Happy Monday,, Everyone!
3 Chics favorite Sunday talk show video:
Now on to this week 3 Chics’ featured artist, Ms. Oleta Adams.
Wiki: Oleta Adams (born May 4, 1953, Seattle, Washington) is an American soul, jazz, and gospel singer and pianist.
Adams was born the daughter of a preacher and was raised with gospel music. In her youth her family moved to Yakima, Washington, which is sometimes shown as her place of birth. Before gaining her opportunity to perform, Adams faced a great deal of rejection. In the 1970s, she moved to Los Angeles, California where she recorded a demo tape. However, many music executives were exclusively interested in disco music rather than Adams’ preferred style.
With the advice of her singing coach, Lee Farrell, Adams moved to Kansas City where she did a variety of local gigs. Adams started her career in the early 1980s with two self-financed albums which had limited success.
WINDOW OF HOPE
FYI: Forbes has listed 35 questions Mitt Romney must answer:
A few of the critical questions Romney must answer include:
1. Are you contending that an individual can simultaneously be the CEO, president, managing director of a company, and its sole stockholder and somehow be “disassociated” from the company or accurately classified as someone not having “any” formal involvement with a company?
2. You have stated that in “Feb. 1999 I left Bain capital and all management responsibility” and “I had no ongoing activity or involvement.” It depends on what the definition of “involvement” is, doesn’t it? Clearly you were involved with Bain to the extent that you owned it. Are you defining “involvement” in a uniquely specific way that only means “full-time, active, 60-hours-a-week, hands-on manager?”
3. You earned at least $100,000 as an executive from Bain in 2001 and 2002, separate from investment earnings according to filings with State of Massachusetts. Can you give an example of anyone else you personally know getting a six figure income, not dividend or investment return, but actual income, from a company they had nothing to do with?
4. What did you do for this $100,000 salary you earned from Bain in both 2000 and 2001?
5. In 2002, you are listed as one of two managing members of Bain Capital Investors LLC in its annual report. What does this mean?
6. If, in fact, you did not veto any major investment decision during your 1999 though 2002 ownership, doesn’t that imply your broad consent of management’s decisions?
7. According to the Boston Globe, “Romney also testified that ‘there were a number of social trips and business trips that brought [him] back to Massachusetts, board meetings’ while he was running the Olympics. He added that he remained on the boards of several companies, including the Lifelike Co., in which Bain Capital held a stake until 2001.” You testified that while running the Olympics you took a number of business trips to Massachusetts and for board meetings for companies including Lifelike Co. Bain had a stake in this company until 2001. Are you contending that you could attend board meetings for Lifelike Co at the same time Bain Capital had a stake in Lifelike Co and at the same time you owned the stock of Bain Capital, but that somehow your attending a board meeting for a company partially owned by Bain had nothing to do with Bain because you were on the board as Mitt Romney the individual, not as the representative of Bain?
8. When asked “did you attend board meetings for Bain after 1999″ you responded by saying “I did not manage Bain after 1999,” or that you didn’t attend any meetings involving things like firing people. This seems to suggest the possibility that you did attend Bain meetings in 2000 and 2001 that did not involve hiring or firing people or where you made the final decisions on investments. Is that possible?
Romney has been unable to explain how he accepts no responsibility for what happened at Bain after February 1999 while remaining CEO, President, and Chairman of the company. Confronted with this fact in his interview with CBS, Romney explained his role at Bain Capital through 2002 in this way:
“I was the owner of a, of the general partnership but there were investors which included pension funds and various entities of all kinds that owned the, if you will, the investments of the firm. But I was the owner of an entity which was a management entity. That entity was one which I had ownership of until the time of the retirement program was put in place. But I had no responsibility whatsoever after February of ’99 for the management or ownership – management, rather, of Bain Capital.”
Most Americans would find that explanation to be incoherent. And while Romney has repeatedly tried to distance himself from Bain’s decisions after February 1999, he has also hypocritically taken credit for jobs created well after the 1999 end date that he cites. He can’t have it both ways.
If Romney followed decades of precedent set in motion by his father, who released 12 years of tax returns, as well as the minutes from Bain Capital board meetings, the American people could finally learn to what extent Mitt Romney was involved with the actions at Bain Capital following 1999.
This week, Mitt Romney has the opportunity to provide a full accounting of his tenure at Bain Capital, the central premise of his campaign and the opportunity to demonstrate whether or not he was the job creator he claims to be.
Circling the Bowl
by BooMan
Mon Jul 16th, 2012 at 05:46:09 PM EST
In 2004, John Kerry released two years of tax returns. If you wanted to see more, it was pretty easy because Sen. Kerry had already released 18 years of tax returns during his time in the Senate. So, in total, voters had 20 years of Kerry tax returns to peruse as they made their decision about whom to support. Despite this, Romney flak Ed Gillespie had this to say:
On Sunday, Romney senior adviser Ed Gillespie promised that Romney would release a total of two years worth of tax returns, following in the footsteps of McCain and Kerry.
“He is going to release them, Candy, we’ve made that clear,” Gillespie said to host Candy Crowley on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “And that’s the standard that Senator McCain, Republican nominee in the last election said was the relevant standard. It’s the standard that Senator John Kerry as the Democratic nominee said was the standard.”
I’d like see the quote of John Kerry saying that two years is the standard. Back in April, Mitt Romney told the same lie about Kerry’s tax returns. Team Kerry is not amused:
Kerry spokesperson Jodi Seth chastised the Romney campaign for the false allegation.
“Months ago, the Romney team began making this false and convoluted excuse — the media investigated it and promptly reminded them that as a presidential candidate John Kerry had released twenty years of tax returns,” Seth said in a statement to TPM. “Still, months later they’re falling back on this same disproven excuse. In fact, if the Romney standard was the same as the Kerry standard for disclosure, the media would have the chance to review twenty years of Romney tax returns. Ed Gillespie should know better
Actually, I don’t believe that 20 years is enough. John McCain asked for and received 23 years of tax returns, and that was four years ago. I think we all deserve to know at least as much as John McCain knew when he looked at Romney’s records and picked Palin as his running mate instead.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/7/16/17469/9575
A Corporate Veteran Writes …
By James Fallows
Jul 16 2012, 9:33 AM ET
with a suggested question for Mitt Romney, bearing on when he was and was not responsible for the plans and decisions of Bain Capital:
If you weren’t in charge at Bain in 1999-2001, who was? If Mitt Romney had ‘retroactively’ retired — who was ‘proactively’ managing Bain Capital? Just a simple name — or a committee would do. (Next question, why wasn’t this person listed on the SEC forms?)
I’ve worked in corporate life for >35 years and always knew who was “in charge”. I’m sure Romney knows who was in charge at Bain during the time in question. After all this is the company that he founded.
Answering this simple question would clarify matters greatly. (BTW – “the person in charge” of a company is not supposed to be a secret. This isn’t the Sopranos you know.
The reader adds
I think this is becoming the opening of Obama’s end game. In chess — I think it’s called a fork. Can’t move here because I get taken — can’t move there because something else gets taken.
A long-time lawyer writes:
I haven’t heard anyone in the media make the point why Romney’s poor response to the Bain capital issue is so damning: In effect, Romney is saying that he should get a pass for what Bain did in his “absence” because he wasn’t running the company at the time (even though he was technically still its CEO), and/or that he should get a pass for telling the SEC that he was CEO of the company for three years while he had passed off those duties to others because he didn’t actually exercise control.
The Obama campaign mistakenly focused on whether that makes him a liar or a criminal. In my opinion, the more damning conclusion comes from accepting Romney’s story at face value. If he can’t deal with two big issues at the same time, and [won’t] take responsibility for what is done on his behalf (by those he chose to act on his behalf–because he was the sole owner of the company), how can he possibly be competent to be President of the United States
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/a-corporate-veteran-writes/259852/
The Scariest Chart for the Romney Campaign on Bain Attacks
Although there’s some polling evidence and Mitt Romney’s allies are getting worried, it’s a little early to tell how effective President Obama’s attacks on the Republican nominee’s time at Bain Capital will be — or how much that will affect the ultimate result of the campaign.
But we can say with some confidence that the attacks are getting Americans’ attention. Via Politico’s Alex Burns, here’s a chart that shows that Google searches for “Bain Capital” have increased exponentially since late last week, when reports about Romney’s confusing involvement — or non-involvement –with the firm from 1999 to 2002 started to surface. The numbers along the y-axis are Google’s search volume index, basically an arbitrary number that measures recent searches relative to past ones. It’s the rapid growth that should be scary for the Romney campaign — it means that voters are taking notice of the controversy, and makes it harder to change the subject to something less favorable to Obama.
The list of locations with the greatest interest has some red flags, too:
Massachusetts, United States
Virginia, United States
District of Columbia, United States
Ohio, United States
Pennsylvania, United States
Florida, United States
New York, United States
North Carolina, United States
Washington, United States
Arizona, United States
Of those 10, six are swing states.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/the-scariest-chart-for-the-romney-campaign-on-bain-attacks/259869/
Mittens Impossible: Romney Bombs on Fox News
By: Jason Easley
July 16th, 2012
Mitt Romney managed to do the impossible today. He bombed on Fox News by turning a softball question on his tax returns into a total word salad disaster.
Everything was going fine for Mitt Romney on Fox and Friends. Gretchen Carlson and crew were mixing lies about President Obama with his campaign’s talking points. Everything was just dandy for Mitt, until the topic of his tax returns came up.
Eric Bolling asked Romney if he thought releasing his tax returns would be a good way to go on offense, and the Republican nominee replied, “John McCain ran for president and released two years of tax returns. John Kerry ran for president, and his wife, who has hundreds of millions of dollars, she never released her tax returns. Somehow this wasn’t an issue. The Obama people keep on wanting more and more and more, more things to pick through, more things for their opposition research to try and make a mountain out of and distort and to be dishonest about.”
At that moment, Romney managed to do the impossible. He became a Republican who bombed on Fox News. Here is what the Romney campaign doesn’t grasp. The media has now gotten a hold of the tax returns issue, and they are demanding answers. (No, Mitt. Trying to change the subject to Fast and Furious is not going to work.)
http://www.politicususa.com/mitt-romney-impossible-bombs-fox-news.html
What Are the Gobshites Saying These Days?
By Charles P. Pierce
at 11:46AM
\
elcome back to our weekly feature on the state of Our National Dialogue, which is what Duke Ellington would have arranged if his entire orchestra was made up of kazoos, slide whistles, and whoopie cushions.
Yes, I’m going to go waaaayyyyyy out on a limb here and say that the phrase “retroactive retirement” is going to get itself a workout over the next couple of weeks, and I’m also going to declare it Worst. Talking. Point. Ever. and declare the competition closed sine die. Thanks to our old pal, Enron Ed Gillespie, for introducing an easily mocked phrase, and one that readily jumps to mind, into our political parlance. If his old bosses, Kenny Boy Lay and Jeff Skilling had “retroactively retired” back in the early Aughts, a lot of old people would still have their pensions.
Otherwise, the aroma of conservative flopsweat was everywhere on Sunday, as everybody from Bill (Wrong) Kristol to George Effing Will exhibited the biggest public case of buyer’s remorse since the people of Hamelin went looking for their children. Kristol told the people on the Fox Sunday show — aka, the last 25 people in American who actually listen to him — that Romney is “crazy” not to release his tax returns. And Effing Will? Over on This Week With The Cute Clinton Guy, he was beside himself, which is one effete charlatan too many for my way of thinking….
Oh, Mitt Romney is losing at this point in a big way. If something’s going to come out, get it out in a hurry. I do not know why, given that Mitt Romney knew the day that McCain lost in 2008 that he was going to run for president again that he didn’t get all of this out and tidy up some of his offshore accounts and all the rest. He’s done nothing illegal, nothing unseemly, nothing improper, but lots that impolitic. And this is — and he’s now in the politics business… The Republicans have now nominated someone from the financial sector at a time when the financial sector is in extremely bad odor. Hardly a day goes by, the LIBOR scandal, TARP, that conditioned the country to believe that we’re allowing the banks to keep profits private and socializing losses, all of this conditions the atmosphere in which this is occurring.
Wait. Whoa. Can a brother get a 20 here? George Effing Will has noticed that our major financial institutions have something of a, je ne sais quoi, how you say?, credibility problem with the general public these days? That the real problem is that the country, having seen its 401K’s evaporate, its jobs destroyed, its homes foreclosed upon, and its personal wealth sunk into Middle Earth, has been conditioned to believe that our banks are run by wolverines at whose table the Romneys have supped for two generations? Nothing gets by George, I’m telling you that.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/mitt-romney-retroactive-retirement-10720035#ixzz20pjXBNRD
Tee hee hee. Love Charles Pierce..
FROM CHARLES PIERCE:
All weekend, the question arose: What could possibly be in those tax returns that is so goddamn awful that Romney — who is still, remember, no worse than 50-50 to win this thing — is fighting so hard to keep it secret? The more I think about it, the more I believe that this is the answer to that question.
Nothing.
There is nothing in those tax returns that is in any way illegal …. He is not fighting the release of these returns to keep us from finding out the dark secrets about how stupid-wealthy he and his family are. He is fighting the release of these returns because he doesn’t think he should have to release them.
….This isn’t stubbornness. That’s often an acquired trait. What this is, fundamentally, is contempt. Contempt for the process, and contempt for the people who make their living in that process, and contempt for the people whose lives depend on that process. There are rules for The Help with which Willard Romney never has had to abide, and he has no intention of starting now. My dear young fellow, this simply is not done.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/why-mitt-romney-wont-release-tax-returns-10719962
THIS: “He is fighting the release of these returns because he doesn’t think he should have to release them.”
Which is why this muthafucka should not be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office leather.
Pew: Public Believes Tax Increase On High Earners Would Help The Economy, Improve Fairness
By a two-to-one margin, the public views President Barack Obama’s call to raise taxes on high-income earners as good for the economy, a new poll released Monday shows.
According to the latest survey from Pew Research Center, 44 percent believe that raising taxes on income above $250,000 would help the economy, while 22 percent say it would hurt the economy. The same percentage — 44 — says such a tax increase would make the current tax system more fair.
While strong majorities of Democrats support Obama’s proposal and believe that it would make the tax system more equitable, Republicans are not as virulently opposed as one might assume. Forty-one percent of Republicans say that it would hurt the economy — compared with 27 percent who believe it would help — but 24 percent say it would make no difference. And while 36 percent of Republicans believe the proposal would make the tax system less fair, 30 percent say it would make no difference at all and 25 percent say it would make the system more fair.
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entries/pew-public-believes-obamas-tax-increase-on-high
Political Animal
Blog
July 16, 2012 9:43 AM
The Bain Quatrain
By Ed Kilgore
So to get a little distance from last week’s big presidential campaign discussion, how did Mitt Romney’s campaign get to where it is today on the questions surrounding his stewardship of Bain Capital?
First, there was the fateful decision to make Romney’s success (the money he made plus the jobs the firm supposedly helped create) at Bain the centerpiece of his own campaign. This decision appears to have been the product of several calculations: it reinforced the simplistic economic monomania of their chosen campaign message; it avoided the kind of detailed policy-based message that might be dangerous for any Republican; they didn’t want to campaign on his Massachusetts record because of RomneyCare and other major flip-flops; and they figured an atmosphere of unprecedented hostility to government and politics was the best possible time to campaign as a technocratic businessman.
Second, there was a major effort to draw a big line in the sand in 1999 and make everything Bain did up until then a supreme achievement of American capitalism, and everything after that irrelevant to Mitt Romney. This effort was compounded by the equally firm decision to draw another line in the sand in 2010 as the maximum period of exposure of Romney’s tax returns; his “golden parachute” arrangement with Bain ended in 2009, so there’s something about the income he received from Bain during that period, or about how it was generated, or about how it was invested (quite possibly through Bain-managed funds) that’s dangerous. But at this point, the period of time after 1999 (and even after 2002) is unsurprisingly drawing a lot of attention. As Josh Marshall noted today in a Tweet: “Romneys point seems 2b that Satan took over as CEO of Bain immediately after his departure; started doing awful stuff he’d never have done.” TNR’s Alec MacGillis more thoroughly laid out how the media are likely to begin looking at this shoe question of timing:
[H]ow should we judge his responsibility for Bain activities? Well, on a sliding scale. It doesn’t have to be black-or-white. We can judge him as very responsible for its decisions pre-’99, as somewhat less responsible for its decisions between 1999 and 2002 and as less responsible yet for its activities post-2002. But I would argue that it’s not out of the realm of fairness to hold him slightly to account even for Bain’s activities post-2002—as the New York Times reported a while back, Romney continued to get a huge cut of Bain’s deals this past decade as part of his retirement deal. And it is, after all, the company he founded and whose direction he set in motion.
Third, and this was the major thrust of the Team Romney pushback last week, came the tactic of going for the capillaries of the attack, declaring them wrong-minded, over-the-top, or refuted, and trying to take the whole subject off the table (at least in terms of media coverage) for the duration. Thus the Romney campaign tried to reduce the entire “story” to Obama operative Stephanie Cutter’s suggestion that if Romney had actually lied on his SEC forms about his role at Bain he would have committed a felony, while it was obvious what Cutter was actually saying that he had lied to the American people. But the important point here is that Romney’s campaign and its media enablers are trying to find some sub-argument it can have been said to have “won,” thus “resolving” the entire “Bain issue” until after the election.
Fourth, and apparently intensifying this week, is a drive to make this whole back-and-forth over Romney and Bain just a tactical campaign issue that can be submerged in race-horse analysis. So today you have some of Romney’s most reliable mouthpieces (e.g., Jennifer Rubin) shouting joyfully that the Obama campaign’s focus on Bain represents a concession that the president must pull out all the stops right this minute because his whole campaign is about to collapse. This is part of a “July Panic” for the Democrats, you see. At the same time, Romney’s own campaign is trying to create its own horse-race noise, partly through a fresh attack on Obama’s alleged cronyism, and partly through renewed Veep speculation speculation (with carefully planted rumors today that Mitt might even announce something this very week).
We’ll see if this last gambit works, but it’s important to understand that if anyone manufactured the furor over Bain, and largely directed the development of the “story,” it was the Romney campaign, from the very beginning. It remains to be seen if they knew what they were doing, have outsmarted themselves, or simply had no better options.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_07/the_bain_quatrain038599.php
July 16, 2012 3:13 PM
Between Campaign Hysteria and Indifference
By Ed Kilgore
Kevin Drum had a fine if somewhat disrespectful riposte today to a political scientist who dismissed the attacks on Romney record at Bain Capital on grounds that in a polarized electorate a large majority of voters have already made up their minds:
Why do people say stuff like this? Of course the electorate is highly polarized. Of course 70% of voters have already made up their minds. So what? Campaign ads aren’t aimed at these people. They’re aimed at the small segment of the population that’s persuadable, just like every advertisement for every product in history. That’s not even Political Science 101. It’s more like junior high school level stuff.
Please, let’s all stop spouting this nonsense as if it were something profound. It’s not. All mass advertising is mostly wasted because the vast majority of the audience has no interest in the product for one reason or another. But some of the audience does. That’s the target. The fact that the target is far, far less than 100% of the viewers is news to no one
I’d go a bit further and suggest that one of the most maddening things about political talk these days is the constant false choice we are being presented between academics (reinforced this cycle by Republican bloviators who want to promote the idea that economic indicators have predetermined a GOP victory) saying nothing in the campaign matters and reporters and/or “opinion journalists” saying (or at least acting as though) everything matters.
The main task of political analysis (the word for what I like to think I’m doing when I’m not just immediately reacting to news) is to figure out those intersections of “fundamentals” and “campaign events” that interact between each other in ways that tangibly affect persuadable voters and turnout patterns. The Bain attacks on Romney matter, I suspect, not because they represent some day or week in which Team Obama “beat” Team Romney or generated more Tweets, but because they are reinforcing strategic trends that affect how persuadable and marginal voters are processing such real-world events as economic trends and the choices represented by the two major-party candidates. Maybe my analysis is right and maybe it’s wrong, but it’s a hell of a lot more interesting—and frankly, relevant to what we know about past elections—than a dialogue of the deaf in which one group of talkers is trying to prove the validity of some paper they published in 1991 and the other is trying to “win the news cycle.”
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_07/between_campaign_hysteria_and038613.php
The Bain Of This Campaign, Ctd
The latest on the controversy from the in-tray. One reader underscores a “minor but important distinction”:
I’ve noticed several references in the last few days to Mitt Romney’s receiving “$100,000 a year” from Bain Capital after he supposedly left the company. I think only once did you allude to the real truth: that the forms in question said that he was paid “at least” $100,000. Methinks it was likely more (possibly a lot more); but we just don’t know.
Another:
Just to add one thing to the Bain pile-on: in the 2008 election, we collectively decided that a candidate can be held accountable for… comments made by his pastor! I didn’t like it at the time, but here we are. Clearly, as a society, we’ve passed the point where a candidate can claim to hold no responsibility for the actions of the company of which he is the CEO, even if he (and Kessler et al) chooses to argue that the title was merely nominal.
Another:
Let’s stop for a moment and pretend everything Mitt and his campaign are currently saying is true. We’ll call this “the best case scenario.” Mitt left in 1999, had absolutely nothing to do with Bain from 1999 to 2002 (except to draw a 100k/year salary which I have neither heard them explain nor refute) and concentrated 100% of his energy on rescuing the Olympics, which we have to admit, ended up a success. In 2002 then, after the Olympics were over, Mitt retroactively retired back to 1999 and a new CEO was named, meaning that there was no CEO for three years.
This is their best-case scenario, correct? So their BEST CASE is that the founder and CEO left suddenly in 1999, without a succession plan in place, and therefore the company was left without a CEO for three years? What kind of businessman, manager or leader does that? Certainly not the type I want running my country, especially when his key selling point is his business savvy. It appears to me that even in his best-case scenario he demonstated rash thinking, poor judgment and an inability to effectively plan for the future.
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/07/the-bain-of-this-campaign-ctd-3.html
DON’T.LET.UP.ON.ROMNEY. LOL
16 Jul 2012 01:31 PM
David Gergen, Part Of The Bain Clique
You want to know what’s wrong with the press corps? In a sentence:
I have a past relationship with the top partners at Bain that is both personal and financial. I have worked with them in support of nonprofit organizations such as City Year. I have given a couple of paid speeches for Bain dinners, as I have for many other groups. I was on the board of a for-profit child care company, Bright Horizons, that was purchased by Bain Capital. It was a transaction with financial benefits for all board members and shareholders, including me
You know what’s even more wrong?
This very connection prompted CNN to ask Gergen to do some reporting on Bain. And – surprise! – Gergen simply ignores the key evidence on the table: Romney’s own sworn testimony that he kept involved in Bain activities and attended Bain company board meetings and remained CEO, sole owner and chairman of Bain all the way through till 2002. If you own a company, benefit from its profits, and are paid a salary, declaring that you had left it is an untrue SEC filing. Which is a felony.
Just as so many of Washington’s media elites could not bring themselves to indict their friends and business partners for war crimes – even though the evidence was overwhelming – so now buck-rakers like Gergen, knee deep in corporate cash, defend the men who helped them get rich. Gergen is part of the problem, not the solution.
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/07/david-gergen-part-of-the-bain-clique.html
We need some tech savy folks to create a video of all these media clowns like David Gergen, Roland Martin, Wolf Blitzer, etc. and expose them for the water-carrying, shilling hacks they are.
, Monday July 16, 2012
Senate Republicans Filibuster DISCLOSE Act
As expected, Senate Republicans on Monday blocked a vote on the DISCLOSE Act, a Democratic-led bill aimed at enhancing transparency in campaign contributions.
The cloture motion went down by a 51-44 margin, falling 9 votes short of the 60-vote threshold needed to overcome the GOP filibuster
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entries/senate-republicans-filibuster-disclose-act
TPM2012
Campaign Finance Advocates: Romney Throwing Stones ‘From His Big Glass House’
Benjy Sarlin July 16, 2012, 1:36 PM
Mitt Romney is rebooting his campaign with a bold new attack against President Obama: The White House, he claims, is a hotbed of “crony capitalism” designed to pay off big-time Democratic donors. Government transparency groups say that if Romney wants to attack the president, he better put his anonymous money where his mouth is.
Romney’s case against Obama is that clean-energy companies like Solyndra received loan guarantees (through a Bush administration program) after executives donated to the president’s 2008 campaign, and that other top contributors also received government benefits. The corruption claims have not held up well with fact-checkers or voters wary of personal attacks on a personally well-liked president, Romney is doubling down: The Obama administration is doling out “political payoffs.”
Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign donations, expressed shock and amazement that Romney would try to claim the high ground on rooting out undue influence from big donors. After all, Romney refuses to even name his top fundraisers, commonly called “bundlers,” in the first place. The information has been standard for presidents and presidential hopefuls in recent election cycles: Obama has named his bundlers, as did President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).
“It’s ironic that Romney would criticize Obama for doing something while shielding his campaign from being similarly criticized,” Krumholz told TPM. “Romney’s house isn’t exactly shatter-proof.”
By coincidence, a coalition of campaign finance advocates, including the Center for Responsive Politics, launched a petition drive Monday to demand Romney follow past precedent and release his bundlers.
Krumholz noted that it was entirely legitimate to scrutinize the Obama administration’s top donors to see whether they received any benefits, a concern she says has been endemic across all recent presidencies. But Romney’s historically weak standing makes him an unusual messenger, Krumholz said. “Unlike Obama and all other recent presidential nominees, Romney’s refusal to release bundlers is really sticking a finger in the eye of citizens who need this information to effectively monitor government.”
Romney’s dissonant position hasn’t gone unnoticed, either: His campaign surrogate Ed Gillespie was grilled Monday over how Romney can attack Obama while keeping his own bundlers hidden. Gillespie responded that the campaign had followed the law when it came to disclosures.
http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/romney-obama-crony-capitalism.php?ref=fpnewsfeed
Fehrnstrom’s Appointment Flap
A play for a state pension? Dukakis was outraged.
Posted Jul 16, 2012 3:24pm EDT
As his term as Governor of Massachusetts drew to a close in 2006, Governor Mitt Romney filled more than 200 slots on boards and commissions with party loyalists and state employees according to a 2006 report in the Boston Globe. Among them was current Romney advisor Eric Fehrnstrom, who was forced to resign from his position after drawing heat for becoming eligible for a hefty state pension.
Romney appointed Fehrnstrom to the Brookline Housing Authority in November of 2006. Fehrnstrom, who earned $161,000 as an aide to Romney would have been out of a state job when Romney left office in January 2007, and would have fallen two years short of requirement to invest in the state pension system.
The added years serving as a state employee made Fehrnstrom eligible to receive a few hundred thousand dollars during retirement that he would not have been eligible to receive if he had not been on the Housing Authority.
The Romney campaign today is attacking President Obama for his appointments with a new ad saying the President paid off donors with White House privileges and stimulus money while falling short on helping the middle class.
The Romney case is much smaller ball. The position on the Brookline Authority was only part-time with a salary of $5,000, but Fehrnstrom’s pension would have been based off his highest three earning years in the state government.
The Boston Globe reported that in the weeks prior to the appointment, Fehrnstrom had bought back into the state pension system by repaying the cash he had withdrawn when he left his previous state job as a spokesman for the Massachusetts Treasurer in 1999.
Fehrnstrom denied that his appointment was political and to receive a state pension, saying it was entirely based off his desire to serve the community.
“I’ve lived in Brookline for the past 20 years, and I have two children in the public schools, and I look forward to serving my local community,” he told the Boston Globe in a statement.
Both Romney and his chief of staff defend Fehrnstrom’s appointment.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/fehrnstroms-appointment-flap
DRIP, DRIP, DRIP! Mitt Romney actually thought he could run for POTUS, and would not be THOROUGHLY VETTED?
BWA HA HA HA
REPORT: Biggest Donor To Romney And GOP Did Business With Chinese Mob
By Ali Gharib on Jul 16, 2012 at 4:24 pm
Things are getting awkward for Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate who pledged to spend a “limitless” amount of money to get Mitt Romney elected. Adelson’s latest woes stem from business practices surrounding his lucrative casino in Macau, the only Chinese city with legalized gambling.
The Macau operation has long been under scrutiny but a new in-depth investigation from ProPublica and PBS focused on allegations of improper, and perhaps in some cases illegal, business dealings by Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands company in China. While focusing on the possibility that Sands violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act with a $700,000 payment to a Chinese associate, PBS also released documents that bolstered accusations of business ties between Adelson’s shop and Chinese organized crime figures.
PBS reports that Sands was clear that, in order to drive business from mainland China to their Macau casino, they would need to use “junkets” — trips arranged by private companies to ferry high-stakes gamblers to Macau:
Among the junket companies under scrutiny is a concern that records show was financed by Cheung Chi Tai, a Hong Kong businessman.
Cheung was named in a 1992 U.S. Senate report as a leader of a Chinese organized crime gang, or triad. A casino in Macau owned by Las Vegas Sands granted tens of millions of dollars in credit to a junket backed by Cheung, documents show.
Cheung did not respond to requests for comment.
Another document says that a Las Vegas Sands subsidiary did business with Charles Heung, a well-known Hong Kong film producer who was identified as an office holder in the Sun Yee On triad in the same 1992 Senate report. Heung, who has repeatedly denied any involvement in organized crime, did not return phone calls.
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/07/16/525131/adelson-romney-chinese-mob/
Mitt Romney Ad Taken Down Over Copyright Claim
Huff Post
One day after President Barack Obama’s campaign put out a brutal ad making fun of Mitt Romney’s singing abilities, the Romney campaign responded in kind with a web video mocking Obama for singing Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.”
However, on Monday afternoon, that video was no longer available. Viewers who tried to watch it were greeted with a fuzzy screen and the message:
This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by BMG_Rights_Management.
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/16/mitt-romney-ad_n_1677874.html
PASS IT ON
Dirty MOFOS! Wonder how their constituents feel about them repealing health care for Americans, and hoarding all the GOVERNMENT BENEFITS for themselves.
Check out this SHIT. Where are you Rikyrah?
Mormons and African Americans still face substantial prejudice, poll finds
The Washington Post
Substantial prejudice still exists for both Mormons and African Americans, despite shifting views on both groups since Barack Obama and Mitt Romney first ran for president four years ago.
Sizable pockets of voters say they would be uncomfortable with a close family member marrying someone who is black or Mormon, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, with Mormons facing slightly more distrust from people outside their community.
Twenty percent of voters report discomfort with the idea of a Mormon marrying into their immediate family; 14 percent say the same for African Americans. . For blacks, proximity appears key: Whites living in communities with few or no African Americans are more apt to express uneasiness than those in more diverse communities. That geographic distinction seems to matter less for Mormons.
Read on. Because lately I’m sure a few negroes have beared wittness to Mormons getting pulled over for driving while MORMON. /snark
Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mormons-african-americans-face-substantial-prejudice-poll-finds/2012/07/16/gJQAFBWcnW_story.html
yeah, they ain’t slick
Five Reasons the Super-Rich Need Government More Than the Rest of Us
By Paul Buchheit
Wealthy individuals and corporations want us to believe they’ve made it on their own, without the help of government or the American people. Billionaire financier Sanford Weill blustered, “We didn’t rely on somebody else to build what we built.” He was echoing the words of his famous predecessor, the formidable financier J. P. Morgan, who spouted, “I owe the public nothing.”
That’s the bull of Wall Street. There are at least five good reasons why the wealthiest Americans need government as much as the rest of us, and probably more.
1. Security
In his “People’s History,” Howard Zinn described colonial opposition to inequality in 1765: “A shoemaker named Ebenezer Macintosh led a mob in destroying the house of a rich Boston merchant named Andrew Oliver. Two weeks later, the crowd turned to the home of Thomas Hutchinson, symbol of the rich elite who ruled the colonies in the name of England. They smashed up his house with axes, drank the wine in his wine cellar, and looted the house of its furniture and other objects. A report by colony officials to England said that this was part of a larger scheme in which the houses of fifteen rich people were to be destroyed, as part of ‘a war of plunder, of general levelling and taking away the distinction of rich and poor.'”
That doesn’t happen much anymore. Of course, the super-rich aren’t taking any chances, with panic shelters and James Bond cars and personal surveillance drones. But the U.S. government will be helping them by spending $55 billion on Homeland Security next year, in addition to $673 billion for the military. The police, emergency services, and National Guard are trained to focus on crimes against wealth.
In the cities, business interests keep the police focused on the homeless and unemployed. And on drug users. A “Broken Windows” mentality, which promotes quick fixes of minor damage to discourage large-scale destruction, is being applied to human beings. Wealthy Americans can rest better at night knowing that the police are “stopping and frisking” in the streets of the poor neighborhoods.
http://www.nationofchange.org/print/21441
Stephen Covey, author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” died today at age 79, hospital officials say.
Romney’s Double Standard
If today’s economy is the Obama economy, as Romney repeats ad nauseam, and if Obama must be held accountable for every job lost in his first year, even though no one can seriously blame Obama for forces that were far stronger than a new president in his first few months, then surely and obviously, Mitt Romney is responsible for the actions of a company he co-founded, managed with only a small leave from 1984 – 1999, was paid a salary of more than six figures from 1999 – 2002, and reaped all the benefits of the profits from 1999 – 2002.
Obama’s first year, 2009, was shaped by his predecessor, and so can be legitimately argued as only partly his responsibility. Romney’s predecessor at Bain from 1984 – 1999 was, however, Romney. It was a company he created, whose staff he hired, whose practices he honed, whose acquisitions’ board meetings he continued to attend – and yet he wants to be excused from any responsibility for anything that happened from 1999 to 2002.
Sorry, Mitt. No deal. Own it all. Or are you actually ashamed of what your company did from 1999 – 2002?
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/07/romneys-double-standard.html
Yes, Romney Perjured Himself
The claim that he committed a felony by falsely reporting his role at Bain Capital under oath is what has really gotten under Romney’s skin. But it seems pretty clear to me that he signed a federal financial disclosure form, under the penalty of perjury, saying he had not been involved “in any way” with Bain after he left for Utah in February 1999. That’s a strong statement. And it is directly undercut by Romney’s own statement in his 2002 attempt to prove residency to run for governor:
Romney testified that “there were a number of social trips and business trips that brought [him] back to Massachusetts, board meetings” while he was running the Olympics. He added that he remained on the boards of several companies, including the Lifelike Co., in which Bain Capital held a stake until 2001…
“He succeeded in that three-year period in restoring confidence in the Olympic Games, closing that disastrous deficit and staging one of the most successful Olympic Games ever to occur on US soil,” said Peter L. Ebb from Ropes & Gray, [his lawyer at the 2002 hearing].
“Now while all that was going on, very much in the public eye, what happened to his private and public ties to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts? And the answer is they continued unabated just as they had.”
So the question of whether Romney committed a felony in his financial disclosure form is a very real one – because Romney and Romney’s lawyer provide the strongest evidence that it was perjury. Now we have more contemporaneous evidence that Romney perjured himself:
During the 2002 hearing — in a remark that has not been previously reported — Romney said that after he departed Bain in February 1999 he went through a transition period regarding his work in Boston.
When a lawyer challenging his eligibility asked Romney, “Did you remain more or less continuously in Salt Lake City from February ’99 to the end of the year,” Romney answered: “Actually, there was some transition away from my work in Boston for the first few months and then I pretty much stayed there after.” Trying to clarify this, the lawyer, after referring to this “transition,” asked, “So from February through the end of the year you were pretty much full-time out in Utah, right?” Romney replied: “Well again, the beginning of the year was a good deal of time back and forth, but towards the last half of the year it was pretty much exclusively in Utah.”
If there was a good deal of time back and forth in the first few months and some business conducted all the way through to December (“pretty much exclusively”), and if Romney’s own lawyer tells an inquiry that Romney’s work for Bain “continued unabated just as they had,” then it is incontrovertibly true that Romney’s statement under oath that he was not involved “in any way” in Bain business after February 1999 was a lie under oath.
I thought Republicans cared about perjury when it comes to high office. I mean, they impeached a sitting president for it. But their current candidate is an obvious perjurer and thereby a felon. How long will it take before this sinks in?
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/07/yes-romney-perjured-himself.html
ALL.OF.THIS!
http://3chicspolitico.com/2012/07/14/president-obamas-cbs-interview-his-campaigns-bain-focus-has-shades-of-enron-scandal/
Romney Campaign Sleepwalks into “Name Your Bundlers” Story
By David Weigel
Posted Monday, July 16, 2012, at 9:37 AM ET
Floating Condi Rice’s name as a possible VP pick didn’t really change the Bain storyline. Neither did Mitt Romney’s Modified Full Ginsburg* of TV interviews. Today, the campaign enters Door Number Three, attacking the Obama administration via web ads and soft Fox and Friends interviews over what we typically call “crony capitalism.”
Spot the problem. Obama and Priorities USA are making a series of proud class-war arguments when they attack Bain. Among them: The accusation (which happens to be true) that Mitt Romney’s benefited from regressive tax cuts, and his own tax cuts would enrich him further, and enrich his donors. We haven’t heard that used against many candidates, but we haven’t had many candidates as rich as Romney. (Adjusted for inflation, I think he’d be the president with the greatest personal wealth since Jefferson. Depends on how you want to calculate JFK’s wealth.)
The Romney response: Obama has crafted policy to help his donors. The proof is in disclosures which reveal how Obama campaign bundlers also invested in companies that got government contracts. George Kaiser fund-raised for the Obama campaign and invested in Solyndra, and by 2010 he was worrying — correctly! — that reporters would suss him out as the company sputtered.
Got it? We’ve arrived at the logic problem. We know that Obama’s bundlers stood to gain if, say, Solyndra did well, because Obama’s campaigns have disclosed the names of bundlers. But the Romney campaign hasn’t disclosed the names of bundlers.
So, this morning, the Romney campaign made Ed Gillespie available to talk about the new line. “Do you want to have an economy in which political appointees in D.C. make decisions about where tax money is spent based on who contributors were in the last cycle?” asked Gillespie, rhetorically.
NBC’s Peter Alexander asked the natural follow-up: Would Romney’s campaign reveal who its bundlers were? That way, you know, people could determine, now or in 2013, whether they were benefiting from Romney policy.
The issue here is the, uh, not so much the appointments and that kind of thing,” said Gillespie. “It’s the contracts, the subsidies, the loan guarantees… Gov. Romney’s contributors are made public, they’re disclosed, and we’re gonna continue to do that… we make public our donors.”
Sure, the names of people who donate more than $200 are disclosed in FEC reports. But Gillespie refused to say whether Romney would take the extra, always-damaging step of disclosing who bundled (stacked up donations from other people) for the campaign.
All of this occurs as the Senate prepares to vote on (and kill with a cloture vote) the new version of the campaign finance DISCLOSE Act.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/07/16/romney_campaign_sleepwalks_into_name_your_bundlers_story.html
July 16, 2012 9:43 AMThe Bain Quatrain
So to get a little distance from last week’s big presidential campaign discussion, how did Mitt Romney’s campaign get to where it is today on the questions surrounding his stewardship of Bain Capital?
First, there was the fateful decision to make Romney’s success (the money he made plus the jobs the firm supposedly helped create) at Bain the centerpiece of his own campaign. This decision appears to have been the product of several calculations: it reinforced the simplistic economic monomania of their chosen campaign message; it avoided the kind of detailed policy-based message that might be dangerous for any Republican; they didn’t want to campaign on his Massachusetts record because of RomneyCare and other major flip-flops; and they figured an atmosphere of unprecedented hostility to government and politics was the best possible time to campaign as a technocratic businessman.
Second, there was a major effort to draw a big line in the sand in 1999 and make everything Bain did up until then a supreme achievement of American capitalism, and everything after that irrelevant to Mitt Romney. This effort was compounded by the equally firm decision to draw another line in the sand in 2010 as the maximum period of exposure of Romney’s tax returns; his “golden parachute” arrangement with Bain ended in 2009, so there’s something about the income he received from Bain during that period, or about how it was generated, or about how it was invested (quite possibly through Bain-managed funds) that’s dangerous. But at this point, the period of time after 1999 (and even after 2002) is unsurprisingly drawing a lot of attention.
As Josh Marshall noted today in a Tweet: “Romneys point seems 2b that Satan took over as CEO of Bain immediately after his departure; started doing awful stuff he’d never have done.” TNR’s Alec MacGillis more thoroughly laid out how the media are likely to begin looking at this shoe question of timing:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/
Every INTELLIGENT VOTER’S GUIDE TO ELECTIONEERING BUNK
PDF
http://thenation.s3.amazonaws.com/VotersGuidetoElectioneeringBunk/VotersGuide3Pages.pdf
Desperation leads to ‘retroactive’ rationalizations
By Steve Benen – Mon Jul 16, 2012 8:35 AM EDT
.As has become painfully clear of late, Mitt Romney doesn’t want any responsibility for the activities of his private-equity firm, Bain Capital, after February 1999. He was still the CEO, president, chairman, and sole stockholder of Bain for years after that point, and still received a six-figure salary, but the Republican and his defenders say those facts don’t count.
Yesterday, one of Romney’s senior adviser, Republican strategist Ed Gillespie, made a new argument on “Meet the Press.”
For those who can’t watch clips online, Gillespie’s new defense is that Romney “actually retired retroactively.” This wasn’t a verbal slip-up — Gillespie used the same phrase on CNN.
In other words, as far as the Romney campaign is concerned, the candidate is absolved of responsibility for his company’s investments, layoffs, and bankruptcies because Romney “retroactively” erased those years from his business record, perhaps taking advantage of some kind of loophole in the space-time continuum. I suspect Gillespie at this point wishes he could retroactively come up with a new talking point.
Meanwhile, additional details continue to come to light. The Huffington Post reported over the weekend on a corporate document filed with Massachusetts in December 2002, soon after Romney’s election as governor, that identified him as one of two managing members of Bain Capital Investors, LLC “authorized to execute, acknowledge, deliver and record any recordable instrument purporting to affect an interest in real property, whether to be recorded with a Registry of Deeds or with a District Office of the Land Court.”
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The Boston Globe also reported on Saturday that Romney’s version of events has “evolved” over time, and some of his accounts contradict one another. That’s never a good sign.
And finally, Chris Hayes had a very interesting discussion yesterday with Ed Conard, a former Romney colleague and former partner at Bain Capital, who conceded that Romney was “legally” the chief executive officer and sole owner of Bain Capital until 2002, not 1999.
.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/16/12766354-desperation-leads-to-retroactive-rationalizations?lite
July 16, 2012
MEMORANDUM TO INTERESTED PARTIES
FROM: Ben LaBolt, National Press Secretary
SUBJECT: Unanswered Questions about Mitt Romney’s RETROACTIVE RETIREMENT\
http://secure.assets.bostatic.com/pdfs/D7BD677D6092B258961572D6585DEF1702F4578E70A11AFD350C4F20E97D9A39/LaBolt-Memo-7.16.12.pdf
GOP pressures Romney: release the tax returns
By Steve Benen – Mon Jul 16, 2012 9:58 AM EDT.
Mitt Romney thought he could resolve the controversy surrounding his hidden tax returns once and for all on Friday. Romney, who has released his 2010 returns and promises to eventually release the 2011 materials, declared on CNN, “[T]hat’s what we’re going to put out…. Those are the two years that people are going to have.”
The firm rejection of additional disclosure was apparently intended to shut down the discussion altogether. It appears that no one, not even his own allies, found this persuasive. Indeed, instead of settling the issue, Romney appears to have made it worse.
Yesterday on Fox News, for example, Bill Kristol presented Romney with some advice: “Here is what he should do: he should release the tax returns tomorrow. It’s crazy. You’ve got to release 6, 8, 10 years of back tax returns.”
If it were just Kristol, Romney might have an easier time defending his secrecy, but Kristol is just the beginning. George Will said yesterday that Romney “must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.” Republican strategist Matthew Dowd added “there’s obviously something there” in Romney’s returns that he doesn’t want voters to see.
Republican strategist John Weaver said, “Stop demanding an apology, release your tax returns.” Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (R) added, “I think he ought to release everything. I believe in total transparency. You know if you have things to hide, then you may be doing things wrong.”
Keep in mind, those quotes are just from the weekend, and don’t include the many Republicans, including top Romney allies, who’ve been saying the same thing for a while: release the damn returns.
And here’s the real kicker: what’s Romney’s explanation to defend the lack of disclosure? He doesn’t have one.
——————————————————————————–
After months of questions about why he won’t release the tax returns, Romney’s only attempt at an explanation came Friday, when he said additional disclosure isn’t “necessary.” Neither he nor his aides have managed to come up with a more compelling spin to justify the secrecy
Given the increasingly-serious questions about his Bain background, offshore finances, controversial investments, unanswered questions about his individual retirement account that somehow ended up with more than $100 million, and claims about his business that contradict SEC filings, releasing these materials would go a long way in helping Romney move past the controversies.
But he still refuses. Romney was willing to turn over 23 years of tax returns to John McCain’s campaign team four years ago, but he doesn’t want American voters to see what McCain saw.
Also note, the Romney campaign argued yesterday that if John Kerry only released two years’ worth of tax returns, it’s acceptable that Romney do the same. The problem with this argument is that it’s a lie — during the 2004 race, voters had access to Kerry’s tax returns for the previous 20 years. If Romney wants to meet Kerry’s standard for disclosure, he has a long way to go.
And finally, let’s also not forget that when President Obama sends the Senate a nominee for a cabinet post, Senate Republicans require the nominee turn over at least three years’ worth of tax returns. By Senate GOP standards, Romney wouldn’t even be eligible for a confirmation hearing.
.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/16/12767580-gop-pressures-romney-release-the-tax-returns?lite
Romney was on Fox this morning. Said he’s putting out 2 years and that’s it. He’s scurred. Mentioning John Kerry’s wife’s wealth. WTF does that have to do with Bain and his returns? He knows releasing those returns will be DAMAGING!
We’re not ‘going broke’
By Steve Benen – Mon Jul 16, 2012 8:00 AM EDT.
Sen. Rob Portman (R) of Ohio is getting plenty of attention lately, in large part because we know he’s being considered for the Republican vice presidential nomination. And given his notoriety, it was interesting to see Portman, George W. Bush’s former budget director, deliver his party’s weekly address over the weekend, arguing, “We need to face facts: we’re going broke.”
There was some irony in Portman’s complaint: the senator simultaneously complained about the deficit and proposed tax increases on the wealthy that would reduce the deficit.
But that’s not the interesting part. Rather, there are two broader angles to keep in mind here. The first is that Portman seems unnervingly confused about what “broke” means. We learned recently that global demand for U.S. Treasuries is so remarkably strong that investors will literally pay us to borrow their money.
Imagine a family household with a steady income, but high debts. If banks are tripping over one another, begging that family to borrow the banks’ money — charging negative interest rates — is that family broke? Of course not. But that’s the situation the United States is in. On the contrary, we have the world’s largest economy, we’re paying our bills, and it’s literally never been so easy for us to borrow as much as we want. Either Portman is ignorant about America’ finances or he’s trying to deceive the public.
But even if we put all of that aside, the other problem here is that Portman is focusing on the wrong problem: he sees the debt as the main issue, while unemployment is what really matters.
——————————————————————————–
Indeed, none other than George W. Bush — Portman’s former boss — has a new book out this week, which argues, among other things, that prioritizing deficit reduction right now is a mistake. This week’s Republican address pushed a message that even Republicans don’t agree with.
Taken together, we need to face facts: Rob Portman doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about.
.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/16/12765902-were-not-going-broke?lite
Posted at 09:02 AM ET, 07/16/2012
The Morning Plum: Mitt Romney is boxed in on Bain
By Greg Sargent
When it comes to the argument over the true nature of Mitt Romney’s ties to Bain Capital after 1999, when the controversial deals took place, there are two separate questions that — for all practical political purposes — don’t necessarily have the same answer:
1) Has it been proven that Romney asserted direct managerial control over the company during the period in question, or that he personally approved or consulted on any of the deals that are now the subject of the Obama campaign’s attacks?
2) Even if the answer to the above is No, should Romney still be held partly responsible for — and is it fair to associate him — the activities of a company which still listed him as chairman and CEO, which Romney himself co-founded and built up, and which retained ties to Romney in complicated ways during the disputed period?
The Romney campaign wants this dispute to start and end with the first question. That’s because we don’t have evidence that Romney was directly involved in the deals in question. But is it unreasonable or out of bounds for Democrats to continue asking the second question, particularly given the convoluted nature of his continued ties to the company and the continued revelations about those ties? Is this association really not fair game? That’s a tough case to make.
Some news outlets continue to conflate the above two questions. But today’s New York Times, in its big piece wrapping up what we now know about this whole story, rightly notes that the political argument is focused partly on the second question, and that there are no clean answers.
The Times presents both sides of the argument. It notes that there is “no evidence” Romney exercised control over Bain in the disputed period, but it also points out that “his campaign has declined to say if he attended any meetings or had any other contact with Bain during the period.”
Ultimately, Romney is now in a box. Obama and his advisers don’t mind if he keeps denying direct control over the company. By continuing to hit Romney over the deals, they are forcing him to continue denying responsibility for the activities of a firm at which he continued to be listed as CEO and chairman. This will be a hard argument for Romney to make convincingly, and it reinforces the Obama campaign’s larger message about Romney’s shiftiness and lack of transparency about his finances. And the Romney camp’s jargony rebuttals are far more difficult to grasp than is the Obama camp’s continued question: Doesn’t the buck stop with you?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line
Romney’s Tax Returns Could Cost Him the Election
Posted: 07/16/2012 8:41 am
Abby Huntsman- JOHN HUNTSMAN’S DAUGHTER
In the spring of 2008, President Obama was facing the most difficult challenge of his campaign — his association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Wright, the pastor at Obama’s local church and the man who presided over his wedding to Michelle, was increasingly seen as a polarizing political figure. As part of an effort to diffuse the situation, he gave an historic speech at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia that served to distance himself from Wright, as well as elevate the conversation beyond political attack ads. Obama’s approach was perfectly executed — attack the allegations head on, and focus the conversation on another topic of greater importance.
Although different in substance, Romney faces a similar situation today. For Obama, there were questions about his views with regards to race and religion. Today, as Romney refuses to release more than two years of tax returns, he gives his opposition the opportunity to remind voters of some of his shortcomings. First, his “flip flopping” nature (is he hiding something or not?); and, second, the idea that he is rich, out of touch and just “not like me” (scores of bank accounts across Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and beyond isn’t exactly common among the middle class).
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/abby-huntsman/mitt-romney-tax-returns_b_1675711.html
Sources: N.Y. to let Jeremy Lin walk
With point guard Raymond Felton on his way to New York via a sign-and-trade deal with the Portland Trail Blazers, evidence is mounting that the Knicks will not match the Houston Rockets’ offer sheet to Jeremy Lin.
http://espn.go.com/dallas/nba/story/_/id/8168185/2012-nba-free-agency-new-york-knicks-match-jeremy-lin-houston-rockets-offer-sheet-sources-say
July 16, 2012
Why Won’t Romney Release More Tax Returns?
Posted by John Cassidy
I’m following Mitt Romney’s example and vacationing in New England this week, but the Sunday-morning talk shows make it to out to Cape Cod, and I couldn’t quite go cold turkey. In addition to much rehashing of Friday’s Bain Capital story, the network gabfests actually generated some news on another front: three well known Republican pundits—Bill Kristol, George Will, and Matthew Dowd—all criticized Mitt Romney for not releasing more of his tax returns.
“He should release the tax returns tomorrow: it’s crazy,” Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “You gotta release six, eight, ten years of back tax returns. Take the hit for a day or two.” Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” Will, the veteran columnist, agreed, saying, “If something going to come out, get it out in a hurry.” And Dowd, who was the chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004, said Romney’s refusal to release returns for the years prior to 2010 was a sign of his “arrogance.”
With even prominent Republicans saying that his current stance is unsustainable, the obvious question to ask is: Why is the Mittster being so obstinate? He surely isn’t standing on principle, for what principle would that be? The notion that very rich men running for President shouldn’t have to disclose as much information about their personal finances as less wealthy candidates? The principal that if your father also ran for President, and released twelve years of tax returns, then you can release just two and claim the family average is a respectable seven years?
No. It’s only fair to assume that Mitt is doing what he always does: acting on the basis of a careful cost-benefit analysis. Will’s comments on this were spot on: “The cost of not releasing the returns are clear,” he said. “Therefore, [Romney] must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.” But what information could the earlier tax returns contain that would be so damaging if it were brought out into the open? Obviously, we are entering the realm of speculation, but Romney has invited it. Here are four possibilities:
1. Extremely high levels of income. According to the tax filings and estimates he released earlier this year, Romney earned about $21.7 million in 2010 and $20.9 million in 2010—most of it from capital gains on investments related to Bain Capital. This is a lot of money, but Romney may well have earned considerably more in earlier years. His ten-year severance agreement with Bain Capital ended in 2009. The terms of it haven’t been revealed, but quite probably it allowed Romney to keep pocketing a substantial portion of the firm’s profits. And the years before 2008 were massively successful ones for Bain and other private-equity firms.
But even if Romney earned fifty million dollars a year in some years, would be that be sufficient reason for him to keep his returns secret? I doubt it. Americans don’t begrudge people a telephone-number income as long as they are perceived to have earned it. And insofar as any private-equity mogul earns the money he makes, Romney earned his. He created Bain Capital and ran it for (at least) fifteen years.
2. More offshore accounts. The Obama campaign has already made much of Romney’s Swiss bank account, his Bermuda-based investment company, and the income he receives from Bain Capital-related trusts that are domiciled in the Cayman Islands. It is perfectly possible that in the years before 2010, Romney and his financial advisers were even more aggressive in their use of overseas investment vehicles and tax shields. Hedge funds and private-equity funds, such as Bain Capital, routinely exploit offshore shell companies, to minimize their tax burdens but also to escape government regulation and oversight.
Here, too, though, I doubt whether this would be sufficient reason to justify not releasing the returns. Thanks to the Obama campaign, Romney’s name is already indubitably linked to offshore accounts. I doubt whether the average American is very shocked. Most people know full well that one of the reasons rich people employ so many fancy accountants and tax lawyers is to shield as much of their income from tax as possible, and that one of the ways they do this is by keeping cash offshore.
3. Politically explosive investments. Over the years, Bain Capital invested in all sorts of companies, including some that specialized in helping to outsource and offshore some of their operations, and one, a medical-waste-disposal company, that helped family-planning clinics to dispose of aborted fetuses. Romney, even after he left, kept much of his money in investment funds managed by the firm.
It is conceivable that Romney’s earlier tax returns reveal that he made a lot of money out of some controversial investments. Again, though, it is difficult to see how this would justify taking more heat on the tax issue. The Obama campaign is already attacking him mercilessly for Bain’s actions in shutting down plants, slashing wages, shifting production offshore, and driving companies into bankruptcy while extracting hefty fees from them. Unless Romney were investing in a Chinese sweatshop company that was taking business from American firms, or helping to finance a chain of for-profit abortion clinics, most of the damage has already been done.
4. A very, very low tax rate. Romney’s filings indicate that his effective federal income-tax rate in 2010 was 13.9 per cent, and his estimated rate for 2011 is 15.4 per cent. Those figures reflect the fifteen-per-cent tax rate on capital gains and dividend income. But it is perfectly possible that in earlier years he paid even lower rates. Since his 2010 and 2011 returns were prepared during an election campaign, it seems likely that his accountants took a conservative approach to deductions and other aspects of his finances. In prior years, they may well have been more aggressive. And maybe at some point Romney suffered some investment losses that enabled him to reduce his tax burden in subsequent years. Obviously, we don’t know. But there may have been a year in which Romney’s federal tax rate was in the single figures, and possibly even close to zero.
This seems pretty unlikely. But, hey, as Matthew Dowd noted, “there’s obviously something there, because if there was nothing there, he would say, ‘Have at it.’ ”
See the Political Scene for The New Yorker’s full coverage of the campaign season.
Photograph by Evan Vucci/AP Photo.
.Keywords2012election;Mitt
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/07/why-wont-romney-release-more-tax-returns.html#ixzz20nH7dmYB
Why are They Eating Their Own?
by BooMan
Mon Jul 16th, 2012 at 12:08:49 AM EST
Mitt Romney is taking a beating only a red-headed step-child could fully understand. And he’s taking it from conservatives who want nothing to do with his obfuscation and lack of transparency.
Said [George] Will: “If something’s going to come out, get it out in a hurry. I do not know why, given that Mitt Romney knew the day that McCain lost in 2008 that he was going to run for president again that he didn’t get all of this out and tidy up some of his offshore accounts and all the rest. The cost of not releasing the returns are clear. Therefore, he must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.”
GOP strategist Matthew Dowd had a similar view: “There’s obviously something there, because if there was nothing there, he would say, ‘Have at it.’ So there’s obviously something there that compromises what he said in the past about something.”
Meanwhile, William Kristol told Fox News: “He should release the tax returns tomorrow. It’s crazy. You gotta release six, eight, 10 years of back tax returns. Take the hit for a day or two.”
Hell, even the governor of Alabama thinks that Romney should release his tax returns, even if he’s kind of waffling about the issue.
If Mitt Romney thought the Republican Establishment or the base was going to have his back on this, he was obviously mistaken. So, what can we conclude from this? Why are high-powered Republican commentators and politicians knee-capping their nominee in such a public manner?
Don’t be tempted to believe that these folks are standing up for principle. I know you can’t be that stupid. They’re probably in two camps. The first camp thinks Romney is merely making a miscalculation and they think they’re offering him savvy political advice. The second camp knows why Romney isn’t releasing his tax returns and they’ve given up on him winning the election. They’re straight-up saying that Romney’s hiding something so devastating that he’s unelectable. They just want to disassociate themselves from him and hope that he doesn’t have negative coattails on House and Senate races.
William Kristol is in the first (stupid) category. George Will and Matt Dowd are in the latter (smart) category.
http://www.boomantribune.com/
Why Does Romney Act So Guilty?
by BooMan
Sun Jul 15th, 2012 at 08:06:48 PM EST
I understand Mitt Romney’s basic argument, which is that he took a paid leave of absence from Bain Capital in 1999 and that he didn’t exercise any executive authority over the business again afterward. He didn’t originally know that he wouldn’t be coming back, so he continued to act as CEO in some capacities, like filling out paperwork or even, perhaps, attending a board meeting of some subsidiary, but he can’t be blamed for decisions that the company made while he was focused on the Olympics or launching his gubernatorial bid. That’s basically the theme the right is using to defend him, and it makes sense as far as it goes. The problem is that it doesn’t go very far.
Let’s just phrase the charge a little differently and say that Mitt Romney enriched himself by owning a business that made huge profits by outsourcing jobs and downsizing companies. Can he dispute that he personally profited as the CEO, chairman, a sole shareholder of Bain Capital in the 1999-2002 period? Obviously, he cannot make that claim.
Moreover, if he didn’t like what the company was doing, he had the power to make them stop. I haven’t seen Romney come out and claim ignorance about Bain’s activities. He’s just saying that he didn’t make those decisions. At best, he approved those deals retroactively by not expressing any displeasure.
So, what is Romney’s defense? That he didn’t work on the deals even though he made tons of money off them and never complained?
That’s why Dick Durbin said he was running away from Bain Capital like a scalded cat. It was his company. His baby. He created it. He grew it. He wants us to admire his work there so much that we make him president. And then he turns around and says, “I didn’t have anything to do with that.” I mean, that’s just remarkable. And it’s not like Bain Capital behaved any differently once Romney took his leave of absence. He’s just trying to avoid responsibility for certain deals, even though there is nothing particularly special about those deals.
Imagine if Bernie Madoff had taken a leave of absence a few years before he got busted. Would anyone take him seriously if he claimed he wasn’t a bad guy because some of the fraud took place while he was on his paid leave of absence? Either what Bain Capital did in 1999-2002 was shameful or it wasn’t. If it was shameful, then so is what Bain Capital did throughout the 1990’s.
Why is Romney acting like his company was a criminal enterprise the second he stopped running it, and not a moment before?
And, you know, you have to ask some lawyers if Romney committed any felonies. I don’t think he set out to commit perjury or defraud anyone, but he might have done those things inadvertently. You know, the law can be tricky that way.
http://www.boomantribune.com/
Romney’s Deeper And Deeper Hole
If today is the Romney campaign’s idea of how to get out of the box Romney is in, they’re even less ready for prime time than I thought. This is, well, amazing:
There may have been a thought at the time that it could be part time, but it was not part time,” [Romney spokesman Ed] Gillespie said. “He took a leave of absence and in fact he ended up not going back at all, and retired retroactively to 1999 as a result,” he added.
He ended up not going back at all? So I presume since he retroactively retired, he also paid back the salary he earned during that period. But apart from that, how does the Romney campaign explain the following claims made under oath by Romney and his lawyer testifying about his Massachusetts residence to qualify for the race for governor:
Romney testified that “there were a number of social trips and business trips that brought [him] back to Massachusetts, board meetings” while he was running the Olympics. He added that he remained on the boards of several companies, including the Lifelike Co., in which Bain Capital held a stake until 2001…
“He succeeded in that three-year period in restoring confidence in the Olympic Games, closing that disastrous deficit and staging one of the most successful Olympic Games ever to occur on US soil,” said Peter L. Ebb from Ropes & Gray, [his lawyer at the 2002 hearing].
“Now while all that was going on, very much in the public eye, what happened to his private and public ties to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts? And the answer is they continued unabated just as they had.”
So either Ed Gillespie and Romney are lying now, or Romney and his lawyer were lying then. Which is it? They were and are obviously trying to have it every which way to suit whatever purpose at the moment. But legally, CEOs are responsible for their companies, whether they are managing them full time, part time or even retroactively retiring while managing them. Period. The buck stops with the CEO, just as much as it stops with a president. As a Bain partner at the time said today:
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/07/romneys-deeper-and-deeper-hole.html
Romney’s Bain Yielded Private Gains, Socialized Losses
By Anthony Luzzatto Gardner Jul 15, 2012 5:30 PM CT
Mitt Romney touts his business acumen and job-creation record as a key qualification for being the next U.S. president.
What’s clear from a review of the public record during his management of the private-equity firm Bain Capital from 1985 to 1999 is that Romney was fabulously successful in generating high returns for its investors. He did so, in large part, through heavy use of tax-deductible debt, usually to finance outsized dividends for the firm’s partners and investors. When some of the investments went bad, workers and creditors felt most of the pain. Romney privatized the gains and socialized the losses.
What’s less clear is how his skills are relevant to the job of overseeing the U.S. economy, strengthening competitiveness and looking out for the welfare of the general public, especially the middle class.
Thanks to leverage, 10 of roughly 67 major deals by Bain Capital during Romney’s watch produced about 70 percent of the firm’s profits. Four of those 10 deals, as well as others, later wound up in bankruptcy. It’s worth examining some of them to understand Romney’s investment style at Bain Capital.
In 1986, in one of its earliest deals, Bain Capital acquired Accuride Corp., a manufacturer of aluminum truck wheels. The purchase was 97.5 percent financed by debt, a high level of leverage under any circumstances. It was especially burdensome for a company that was exposed to aluminum-price volatility and cyclical automotive production.
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Casino Capitalism
Forty-to-one leverage is casino capitalism that hugely magnifies gains and losses. Bain Capital wisely chose to flip the company fast: After 18 months, it sold Accuride, converting its $2.6 million sliver of equity into a $61 million capital gain. That deal, which yielded a 1,123 percent annualized return, was critical to Bain Capital’s early success and led the firm to keep maximizing the use of leverage.
In 1992, Bain Capital bought American Pad & Paper by financing 87 percent of the purchase price. In the next three years, Ampad borrowed to make acquisitions, repay existing debt and pay Bain Capital and its investors $60 million in dividends.
As a result, the company’s debt swelled from $11 million in 1993 to $444 million by 1995. The $14 million in annual interest expense on this debt dwarfed the company’s $4.7 million operating cash flow. The proceeds of an initial public offering in July 1996 were used to pay Bain Capital $48 million for part of its stake and to reduce the company’s debt to $270 million.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-15/romney-s-bain-yielded-private-gains-socialized-losses.html
Good Morning, Everyone :)
Did anyone see HBO’s “Network’? It’s written by West Wing’s Aaron Sorkin. GREAT SHOW!
Rational Irrationality
John Cassidy on politics, economics, and more.
July 16, 2012
Why Won’t Romney Release More Tax Returns?
Posted by John Cassidy
I’m following Mitt Romney’s example and vacationing in New England this week, but the Sunday-morning talk shows make it to out to Cape Cod, and I couldn’t quite go cold turkey. In addition to much rehashing of Friday’s Bain Capital story, the network gabfests actually generated some news on another front: three well known Republican pundits—Bill Kristol, George Will, and Matthew Dowd—all criticized Mitt Romney for not releasing more of his tax returns.
“He should release the tax returns tomorrow: it’s crazy,” Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “You gotta release six, eight, ten years of back tax returns. Take the hit for a day or two.” Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” Will, the veteran columnist, agreed, saying, “If something going to come out, get it out in a hurry.” And Dowd, who was the chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004, said Romney’s refusal to release returns for the years prior to 2010 was a sign of his “arrogance.”
With even prominent Republicans saying that his current stance is unsustainable, the obvious question to ask is: Why is the Mittster being so obstinate? He surely isn’t standing on principle, for what principle would that be? The notion that very rich men running for President shouldn’t have to disclose as much information about their personal finances as less wealthy candidates? The principal that if your father also ran for President, and released twelve years of tax returns, then you can release just two and claim the family average is a respectable seven years?
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Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/07/why-wont-romney-release-more-tax-returns.html#ixzz20mzAKIAA
Jul 16, 2012
Obama campaign keeps up the pressure on Bain
Good morning from The Oval, on a day when President Obama and his re-election team are taking the fight to Mitt Romney and, geographically at least, House Speaker John Boehner.
The campaign kicked off the day with a memorandum entitled “Unanswered Questions About Mitt Romney’s ‘Retroactive Retirement.'” It’s intended to create even more doubts about Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital, which he either left in 1999 or 2002, depending on your interpretation.
With Romney on the defensive over his lucrative business career and still refusing to release his tax returns from that time, the Obama camp clearly thinks there is more to gain from going on the attack. To date, however, national and key state polls remain virtually deadlocked.
Our in-box contained this little missive from campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt:
While Romney has repeatedly tried to distance himself from Bain’s decisions after February 1999, he has also hypocritically taken credit for jobs created well after the 1999 end date that he cites. He can’t have it both ways.
If Romney followed decades of precedent set in motion by his father, who released 12 years of tax returns, as well as the minutes from Bain Capital board meetings, the American people could finally learn to what extent Mitt Romney was involved with the actions at Bain Capital following 1999.
This week, Mitt Romney has the opportunity to provide a full accounting of his tenure at Bain Capital, the central premise of his campaign and the opportunity to demonstrate whether or not he was the job creator he claims to be.
Loving it. My daddy’s name was Ben. Don’t mess with BEN.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2012/07/obama-campaign-keeps-up-the-pressure-on-bain/1#.UAQBmXA1iYU
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