this is all one giant oversight. Republicans failed to craft an alternative plan during the health-care debate, then voted to just straight repeal Obamacare with no replacement, then voted for a budget that just straight repeals Obamacare with no replacement, but when they have power, then they’ll really come up with a plan.
But where is the evidence that they have any desire to do so? Sunday, the two most powerful Republicans in Congress appeared on interview shows and were asked what they plan to do for the uninsured. Mitch McConnell hilariously danced and weaved, admitting that covering the uninsured is “not the issue”:
……………………………………………….
If Republicans really wanted to replace Obamacare with some more “market-friendly” alternative, then there’s a simple way they could go about it. They could promise to repeal the law only if they packaged the repeal with a replacement that did not increase the number of uninsured. But they’ll never do that, because the magic, cheaper free-market alternative does not exist, and the GOP has no interest in diverting resources to cover the poor and sick.
Hennessey, who lays out the most specific vision for repealing Obamacare, asserts, “Repeal and replacement should be separate legislative efforts.” This means, of course, that the actual plan is first to get rid of Obamacare, then pretend to work on a replacement before eventually discovering that it’s expensive and unpopular. Oh well. The only interesting question here on any level is why so many conservatives feel bound to pretend that the Republicans really are going to formulate some other plan to care for the poor and sick.
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/07/will-romney-pretend-to-have-a-health-plan.html
Netflix can be dangerous.
Just finished watching the first seasons of Downton Abbey and the new Sherlock Holmes…LOVE both of them.
LOL I just got through watching my very first episode of Mad Men. First season. It’s going to be an interesting Summer!
How Obama is Using Karl Rove’s Election Strategy to Batter Romney
Categories: Barack Obama, Karl Rove, MItt Romney, Original Opinion, Presidential elections
July 02,2012
Karl Rove: The mastermind behind Obama’s re-election strategy?
By Ben Cohen: Karl Rove took one of the least intellectually curious and incapable candidates in US history to two victories in Presidential elections – an extraordinary feat that has sealed his reputation as one of America’s greatest political strategists. Rove used a simple formula to propel George W. Bush into the White House and keep him there for 8 years, and one that President Obama seems to be adopting as he fights to keep his Presidency.
Rove relied on the following four principles to guide Bush’s strategy in 2000 and 2004:
1. Fight from the base
2. Control the message
3. Set the agenda
4. Never admit mistakes
………………………………………
Bush’s Presidential campaigns were far from perfect, but they focused on long term principles rather than short term maneuvering. It worked, and Rove’s playbook deserved considerable recognition.
Other than the fourth principle, President Obama is following Rove’s election guidelines perfectly.
In 2008, Obama made a wise decision to tout his anti war record when facing off against Hillary Clinton and John Edwards – both of whom had voted from the Iraq war. This appealed to younger generations and the Democratic base, all whom felt extreme anger about the war and how it had been handled. Obama attracted a record number of young voters and brought out the base in droves. In 2012, Obama is again reaching out to his base by highlighting health care and immigration reform and his position on gay marriage.
In 2012 Obama is now expertly controlling the message – he has his party lined up behind him repeating talking points with military precision. After the Supreme Court ruling on health care, Democratic leaders came out and repeated the President’s line virtually word for word. When Newark Mayor Cory Booker criticized Obama on his ads attacking Romney for his record at Bain capital, he was slapped down from every corner of the party until he stepped back into line (which he did very, very quickly). The message is now clear – follow the talking points, or risk alienation from the party.
Most importantly, Obama is setting the agenda. He did this reasonably well in 2008, but spent a lot of time deflecting the relentless attacks form the Clinton camp. Obama has clearly learned from his mistakes and is now continually forcing Romney to react to his moves, and not the other way around. This is coming as a bit of a surprise to the Republicans as they have spent over 3 years bashing Obama without having to play defense. Obama has set the terms of debate when it comes to the economy, immigration, health care reform and gay marriage by stating a clear position that is not open to interpretation, and he is hammering Romney for his inability to speak clearly on them. Here was Obama on Romney’s track record at Bain Capital last week:
Just last week, it was reported that Governor Romney’s old firm owned companies that were ‘pioneers’ — this is not my phrase, but how it was described in the report — ‘pioneers’ in the business of outsourcing American jobs to places like China and India. Yesterday, his advisers tried to clear this up by telling us that there was a difference between ‘outsourcing’ and ‘offshoring.’ Seriously. You can’t make that up.
The theme is consistent: Obama takes a stance, while Romney flip flops. The immigration ruling in Arizona and the decision to grant 800,000 young people a path to citizenship was also another example of Obama’s decisiveness. Obama took the initiative and made his position clear, while Romney waited for opinion polls to make his mind up.
Obama is not following the fourth of Rove’s principles – to never admit mistakes – because so far, he hasn’t had to. Bush made mistakes and never learned from them, whereas Obama clearly has. And there’s a good argument to be made that this makes Obama look even more powerful. He spent much of his first term allowing Republicans to dictate the agenda and set the terms of debate, but no longer. The reversal is noticeable, and impressive.
As Obama and his team go about defining the election, he won’t have to talk about mistakes he has made, because Romney will be too busy defending his.
Somewhere deep inside Karl Rove’s murky heart, he must be impressed with the 2012 version Barack Obama. He’s turned into a master strategist using Rove’s own playbook, and is beating his candidate to the punch every time.
http://thedailybanter.com/2012/07/how-obama-is-using-karl-roves-election-strategy-to-batter-romney/
Chris Christie Vetoes Cancer Screenings
Posted on 07/03/2012 at 7:00 pm by JM Ashby
What War on Women?
Just before the midnight deadline on July 1st, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie vetoed $7.5 million in family planning funding which would have funded mammograms, pap smears, cancer screenings, and birth control.
It wouldn’t have funded abortions, and it wouldn’t have forced the state budget into the red. He vetoed it just because.
Democrats in the state had tried to restore money for social services but Christie wasn’t having it. All said he vetoed $7.5 million into women’s clinics, refused to return $66 million in energy tax revenue to cities, and vetoed a proposal to beef up tax credits for the working poor after slashing them previously in 2010.
As Robin Marty reports, the $7.5 million proposed would have come from the over $500 million budget surplus the state is projected to have. Those funds will instead go to increase the state’s cash reserves.
Christie offered the following response
The budget I signed reverses irresponsible funding decisions, establishes funding levels based on realistic and responsible revenue assumptions and increases our surplus. I am unwilling to surrender the gains we have made to establish fiscal responsibility in the state budget.
“I am unwilling to surrender the gains we have made to establish fiscal responsibility in the state budget.”
Translation: I am willing to surrender the health of others to further my political career.
The state is expecting a $500 million budget surplus thanks in part to increased taxes on the working poor, but Christie refused to sign only $7.5 million into law which would have primarily benefited the same working poor people he raised those taxes on. You know, so he can rubber stamp a $500 million surplus with his name on it. $492.5 million just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
To say that Chris Christie is a dick would be an understatement.
http://bobcesca.com/blog-archives/2012/07/chris-christie-vetoes-cancer-screenings.html
Political Animal
Blog
July 03, 2012 2:29 PM
Mississippi Law Could Lead To Abortion Policy Revolution
By Ed Kilgore
As Scott Lemieux observes at TAP today, the stakes involved in judicial review of the Mississippi law aimed at shutting down the state’s sole abortion clinic could be larger than those involving women in Mississippi alone. Since a federal judge has imposed a temporary stay on enforcement of the law pending a hearing, an appellate court will likely soon get the case, and then it could eventually make its way to the Supreme Court, since the law presents a very direct challenge to the “undue burden” standard established by the Court in Casey v. Planned Parenthood, the 1992 decision that set Roe v. Wade on a firmer foundation. And that’s where it could get dicey, as Scott explains:
To uphold Mississippi’s regulatory framework would be to effectively overrule Roe and Casey. What would happen should this case get to the Supreme Court, however, is unclear. Theoretically, there are five votes on the Supreme Court for upholding Roe v. Wade. But one of these votes, Justice Kennedy, has found only one kind of regulation (spousal notification) to be an “undue burden,” and wrote an opinion upholding a federal ban on partial birth abortions rife with the sexist assumptions of anti-choice activists
Indeed, fear of Justice Kennedy’s “evolution” on abortion policy since 1992 has played a big role in inhibiting reproductive rights advocates from challenging the rash of “fetal pain” laws being enacted in states around the country. It’s entirely possible, conversely, that one of the motives of the anti-choicers championing the Mississippi law was to generate a court challenge that could lead to a dramatic departure from Roe and Casey.
No wonder Scott says “the best-case scenario would probably be a lower appellate court decision holding the new law unconstitutional that the Court declines to review.”
And lest we forget, if there are legitimate fears the Court as currently constituted is ready to gut the right to choose, then the direction of a Court reshaped by a President Mitt Romney—who has all but promised an anti-Roe Justice—won’t be in question at all.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_07/mississippi_law_could_lead_to038334.php
July 03, 2012 3:55 PM
Good Day For Voting Rights
By Ed Kilgore
Today is turning out to be a pretty good moment for voting rights. First off, it became apparent that despite a judge’s ruling in his favor last week, Rick Scott’s voter purge allegedly aimed at non-citizens is as dead as a doornail, as The Nation’s Ari Berman explains:
Last week Florida federal district court judge Robert Hinkle ruled against the Justice Department’s motion for a temporary injunction against Florida’s voter purge. The ruling was widely portrayed as a victory for the state, by Florida Governor Rick Scott and many in the media.
Yet the ruling itself was less of an endorsement for Florida and more of a rebuke. “There were major flaws in the program,” Hinkle wrote. “The [Florida secretary of state] compiled the list in a manner certain to include a large number of citizens…The program was likely to have a discriminatory impact on new citizens.” Hinkle ruled in favor of the state “primarily because the Secretary has abandoned the program.”
In case you’ve forgotten, Florida’s voter purge was riddled with errors (“98.4% of the 2,625 people identified by the Florida SOS as ‘potential noncitizens’ remain on the rolls because the Supervisors of Elections found insufficient evidence that they were ineligible to be registered voters,” found University of Florida political science professor Daniel Smith), racially biased (minorities comprised 80 percent of the list but only 30 percent of Florida’s population) and blatantly partisan (Democrats outnumbered Republicans by two to one). That’s why Florida’s supervisors of elections overwhelmingly refused to implement the purge—which remains their position following Judge Hinkle’s ruling.
“The supervisors are where we were before—we’ve stopped the purge,” Vicki Davis, president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections, told me. “The list was much too flawed for the elections supervisors to move forward with in the same format and without backup documentation.
Meanwhile, in Michigan, Republican Gov. Rick Snyder vetoed three voter suppression measures—a voter ID bill, a citizenship affirmation requirement, and restrictions on independent groups registering voters—drafted by a GOP secretary of state and pushed through by GOP legislators, making him the second prominent member of his party in the course of a week to surprise friends and enemies alike.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_07/good_day_for_voting_rights038336.php
The story behind the semantics debate
By Steve Benen
\Tue Jul 3, 2012 3:16 PM EDT.
The Supreme Court’s decision upholding the Affordable Care Act was bound to cause extensive discussion, but the debate of the last several days has been oddly detached from what matters most.
The questions that seem to have the most relevance relate to Medicaid expansion, the future of the Commerce Clause, the positions of Republican governors, the extremism of the four dissenters, the threats to the law in 2013, etc. But the topic that’s dominating the political world is the unexpected rhetorical fight launched by Republicans: should we call the tax penalty that would apply to 1% of the population a “tax” or a “penalty”?
This morning, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus took a side, but did so in a bizarre way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SUSTAfPbaZM
For those who can’t watch clips online, Priebus told CNN, “Well, our position is the same as Mitt Romney’s position — it’s a tax.”
Oh, for crying out loud.
Look, this is, at its root, a semantics debate. Going forward, what label gets applied to this policy has no bearing on the law itself, legal or otherwise. Republicans desperately want to scream from rooftops that Democrats, by imposing this penalty on free riders, raised middle class taxes, so we’ve been subjected to five days (and counting) of an irrelevant argument.
But if we’re going to have this semantics argument, we should at least pretend reality matters. Literally just yesterday, the Romney campaign said it’s a penalty, not a tax. This morning, the chairman of the RNC told a national television audience, “[O]ur position is the same as Mitt Romney’s position — it’s a tax.” Huh?
And this disconnect is why I think the story has any salience at all. I don’t much care about the semantics, but I care quite a bit about the fact that the Republican Party and the Republican presidential nominee are, quite openly, at odds with one another over a key GOP talking point.
——————————————————————————–
TPM had a good report on the behind-the-scenes tensions today.
Republicans are bewildered by the Romney campaign’s declaration that the health care law’s individual mandate is not a tax…. Republican strategists told TPM that far from the unified voice the GOP said it would present after the Supreme Court ruling, the messaging has been chaotic, and ultimately embarrassing for Romney and the GOP. […]
“It’s a problem, I’m not going to lie,” said Hogan Gidley, a former top adviser to Rick Santorum’s campaign. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it, it’s a problem for the Republicans.”
As we discussed yesterday, this is a box the GOP can’t get out of. When it comes to attacking “Obamacare” and the mandate, there’s no getting around the fact that Mitt Romney created an identical policy in Massachusetts under the identical structure for identical reasons. If Obama raised taxes on the middle class, then Romney raised taxes on the middle class.
For the Romney campaign, that means neither did. For every other Republican, that means both did.
You can almost hear Rick Santorum whispering, “I told you so.”
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/03/12547311-the-story-behind-the-semantics-debate?lite
Republican Michigan Governor Vetoes GOP Voter Suppression Law
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder (R) bucked his fellow Republicans on Tuesday by vetoing a voter ID law crafted by GOP members of the state legislature, the Detroit Free Press reports:
Among the bills vetoed was one requiring photo ID for first voter registration or to obtain an absentee ballot, a requirement that African-American activists claimed was an attempt to deter voting by the urban poor.
Snyder said in a statement that “he appreciates the issue of ensuring voters are eligible and U.S. citizens, however this legislation could create voter confusion among absentee voters.”
(snip)
Snyder also invalidated a requirement that voters check a box on an electoral ballot or application affirming they are citizens — which could have intimidated voters who didn’t understand the question or weren’t native English speakers — as well as new restrictions and requirements on the operations of third party groups registering voters in the state.
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/07/03/510776/republican-michigan-governor-vetoes-gop-voter-suppression-law/
Snyder vetoes voting reform bills
http://www.michiganradio.org/post/snyder-vetoes-voting-reform-bills
Romney’s offshore finances draw new scrutiny
By Steve Benen
Tue Jul 3, 2012 12:40 PM EDT.
Back in January, Americans first learned something odd about Mitt Romney. The fact that he’s enormously wealthy was not new, but one of the eyebrow-raising aspects of his wealth is where he’s kept his money: the Republican nominee is the first modern candidate to stash cash in the Cayman Islands and have a Swiss bank account for no apparent reason.
Romney wasn’t exactly forthcoming with details — as his hidden tax returns help show, he’s kind of shy — and voters still don’t know much about his offshore finances.
But in a much-discussed piece for Vanity Fair, Nicholas Shaxson digs deeper into Romney’s offshore finances, which “look pretty strange for a presidential candidate.”
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/03/12545535-romneys-offshore-finances-draw-new-scrutiny?lite
Posted at 02:15 PM ET, 07/03/2012
Mitt Romney declaring `cease fire’ on health care?
By Greg Sargent
Some on the right are angry at Mitt Romney today over this National Journal report claiming that he has effectively declared a “cease fire” in the health care wars. National Journal notes that Romney’s campaign “has been giving off clear signals that it doesn’t want to make health care a major part of the election.”
“It’s becoming clear that Romney has decided to focus on the economy at the expense of everything else,” the report says.
I don’t know if this will prove to be true or not. But Romney’s discomfort on the issue is now taking on comic dimensions, and it’s worth underscoring that however unpopular Obamacare may be, it very well may be that Obama retains an advantage on health care over his rival.
Today’s Post/ABC News poll finds that just 30 percent have a favorable view of Romney’s approach to health care, versus 47 percent who have an unfavorable view of it. Obama fares better, at 45-48.
The low percentage of people viewing Romney’s approach to health care favorably is driven by the large number of people who haven’t made up their minds about it. But if Romney is really going to deemphasize health care, it’s going to get harder to win those people over on the issue. Romney has sketched out a few ideas on health reform in the past. But he seems to be mostly gambling — as he has on multiple other issues — that all he has to do is criticize Obama and pledge to move to repeal Obamacare on day one of his presidency, without offering any meaningful alternative to it, and that this will be enough.
But look at this striking number from the Post/ABC poll: Among people who see the Supreme Court ruling unfavorably, less than half, or 45 percent, view Romney’s approach in a positive light. As ABC News polling director Gary Langer put it,, even those who wanted Obamacare ruled unconstitutional are not flocking to Romney “as an alternative.”
The National Journal story says that the Romney camp is avoiding health care as an issue partly because Romney’s individual mandate makes it impossible for him to echo the GOP message that Obamacare’s mandate is a tax increase. As Evan McMorris Santoro notes, this messaging train wreck is even starting to make some GOP strategists squirm. The broader story may be that for all of Obamacare’s unpopularity with the public, Romney is proving exactly the wrong candidate to exploit it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line
Joe Walsh doesn’t want to hear about military service
By Steve Benen
Tue Jul 3, 2012 2:03 PM EDT.
A few months ago, Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Fla.) downplayed the military service and sacrifices made by his Democratic challenger, Tammy Duckworth, who lost two legs and part of an arm while serving in Iraq. “What else has she done?” Walsh asked. “Female, wounded veteran … ehhh.”
Walsh later walked that back a little, but the angrily unhinged congressman shared some additional thoughts on the subject over the weekend.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaEMevf7gKI&feature=player_embedded
For those who can’t watch clips online, here’s what Walsh told his constituents:
“Understand something about John McCain. His political advisers, day after day, had to take him and almost throw him against a wall and hit him against the head and say, “Senator, you have to let people know you served! You have to talk about what you did!” He didn’t want to do it, wouldn’t do it. Day after day they had to convince him. Finally, he talked a little bit about it, but it was very uncomfortable for him. That’s what’s so noble about our heroes.
“Now I’m running against a woman who, I mean my God, that’s all she talks about. Our true heroes, it’s the last thing in the world they talk about. That’s why we’re so indebted and in awe of what they have done.”
Oh my.
First, I would hope that sane politicians would know better than to argue, during a time of war, about a double-amputee, that veterans should just shut up about their decorated service to their country. If Republicans were held to sensible rhetorical standards, this little incident would go in the “career ender” category.
Second, it’s not up to Joe Walsh, who’s never worn a military uniform, to decide who qualifies or doesn’t qualify as a “true hero.”
And third, Walsh’s memory about John McCain’s rhetoric is very, very wrong.
——————————————————————————–
Long time readers may recall a piece I wrote ages ago, but this myth that McCain was reluctant to talk about his military service has no basis in reality. On the contrary, McCain routinely exploited his service record as some kind of political “trump card.”
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/03/12546466-joe-walsh-doesnt-want-to-hear-about-military-service?lite
Joe Walsh’s a DEAD-BEAT DAD, LOW LIFE POS
House to prohibit IRS from implementing healthcare law
By Pete Kasperowicz – 07/02/12 01:25 PM ET
The House as early as next week will pass legislation prohibiting the IRS from receiving any money from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to implement the 2010 healthcare reform law.
Passage of the financial services spending bill is especially timely in light of last week’s Supreme Court ruling that penalties the government can impose under the law against people who refuse to buy health insurance can be seen as a tax, because it is enforced like a tax.
That finding allowed the individual mandate to stand, and Republicans have already started reorienting their attacks against the law based on the knowledge that it only remains in place because it is an allowable tax.
The bill would have to get through the Senate and be signed by President Obama to become law.
The House will take up the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act sometime in July, and possibly next week when it returns from the July 4 recess. (The rule governing debate on the bill was already approved last week.) While the Obama administration requested another $1 billion so the IRS can implement the healthcare law, the bill, H.R. 6020, does not give any new money to the IRS.
Additionally, it “prohibits the IRS from receiving transfers from the Department of Health and Human Services to implement the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” according to report language accompanying the bill from the House Appropriations Committee.
http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/235905-house-gop-looks-to-starve-irs-of-funds-to-implement-healthcare-law
The Affordable Care Act’s big giveaway to stingy red states
Posted by Ezra Klein on July 3, 2012 at 8:43 am
Over the coming weeks and months, there’s going to be a new event in the Republican Party’s ongoing “No, I’m the most anti-Obamacare!” contest: refusing to participate in the law’s proposed Medicaid expansion. So far, the governors of Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana have already promised to do exactly that.
Ignore them. The deal the federal government is offering states on Medicaid is too good to refuse. And that’s particularly true for the red states. If Mitt Romney loses the election and Republicans lose their chance to repeal the Affordable Care Act, they’re going to end up participating in the law. They can’t afford not to.
Medicaid is jointly administered between states and the federal government, and the states are given considerable leeway to set eligibility rules. Texas covers only working adults up to 26 percent of the poverty line. The poverty line for an individual is $11,170. So, you could be a single person making $3,000 a year and you’re still not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid in Texas. That’s part of the reason Texas has the highest uninsured rate in the nation.
Massachusetts, by contrast, covers working adults up to 133 percent of the poverty line — partly due to a former governor whose name rhymes with Schmitt Schmomney. It’s a big reason it has the lowest uninsured rate in the nation.
The Affordable Care Act wants to make the whole country like Schmitt Schmomney’s Massachusetts. Everyone earning up to 133 percent of the poverty line, which is less than $15,000 for an individual, gets Medicaid. And the way it does that is by telling states the feds will cover 100 percent of the difference between wherever the state is now and where the law wants them to go for the first three years, and 90 percent after 2020.
To get a sense of what an incredibly, astonishingly, unbelievably good deal that is, consider this: The federal government currently pays 57 percent of Medicaid’s costs. States pay the rest. And every state thinks that a sufficiently good deal to participate.
But, somewhat perversely, the states that get the best deal under the law are states like Texas, which have stingy Medicaid programs right now, and where the federal government is thus going to pick up the bill for insuring millions and millions of people. In states like Massachusetts, where the Medicaid program is already generous and the state is shouldering much of the cost, there’s no difference for the federal government to pay.
That is to say, the less you’ve been doing on Medicaid so far, the more the federal government will pay on your behalf going forward. And that gets to an irony of the health-care law: Red states have, in general, done less than blue states to cover their residents, so they’re going to get a sweeter deal under the terms of the Affordable Care Act.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/03/the-affordable-care-acts-giveaway-to-stingy-red-states/?hpid=z3
Will Willard Slink Away from the Healthcare Debate?
By Betty Cracker July 3rd, 2012
The Romney camp may roll over and piddle on its belly rather than engage in the healthcare debate, according to the National Journal (via General Stuck in the open thread):
Romney Campaign Declaring Cease Fire on Health Care
In the aftermath of the Supreme Court health care ruling, the early conventional wisdom was that an unfavorable health care ruling at the court would be good for Republicans politically, even as it was a serious policy setback for conservatives. But that’s not shaping up to be the case. Mitt Romney, after giving a brief statement decrying the decision, has been virtually silent on criticizing the health care law. He’s been on vacation and his campaign has been giving off clear signals that it doesn’t want to make health care a major part of the election.
I don’t buy this. Sure, Romney is vulnerable on healthcare since he enacted a virtually identical scheme in Massachusetts and the Republicans have nothing to offer to replace the ADA except “Die at great expense in the emergency room, poors!”
But since when have astounding hypocrisy and cruelty ever interfered with a Republican talking point? Maybe Willard really is too busy concocting schemes to trip a toddler grandchild and take the gold in the Romney Olympics sack race to bother with this shit right now, and his team is regrouping in the Sister Wives cabins to plan the attack.
Cease fire my ass. We haven’t even begun to hear the lies and demagoguery yet, is my guess
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/07/03/will-willard-slink-away-from-the-healthcare-debate/#comment-3409628
It’s NO HOLES BARRED, BITCHES. EVERYTHING IS ON THE TABLE.
NUKE’EM!
Posted at 09:03 AM ET, 07/03/2012
The Morning Plum: No letting up on Bain
By Greg Sargent
One of the key questions about the Obama campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s Bain years has been this: Given that swing voters seem willing to accept Romney’s argument that his business background equips him with economic competence that can be applied to the presidency, how can the Obama camp make its critique of that background matter to voters in the context of the campaign’s argument over how to fix the economy going forward? How can the Obama campaign make the Bain years relevant in voters’ minds to what Romney would do as president and how he’d approach the job?
The Obama campaign’s first answer to these questions is this new ad running in nine swing states, which suggests that the attacks on Bain won’t be letting up anytime soon:
The script:
“What a president believes matters. Mitt Romney’s companies were pioneers in outsourcing U.S. jobs to low wage countries. He supports tax breaks for companies that shift jobs overseas. President Obama believes in insourcing. He fought to save the U.S auto industry and favors tax cuts for companies that bring jobs home. Outsourcing versus insourcing. It matters.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/the-morning-plum-no-letting-up-on-bain/2012/07/03/gJQATL7WKW_blog.html
NUKE’EM, PBO. NUKE’EM!
Mr. Andy Griffith’s last TV appearance
Reposts: Mittens is just a truckload of HYPOCRICY & LIARS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=h__s18YXcMs
Reposting the goodie here too!
An EYE-OPENING LOOK AT ROMNEY
Salon.com:“This pattern of elusiveness is hardly confined to Romney’s finances, but rather defines his public life.” http://bit.ly/KRdh3V
The Nation: “The public has a right to know about ethics and probity, not mere legality, of Romney’s personal and professional financial history. Romney has made business experience the central pitch of his candidacy, so how can he claim that how he manages his money is irrelevant?” http://bit.ly/MsXePt
Think Progress: Five Shady Financial Tactics Employed by Mitt Romney: http://bit.ly/MTkUdo
Seeing the Forrest: Why Romney Won’t Release More Tax Returns: http://bit.ly/LuVnFx
Blue Mass Group:“It’s an eye-opening look at why Mitt Romney is really, really nothing like you.” http://bit.ly/LVEWGR
Atlantic Wire: “ If the Romney campaign says there’s nothing unusual about Romney’s finances — that people of his wealth often have offshore accounts to protect them from paying taxes — that only strengthens Obama’s case.” http://bit.ly/R3u6NL
2 Political Junkies: Vanity Fair Shows Us the Money: Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Switzerland: http://bit.ly/R3u0pj
Daily Kos: “By connecting Romney’s Bain experience with the policies he is proposing as a presidential candidate and contrasting those policies with President Obama’s, the ad goes beyond a purely negativepersonal attack, instead framing the choice between Obama and Romney.” http://bit.ly/NtyAsk
Repost
Paul “Eddie Munster- Ayn Rand” Ryan says he is disturbed. Yes, you are dude.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=R_6apes32Po
Full interview here: http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/07/rep-paul-ryan-chief-justice-roberts-had-to-contort-logic-and-reason-in-order-to-rule-obamatax-law-is-constitutional-video/
NATURE & GOD WILL PAY FOR YOUR HEALTH CARE. SMGDH
Posted at 11:51 AM ET, 07/03/2012
In name of states’ rights, millions could go uninsured
By Greg Sargent
Iowa governor Terry Branstad has now become the fifth GOP governor to vow that his state will not opt in to the Medicaid expansion in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling. He joins the ranks of Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, Florida’s Rick Scott, South Carolina’s Nikki Haley, and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker.
It’s worth keeping a running tally of how many people could go without insurance that would otherwise be covered under Obamacare if these GOP governors make good on their threat.
The latest rough total: Nearly one and a half million people.
As Sarah Kliff noted the other day, the Kaiser foundation has done a state by state analysis meant to gauge how many people would gain coverage under the Medicaid expansion that didn’t have coverage before. Keeping in mind that this study was performed in 2010, and that these are estimates, here’s how many people we’re talking about in each state:
* Iowa: 74,498
* Louisiana: 277,746
* Florida: 683,477
* South Carolina: 247,478
* Wisconsin: 127,862
The approximate total now, according to Kaiser’s numbers: 1,411,061.
Now, in fairness, as Kliff notes, some of these people might be able to get insurance via other provisions in Obamacare, such as subsidies for buying insurance on the exchanges. On the other hand, Kaiser estimates that if states practiced aggressive outreach on the Medicaid expansion, even larger numbers of people than the above tallies suggest could get coverage under the provision. But again, Kaiser’s numbers are estimates.
Of course, it’s still unclear whether these governors will go through with their threats. David Dayen and Ed Kilgore have both been making good cases that they will. As Dayen and Kilgore both note, some of these GOP governors are relying on objections to the cost of the program to the states — even though the federal government covers 100% of the program for the first three years and it remains a good deal beyond — to mask ideological reasons for opting out. The opportunity to play to a national conservative audience, or to strike a great blow against Obama’s signature domestic initiative and against the welfare state in general, must be awfully tempting. Dayen rightly notes that the media will probably fail to sufficiently untangle the cover stories these governors are using.
It seems to me that it makes sense to assume the worst about what will happen in the long run And the mounting numbers of people who might go uninsured as a result of these crusades is alone a reminder that the Medicaid ruling is the most consequential news coming out of the decision — and of the need to bear down hard on the specifics of what this means.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line
Private dicks
By DougJ July 3rd, 2012
It creates jobs, though, I’m sure:
Three years ago, Gina Ray, who is now 31 and unemployed, was fined $179 for speeding. She failed to show up at court (she says the ticket bore the wrong date), so her license was revoked.
When she was next pulled over, she was, of course, driving without a license. By then her fees added up to more than $1,500. Unable to pay, she was handed over to a private probation company and jailed — charged an additional fee for each day behind bars.
For that driving offense, Ms. Ray has been locked up three times for a total of 40 days and owes $3,170, much of it to the probation company. Her story, in hardscrabble, rural Alabama, where Krispy Kreme promises that “two can dine for $5.99,” is not about innocence.
It is, rather, about the mushrooming of fines and fees levied by money-starved towns across the country and the for-profit businesses that administer the system. The result is that growing numbers of poor people, like Ms. Ray, are ending up jailed and in debt for minor infractions.
[…]
In Georgia, three dozen for-profit probation companies operate in hundreds of courts, and there have been similar lawsuits. In one, Randy Miller, 39, an Iraq war veteran who had lost his job, was jailed after failing to make child support payments of $860 a month. In another, Hills McGee, with a monthly income of $243 in veterans benefits, was charged with public drunkenness, assessed $270 by a court and put on probation through a private company. The company added a $15 enrollment fee and $39 in monthly fees. That put his total for a year above $700, which Mr. McGee, 53, struggled to meet before being jailed for failing to pay it all.
“These companies are bill collectors, but they are given the authority to say to someone that if he doesn’t pay, he is going to jail,” said John B. Long, a lawyer in Augusta, Ga., who is taking the issue to a federal appeals court this fall. “There are things like garbage collection where private companies are O.K. No one’s liberty is affected. The closer you get to locking someone up, the closer you get to a constitutional issue.”
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/07/03/private-dicks/
Allen West – shinning and grinning and slave catching – again.
…………….
Allen West can’t help himself
By Steve Benen
Tue Jul 3, 2012 9:56 AM EDT.
There seems to be a bit of pattern to how Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) conducts himself. Periodically, the unhinged Republican lawmaker will say something ridiculous, which is soon followed by a period in which West revels in the attention. Then he’ll send out a fundraising letter celebrating his notoriety, before enjoying a little quiet time.
West will, invariably, then start the cycle over again.
It’s been a while since the Floridian’s latest outburst, so I suppose we were due for garbage like this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3A9tX4G5nI4
The Republican congressman was speaking an event in his district, where West explained his deranged perspective on President Obama: “He does not want you to have the self-esteem of getting up and earning, and having that title of American. He’d rather you be his slave.”
It’s worth noting that (a) President Obama is not trying to enslave the population; and (b) as Maddow Blog has noted before, Allen West is a little too fond of slave metaphors.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/03/12543353-allen-west-cant-help-himself?lite
When vouchers reclaim the spotlight
By Steve Benen
Tue Jul 3, 2012 11:28 AM EDT.
For much of the 1990s, the conservative push for school vouchers was a top-tier issue. There was strong public demand for education reforms, and for the Republican Party, vouchers (or the phrase that polled better, “school choice”) were the solution: what better way to improve schools than to give folks tax dollars to pay for private school tuition?
It also checked off a lot of political boxes. With this one idea, the GOP could (1) pander to religious groups, promising them tax dollars; (2) infuriate teachers’ unions; (3) take steps towards privatizing American public education; and (4) appear compassionate towards minority communities.
As we now know, of course, vouchers became wildly unpopular. The Bush/Cheney administration gave up on the idea, and the issue slowly faded. Voucher opponents had effectively won the broader fight.
Or, at least it seemed that way for a while. Mitt Romney is quietly promising to create a massive voucher scheme if elected to the White House, and in Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) is moving forward with his own voucher plan.
State educational reforms signed into law by Jindal in April would allow low- and middle-income students in struggling public schools to receive vouchers to attend private schools. Similar programs have been utilized in about a dozen other states and have long been part of a broader educational reform favored by conservative groups.
In a lawsuit claiming that the bill violates the state’s constitution, the Louisiana Federation of Teachers and the Louisiana Association of Educators are seeking to have the reforms struck down.
The Louisiana School Boards Association also joined 34 other school boards late last week in filing a similar lawsuit, saying that the imposition “put[s] public school systems in more peril than ever.”
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/03/12544557-when-vouchers-reclaim-the-spotlight?lite
RIP, Andy Griffith.
Good old fashioned fathering. Grifftih was a pioneer in tv dads. Thanks Pa!
REPOST
NEW AD – “Believes”: Mitt Romney doesn’t only has a history of shady financial practices, but supports policies that encourage outsourcing – maximizing profits for himself and his partners at the expense of the middle class.”Believes” is airing in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
What a president believes matters.
Mitt Romney’s companies were pioneers in outsourcing US jobs to low-wage countries. He supports tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.
President Obama believes in insourcing.
He fought to save the US auto industry, and favors tax cuts for companies that bring jobs home.
Outsourcing versus insourcing. It matters.
The GOP healthcare ‘alternative’
By Steve Benen
Tue Jul 3, 2012 9:20 AM EDT.
We know President Obama’s approach to fixing the dysfunctional American health care system: it’s called the Affordable Care Act, and until Republicans stop trying to kill it, the reform package is the law of the land. We also know that GOP officials at every level at least pretend to hate “Obamacare” with every fiber of their being.
But what’s the Republican health care plan? They say they don’t like the status quo, and they don’t like the Democratic policy, so where’s their alternative? I’d missed this on Friday, but reader B.A. flagged an interesting comment House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) made on MSNBC the day after the Supreme Court ruling.
For those who can’t watch clips online, here’s the exchange between Cantor and NBC News’ Tom Brokaw.
BROKAW: It seems to me the Republican Party has to have some kind of a framework of an alternative to what they’re talking about because, whatever else we think about health care, everybody knows that financially, the system is broken. You can still get cured here in ways that you can’t in other places and get treatment, but the cost system is a kind of a ponzi scheme. So my question again to you, congressman, is when will we see a Republican plan that would replace more meritoriously the Obamacare plan that you’re so unhappy with?
CANTOR: Tom, you knew back in 2009 when the Obamacare bill was being considered on the House floor, we put forward our alternative. So to sit here and say we don’t have a replacement is not correct. What we have now, though, is the challenge of repealing this law.
Notice that Cantor used present tense — House Republican put forward an alternative, so to “say we don’t have a replacement is not correct.”
In other words, if we want to know what House Republican policymakers, including the Majority Leader, would do with health care policy in the United States, we need only to review their own 2009 plan, which Cantor still seems to support, at least as of a few days ago.
And what was in the 2009 GOP plan? I’m glad you asked.
——————————————————————————–
After missing a series of self-imposed deadlines, Republican leaders slapped together a half-hearted joke — the GOP “policy” largely ignored the uninsured, did nothing for those with pre-existing conditions, and offered nothing for those worried about losing coverage when it’s needed most.
We learned shortly after the Republican plan was defeated that the proposal included provisions that “mirror the suggestions put forth by the lobbying entity of the private insurance industry way back in December 2008.” Imagine that.
As Matt Yglesias noted at the time, the Republican approach to reform sought to create a system that “works better for people who don’t need health care services, and much worse for people who actually are sick or who become sick in the future. It’s basically a health un-insurance policy.” And as ThinkProgress noted in 2009, the CBO crunched the numbers and found that the Republican alternative would leave “about 52 million” Americans without access to basic medical care.
And three years later, Eric Cantor still supports and touts this policy as the Republican health care plan.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/03/12542817-the-gop-healthcare-alternative?lite
Five Best Tools for Following the Money
June 15, 2012
“Data” is the buzzword of the 2012 election. Making sense of campaign finance data is crucial to understanding what will happen in the coming weeks and months, as well as the underlying forces that influence those events. But you don’t have to be a journalist — or have a computer science degree — to dig in. Below are five tools that enable anyone to learn about the money fueling this election.
http://billmoyers.com/content/five-best-tools-for-following-the-money/
BWA HA HA HA
Where did Bain’s early investments come from?
Questionable Connections:
“There is absolutely no evidence that Bain has done anything illegal,but private equity is one channel for this secrecy-shrouded foreign money to enter the United States, and a filing for Mitt Romney’s first $37 million Bain Capital Fund, of 1984, provides a rare window into this.”
· One foreign investor, of $2 million, was thenewspaper tycoon, tax evader, and fraudster Robert Maxwell, who fell from his yacht, and drowned, off of the Canary Islands in 1991 in strange circumstances, after looting his company’s pension funds.
· The Bain filing also namesEduardo Poma, a member of one of the “14 families” oligarchy that has controlled most of El Salvador’s wealth for decades.
· The filings also show a Geneva-based trustee overseeing a trust that invested $2.5 million, a Bahamas corporation that put in $3 million, and three corporations in the tax haven of Panama, historically a favored destination for Latin-American dirty money—“one of the filthiest money-laundering sinks in the world,” as a U.S. Customs official once put it.
“Many Americans might react with a shrug to the idea of shady foreign money such as Robert Maxwell’s being invested here. But, says Rebecca Wilkins, of the Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit Citizens for Tax Justice, “It is shocking that a presidential candidate should think that is O.K.”
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/08/investigating-mitt-romney-offshore-accounts
Eric Holder says Republicans have made him a ‘proxy’ to attack President Obama
By Sari Horwitz, Published: July 2
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. sharply criticized lawmakers Monday for voting to hold him in contempt of Congress last week, saying Republicans have made him a “proxy” to attack President Obama in an election year.
In his first interview since Thursday’s vote, Holder said lawmakers have used an investigation of a botched gun-tracking operation as a way to seek retribution against the Justice Department for its policies on a host of issues, including immigration, voting rights and gay marriage. He said the chairman of the committee leading the inquiry, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), is engaging in political theater as the Justice Department tries to focus on public safety.
“I’ve been doing all of these things all the time Darrell Issa and his band have been nipping at my heels,” a defiant Holder said. “They’ve been nipping, but I’ve been walking.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/eric-holder-says-republicans-have-made-him-a-proxy-to-attack-president-obama/2012/07/02/gJQAKDxMJW_story.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=cheatsheet_morning&cid=newsletter%3Bemail%3Bcheatsheet_morning&utm_term=Cheat%20Sheet
Faces of Change: A Fighting Chance
Romney to stick with far-right agenda on immigration
By Steve Benen
Tue Jul 3, 2012 8:39 AM EDT.
It’s about three weeks since President Obama announced his administration would begin enforcing the goals of the DREAM Act. What does Mitt Romney think of Obama’s policy? Oddly enough, we still don’t know — he and his campaign refuse to say.
What’s more, it’s been more than a week since the Supreme Court ruled on Arizona’s anti-immigrant law, striking down nearly all of the odious SB1070. What does Romney think of the ruling? We don’t know that, either — Team Romney consider the candidate’s opinion a secret.
Last week, when Romney chatted with a far-right website, he seemed to briefly take a position on immigration, but campaign aides quickly walked it back, saying he misspoke.
What on earth is going on here? The Republican reportedly told some Republican elites last week he’s worried about vote totals, but he’s also trying to avoid looking like a “flip-flopper
Romney said the Hispanic vote is important, noting he has Sen. Marco Rubio on the trail for him and that one of his own sons speaks Spanish, but indicated he is not going to change positions from some of what he said in the primaries.
“I know I took some positions in the primary that are” hard to contend with in a general, Romney said, according to two sources.
“I am not going to be a flip-flopper,” he added, according to one guest. He talked more about the various concerns that he has to balance in terms of competing constituencies who have different views — and noted, two sources said, the precise percentage that Hispanic voters make up in the swing states, a figure that was less than 20 percent.
It would appear, then, that Romney is effectively giving up on the Latino vote.
——————————————————————————–
As Rachel recently explained, during the GOP primaries, the former governor positioned himself as one of the most anti-immigrant competitive candidates in decades, vowing to veto the DREAM Act, endorsing “self-deportation,” and palling around with Kris Kobach.
Going forward, that leaves Romney with a choice: abandon every position he took a few months ago in the hopes of winning some Latino votes in key swing states, or keep his primary positions while hoping his Spanish-speaking son and awful Floridian surrogate help mitigate the damage.
The Republican is apparently prepared to go with Door #2.
Even some of his allies are unimpressed.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/03/12542183-romney-to-stick-with-far-right-agenda-on-immigration?lite
Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife continued to lobby against health care
In 2011, per new financial forms
Posted on Monday, July 2, 2012, 4:05 pm by GottaLaff
You all remember Virginia Thomas, right? She’s the founder of a tea party group-turned-lobbyist who bragged about all the influence she had (who also left a rather strange voice mail for Anita Hill, or as I like to call it, drunk dialing).
You know the old saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same”? Here we go again. Via U.S. News:
Now, just days after healthcare law was upheld (with Clarence Thomas dissenting), new financial forms show that Thomas’s wife, Ginni, continued to rake in a profit from opposing healthcare reforms in 2011—even after she previously came under fire for doing so.
According to Thomas’s 2011 financial disclosure report form, filed on May 15 and obtained Friday by Whispers, Ginni Thomas made up to $15,000 working for political lobbying firm Liberty Consulting. The firm lobbied actively against the healthcare law, according to liberal news magazine Mother Jones.
Why is it again that Justice Kagan had to recuse herself from the challenge to Arizona’s immigration law, and very loud, very public demands were made for her to recuse herself again, but Thomas gets a pass?
There is a clear conflict of interest with the Thomases whose ethics are beyond questionable at this point. But you know the other old saying, “It’s OK If You’re A Republican.”
http://thepoliticalcarnival.net/2012/07/02/justice-clarence-thomass-wife-continued-to-lobby-against-health-care-in-2011-per-new-financial-forms/
Islands in the C.R.E.A.M.
By DougJ July 3rd, 2012
The hits just keep on coming:
A person who worked for Mitt Romney at the consulting firm Bain and Co. in 1977 remembers him with mixed feelings. “Mitt was … a really wonderful boss,” the former employee says. “He was nice, he was fair, he was logical, he said what he wanted … he was really encouraging.” But Bain and Co., the person recalls, pushed employees to find out secret revenue and sales data on its clients’ competitors. Romney, the person says, suggested “falsifying” who they were to get such information, by pretending to be a graduate student working on a project at Harvard. (The person, in fact, was a Harvard student, at Bain for the summer, but not working on any such projects.) “Mitt said to me something like ‘We won’t ask you to lie. I am not going to tell you to do this, but [it is] a really good way to get the information.’ … I would not have had anything in my analysis if I had not pretended.
“It was a strange atmosphere. It did leave a bad taste in your mouth,” the former employee recalls.
This unsettling account suggests the young Romney—at that point only two years out of Harvard Business School—was willing to push into gray areas when it came to business. More than three decades later, as he tried to nail down the Republican nomination for president of the United States, Romney’s gray areas were again an issue when he repeatedly resisted calls to release more details of his net worth, his tax returns, and the large investments and assets held by him and his wife, Ann. Finally the other Republican candidates forced him to do so, but only highly selective disclosures were forthcoming.
[….]
To give but one example, there is a Bermuda-based entity called Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., which has been described in securities filings as “a Bermuda corporation wholly owned by W. Mitt Romney.” It could be that Sankaty is an old vehicle with little importance, but Romney appears to have treated it rather carefully. He set it up in 1997, then transferred it to his wife’s newly created blind trust on January 1, 2003, the day before he was inaugurated as Massachusetts’s governor.
Real Murkins love shady tax havens, it’s all they talk about around the Applebee’s Salad bar. Also too, class warfare, and why do liberals hate success?
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/07/03/islands-in-the-c-r-e-a-m/
Chicago Cubs owners, the Ricketts family, are crying about Mayor Rahm still refusing to return their calls about securing public funds to renovate Wrigley Field. Rahm said to still be “livid”, understandably, about the revelation that the head of the family, crazy Joe Ricketts, was planning to donate $10 million to re-launch a Rev. Wright attack against Obama. That news did not go over so well in Chicago. Maybe the Ricketts family will have to use their own billions to renovate their losing team’s ball park.
http://www.nwherald.com/2012/07/02/political-flap-stalls-plans-to-renovate-wrigley-field/aekoszt/
good catch and great update with that VF piece. thank you.
Friday’s storms raise questions about safety of cloud computing
BWA HA HA HA GET’EM, SANDY!
Affordable Care Act Classes
Dear Senator McConnell:
Just heard on the local news a clip of you speaking to a group at Hardin Memorial Hospital this morning. Once again, you mentioned the 2300 page bill, as though that is too much for anyone to expect you to read and comprehend. That’s fine. We know you are lazy and you have whined about the burden of having to do your job for so long this is not surprise.
But, you added to that statement, “2300 page bill that nobody understands.” This is a lie, and you know it is a lie. Many of us have read and do understand the bill. If you want to admit that you are a lazy fool, at least you are being somewhat honest for a change. You do not have permission to try and make the rest of us look like fools with you. That is disgusting and totally unacceptable.
Here are a few links that might help you.
http://www.healthcare.gov/law/full/index.html (Site contains the entire bill as well as simple explanations that even you might be able to comprehend. Again, if you can’t read, my grandchildren will come read it to you.
https://class.coursera.org/healthpolicy-2012-001/wiki/index University of Pennsylvania offers a free class: Health Policy and the Affordable Care Act
A good leader would know this bill inside and out and would be able to explain it so that his constituents would understand.
Sandy
http://lifewithmitchmcconnell.blogspot.com/
PRESIDENT OBAMA TO KICK OFF TWO-DAY
“BETTING ON AMERICA” BUS TOUR
On Thursday, July 5, President Obama will kick off a two-day “Betting on America” bus tour through Northern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania.
Throughout Ohio and Pennsylvania, President Obama will talk about his efforts over the last three years to get our economy back on track, doubling down on American workers by saving the auto industry, investing in manufacturing and bringing jobs back to America.
The President will also talk with voters in their communities about the choice in this election – whether we want to grow our economy from the middle out, not the top town. The President is rebuilding an economy meant to last – one that restores middle class security by investing in education, energy, innovation and infrastructure and reforms the tax code — steps which will create American jobs, responsibly pay down our debt and ensure everyone – from Wall Street to Main Street – plays by the same rules and pays their fair share.
The President’s vision stands in stark contrast to Mitt Romney, who believes in an economy built from the top down and supports the same policies that crashed our economy and devastated the middle class in the first place. As a corporate buyout specialist, he made massive profits by shuttering plants, firing workers and investing in companies that pioneered shipping of good American jobs overseas. As governor of Massachusetts, he increased debt, raised taxes and fees on the middle class and left the state 47th out of 50th in job creation.
As a candidate for president, Romney’s economic plan blows a hole in the deficit with tax cuts for the wealthy, guts investments in education and clean energy, encourages outsourcing, and puts taxpayers at risk by rolling back Wall Street reform. According to independent economists, Romney’s economic plan would fail to create new jobs in the short term, and even make our economy worse. And by proposing $5 trillion in tax cuts weighted towards the wealthy, Romney’s plan requires either further increasing our deficits or raising taxes on the middle class.
BREAKING!
VANITY FAIR INVESTIGATES ROMNEY’S OFFSHORE ACCOUNTS
Where the Money Lives
On Romney’s mysterious Bermuda corporation: “To give but one example, there is a Bermuda-based entity called Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., which has been described in securities filings as ‘a Bermuda corporation wholly owned by W. Mitt Romney.’… Romney failed to list this entity on several financial disclosures, even though such a closely held entity would not qualify as an “excepted investment fund” that would not need to be on his disclosure forms. He finally included it on his 2010 tax return. Even after examining that return, we have no idea what is in this company, but it could be valuable, meaning that it is possible Romney’s wealth is even greater than previous estimates. While the Romneys’ spokespeople insist that the couple has paid all the taxes required by law, investments in tax havens such as Bermuda raise many questions, because they are in ‘jurisdictions where there is virtually no tax and virtually no compliance,’ as one Miami-based offshore lawyer put it.”
On Romney’s Cayman Islands funds: “Because of his retirement deal with Bain Capital, his finances are still deeply entangled with the private-equity firm that he founded and spun off from Bain and Co. in 1984. Though he left the firm in 1999, Romney has continued to receive large payments from it—in early June he revealed more than $2 million in new Bain income. The firm today has at least 138 funds organized in the Cayman Islands, and Romney himself has personal interests in at least 12, worth as much as $30 million, hidden behind controversial confidentiality disclaimers. Again, the Romney campaign insists he saves no tax by using them, but there is no way to check this.”
On Romney’s accounts in foreign tax havens, including his Swiss bank account:“These, plus the mandatory financial disclosures filed with the Office of Government Ethics and released last August, raise many questions. A full 55 pages in his 2010 return are devoted to reporting his transactions with foreign entities… The media soon noticed Romney’s familiarity with foreign tax havens. A $3 million Swiss bank account appeared in the 2010 returns, then winked out of existence in 2011 after the trustee closed it.”
On who Romney raised capital from for Bain’s first fund: “Private equity is one channel for this secrecy-shrouded foreign money to enter the United States, and a filing for Mitt Romney’s first $37 million Bain Capital Fund, of 1984, provides a rare window into this. One foreign investor, of $2 million, was the newspaper tycoon, tax evader, and fraudster Robert Maxwell, who fell from his yacht, and drowned, off of the Canary Islands in 1991 in strange circumstances, after looting his company’s pension fund. The Bain filing also names Eduardo Poma, a member of one of the ‘14 families’ oligarchy that has controlled most of El Salvador’s wealth for decades; oddly, Poma is listed as sharing a Miami address with two anonymous companies that invested $1.5 million between them. The filings also show a Geneva-based trustee overseeing a trust that invested $2.5 million, a Bahamas corporation that put in $3 million, and three corporations in the tax haven of Panama, historically a favored destination for Latin-American dirty money—‘one of the filthiest money-laundering sinks in the world,’ as a U.S. Customs official once put it. Bain Capital has said it did everything required by the U.S. government to check that the investors were not associated with unsavory interests. U.S. law doesn’t require Bain to enforce the tax laws of its investors’ home countries, but the presence of Swiss trustees, Bahamas trusts, and Panama corporations would raise red flags with any tax authority.”
On the special “carried interest” tax treatment Romney receives, allowing him to pay a lower rate than ordinary Americans: “Romney’s personal tax rate is a particular point of interest. In 2010 and 2011, Mitt and Ann paid $6.2 million in federal tax on $42.5 million in income, for an average tax rate just shy of 15 percent, substantially less than what most middle-income Americans pay. Romney manages this low rate because he takes his payments from Bain Capital as investment income, which is taxed at a maximum 15 percent, instead of the 35 percent he would pay on ‘ordinary’ income, such as salaries and wages.
Many tax experts argue that the form of remuneration he receives, known as carried interest, is really just a fee charged by investment managers, so it should instead be taxed at the 35 percent rate. Lee Sheppard, a contributing editor at the trade publication Tax Notes, whose often controversial articles are read widely by tax professionals… ‘Romney is the poster boy, the best argument, for taxing this profit share as ordinary income,’ says Sheppard.”
On the legality of it all: “The assertion that he broke no laws is widely accepted. But it is worth asking if it is actually true. The answer, in fact, isn’t straightforward. Romney, like the superhero who whirls and backflips unscathed through a web of laser beams while everyone else gets zapped, is certainly a remarkable financial acrobat. But careful analysis of his financial and business affairs also reveals a man who, like some other Wall Street titans, seems comfortable striding into some fuzzy gray zones.”
READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/08/investigating-mitt-romney-offshore-accounts
SEE HOW THEY LIE
Good Morning, Everyone! :-)
Good Morning, Ametia and Everyone :)
Hi rikyrah. Check out the Bob Mac thread…