Not This Sh%$ AGain!

Once again, after seeing the continued popularity of Donald Trump amongst the Republican party base, the punditry reach into their bag, and pull out Willard Mitt Rmoney. Give me a f%$#ing break:

Huge congratulations to Suffolk University and the Boston Globe for crafting a poll in New Hampshire that actually offers an interesting bit of news. The story of the Republican primary in the state has largely been the same for months, with Donald Trump holding a steady and robust lead. In the Real Clear Politics polling average, he's up 15 points. In Suffolk's new poll, he's up 10 -- but with a healthy-sized number of undecideds.



But then Suffolk and the Globe added something to the mix. If we added Mitt Romney to the list, they asked, would you switch to him? For 30 percent of respondents, the answer was "yes." Romney leads all other Republicans by a two-to-one margin. Trump loses a third of his support.

Seriously, can we give this a rest?

Rmoney is popular because He is Not Running., and as soon as he joined the race, he would be forced to fall into lockstep with the batsh%$ insane wing of the party base, and we would be back to where we started.

The depressing thing about this is that on the other side of the aisle, the favored candidate of the pundit class, Hillary Clinton is the weakest candidate against "The Donald."  (Yes, the polling shows that O'Malley even though a cipher to most voters polls slightly better against Trump.)

So, it's "insane" to  nominate Donald trump, but the only sane thing for the Democrats to do is nominate the candidate that he is most likely to beat.

Could the pundit class please go Cheney themselves?

Jon Stewart Weeps

Mitt Rmoney has announced that he will not be running for President in 2016:

On a ski lift high above the powdery slopes of Deer Valley, Utah, Mitt Romney made it clear: His quest for the White House, which had dominated nearly a decade of his life, was coming to a close.
In a talk with his eldest son, Tagg, between runs down the mountain on Monday, Mr. Romney, 67, said he had all but decided against a third bid for the White House.

The conversation, according to a person familiar with it, came after days of increasingly gloomy news reached the Romney family.

Donors who supported him last time refused to commit to his campaign. Key operatives were signing up with former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida. The Republican establishment that lifted Mr. Romney to the nomination in 2012 in the face of scrappy opposition had moved on.

I don't think that there is anyone, besides the Mittster, who is more disappointed by this than the writers of topical comedy.

They already had the jokes written, because they could have used their jokes from 2012 and 2008 with a few tweaks.

For the rest of us though, it is a win.

Who Knew that Big Bird Came from Jersey?

Some Navel Gazing on My Part

I've been fairly clear on this blog that I think that various actions of Obama renders him unfit to be President.^*

I also understand that there are people who make arguments that could be called compelling to vote for him, most notably the Rude Pundit's, "In the End, Vote for Obama Because F%$# Romney,"^† (%$# mine)  because Mitt Romney is unfit to be President as well.

While I was in Ashland, I talked with my dad about this, and explained to him my position, and further explained that, living in Maryland, I had no moral dilemma, because my vote for President had not consequence.

He asked me what I would do if I lived in a battleground state, and I responded, "That way madness lies."

My was flip, and it was a cop out. 

I simply don't know what I would do if I lived in Ohio, or Virginia, or Florida,^‡ or New Hampshire, or Wisconsin, or Colorado, or Iowa, and any statement that I might make would be self serving and shallow, and ultimately meaningless.

What I'm saying here is that, on this matter, if you think that I'm full of sh%$, then I'm full of shit, and if you think that I have a f%$#ing point, then I have a f%$#ing point. 

There are any number of times where I make an argument that is fact based, and I try my best to supply links to those facts, but this is not one of those times.

I think that I'm right, but opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.

^*Normalizing torture by refusing to prosecute, his war on whistle-blowing, his steadfast refusal to prosecute the malefactors of wealth, his assertions of a executive authority that makes Dick Cheney look mild, etc.
^†H/t Cthulhu for the catch.
^‡OK, I know what I would do if I lived in Florida, I would kill myself.

Headline of the Day

Romney campaign hiding George W. Bush offshore in the Caymans

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I Bet Those Log Cabin Republicans Feel Stupid Now

Yesterday, I said that the Log Cabin Republicans were idiots for believing that Mitt Rmoney would sign ENDA, which would outlaw workplace discrimination against gays.

Well if you are a gay Republican and think that Romney is going to protect your job from bigots, the news that he actively prevented sane sex parents from being listed on their children's birth certificates:

It seemed like a minor adjustment. To comply with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling that legalized gay marriage in 2003, the state Registry of Vital Records and Statistics said it needed to revise its birth certificate forms for babies born to same-sex couples. The box for "father" would be relabeled "father or second parent," reflecting the new law.

But to then-Governor Mitt Romney, who opposed child-rearing by gay couples, the proposal symbolized unacceptable changes in traditional family structures.

He rejected the Registry of Vital Records plan and insisted that his top legal staff individually review the circumstances of every birth to same-sex parents. Only after winning approval from Romney’s lawyers could hospital officials and town clerks across the state be permitted to cross out by hand the word "father" on individual birth certificates, and then write in "second parent," in ink.

………

Romney expressed similar beliefs during a speech in 2005 to socially conservative voters in South Carolina, as he was beginning to be viewed as a serious candidate for president.

"Some gays are actually having children born to them," he declared."It’s not right on paper. It’s not right in fact. Every child has a right to a mother and father."

Why on earth do gay Republicans think that Rmoney will protect them in the workplace if he wants to deny them basic rights as parents?

Seriously, Mitt Romney just sold you the Brooklyn Bridge.

BTW, as a note, Murray Waas wrote this, and I've always been impressed by his journalism, and he got this story despite attempts to cover this up:

In a preliminary response this month, the Department of Public Health withheld most of the documents because they reflected conversations between lawyers working for the state and "are therefore exempt from disclosure by the attorney-client privilege." The Globe subsequently obtained many of the documents from a source who requested anonymity.

Here's a piece of advice if Murray comes calling about a story, tell him the truth, because he'll get it anyway.

Murray Waas is now officially on my list of "People I Do Not Want to Piss Off".

I Won't Be Liveblogging the Debate

I have an appointment at 9:15, so I won't be watching the debate.

I truth be told, the real meaning of the debates will be how it gets called by the press anyway.

As to my advice to the candidates, it is as follows:

• Obama, don't hippie punch. It will be tempting, because you hate the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, but it won't convince the undecideds, and it would serve to demoralize your base.
• Mitt, you have to go off the reservation. You need to attack Obama for not going after the banksters. Note that, despite clear evidence of fraud, there has been zero prosecutions of big bankers and no meaningful prosecutions of big banks.

FWIW, I predict that neither of them will do this.

Obama will go after liberal strawmen, and Rmoney won't go after the banksters.

Deep Thought

Seen on Facebook.

I Knew that Rmoney Was Using His Taxes to Deceive

Romney's lawyer has admitted that they massaged his tax returns to hit a politically expedient:

Mitt Romney’s lawyer admitted to the Democratic accusation that the Romneys could have paid a lot less in taxes in 2011, but they manipulated the returns so as to conform to an August Romney claim that he always paid at least 13%.

The AP reported:

But, Brad Malt acknowledged, the couple “limited their deductions of charitable contributions to conform to the governor’s statement in August, based on the January estimate of income, that he paid at least 13 percent in income taxes in each of the last 10 years.”

………

Romney told us that paying more than he owed would disqualify him from the presidency, but he has now paid more than he owed in order to make his earlier statement about never paying below 13% appear to be true. Not to worry, though, Mitt Romney can merely amend his return after the election in order to get that money back from the government, like any 47%-er would want to do.

Additionally, there are no details on the offshore accounts in his Bain Retirement account, and note here, Romney is not personally evading taxes here, he couldn't because it's his retirement fund that is pays taxes right now, not the Romneys.

Furthermore, his use of the average rate may be a bit of statistical slight of hand:

5:32 pm by Liam Denning

We checked with the Romney campaign and the 20-year tax-rate average is a simple one (i.e., the average of the percentage in each year) rather than a weighted one (i.e., where you add up all the tax paid across the 20 years and divide it by all the income).

It’s a potentially important difference because the simple average treats each year equally -- whether Romney earned, say, $5 million in that year or $30 million. It is especially important if Romney paid a low tax rate in a year in which he earned a lot but paid a high tax rate in years when he earned less. The weighted average would give a more accurate picture.

Of course, releasing the actual underlying year-by-year data would clear up any confusion -- but that is a step Mr. Romney has said he won't take.

Well, we don't know what is hiding in has tax returns, but we know some of what he is intended to obscure in this release.

Mitt Has Released His Taxes

Well, he sort of released his taxes. He released his 2011 taxes, and "summary" for the past decade:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney fought back on Friday against Democratic charges he paid no taxes in some years, releasing a letter from his accountants saying he paid an effective federal tax rate of at least 13.6 percent annually over 20 years.

Despite heavy political pressure, Romney stood firm in refusing to make those returns public, but followed through on an earlier promise to release his 2011 return. It showed he paid $1.9 million in taxes on more than $13 million in income - an effective tax rate of 14.1 percent.

………

Romney has refused to release returns from his years as head of Bain Capital, a private equity fund that Democratic critics have charged plundered companies and cut jobs in a quest for profits. Romney has an estimated net worth between $190 million and $250 million.

………

The Romney campaign published a statement on Friday from former Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Fred Goldberg, who declared the returns "reflect the complexity of our laws and the types of investment activity that I would anticipate for persons in their circumstances."

Goldberg said, "In my judgment, they have fully satisfied their responsibilities as taxpayers."

The letter from accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers said the average of Romney's annual effective federal personal income tax rate during the 20-year period up to 2009 was 20.2 percent, and he and his wife, Ann, had a charitable deduction rate of 13.45 percent.

Seriously, there is something really hinky about his tax returns that Mitt is desperately trying to hide.

BTW, if you want to run the numbers, I guarantee that he paid only about $10K in social security and medicare taxes, which would be less than 1%.

Ordinary mortals who earn less than about $100K pay about 7½% on every penny for social security and medicare, and that's before the stuff that he squirreled away in his (now closed) Swiss bank account.

Mitt Discovers His Inner Oompa Loompa

This is Mitt Rmoney


This is Mitt Rmoney in Channeling his Inner Oompa Loompa


Any Questions?

It appears that Mitt used spray tan for his interview on Univision.

Seriously, when you attempt to do outreach to voter groups, wearing black^* face does not work.

Mitt and his team decided that it could be handled with a spray tan.

That is not outreach, that is stupidity.

H/t Cthulhu at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

^*OK, Orange.

The Story Behind the Story

OK, one of the inevitable cliches of modern Presidential campaign coverage is the veepstakes, followed by the post mortem of this decisions.

Well, this article has a deeply interesting back-story:

Gov. Chris Christie wasn’t willing to give up the New Jersey statehouse to be Mitt Romney’s running mate because he doubted they’d win, The Post has learned.

Romney’s top aides had demanded Christie step down as the state’s chief executive because if he didn’t, strict pay-to-play laws would have restricted the nation’s largest banks from donating to the campaign — since those banks do business with New Jersey.

But Christie adamantly refused to sacrifice his post, believing that being Romney’s running mate wasn’t worth the gamble.

“[Christie] felt, at one point, that [President] Obama could lose this. And, look, there still is that chance. But he knows, right now, you have to say it’s unlikely,” one source said.

The tough-talking governor believed Romney severely damaged his campaign by releasing only limited tax returns and committing several gaffes during his international tour in July.

Certain Romney was doomed, Christie stuck to his guns — even as some of his own aides pushed him to run, another source said.

OK, why is this story different from all the other useless veepstake gossip?

It isn't the pay to play rules, which are straightforward: If a governor is running, the big banks pretty would have to choose between contributing to Mitt, or doing pension business with New Jersey.

The big story is that this article was published in the The New York Post.

That's right, it was published in Rupert Murdoch's house organ (there is the Wall Street Journal, but they have to preserve the illusion of credibility in non-business news).

I've racked my brain, and I can come up with only two reasons for Murdoch allowing a story like this to be published:

• He is convinced that Romney is going to lose.
• He has Barack Obama's genitals in his back pocket.

It could be both.

Basically, when you look at Murdoch's media empire, much of it depends on regulatory arbitrage, allowing him to form defacto monopolies, and skirt media cross ownership rules.

It's why his continued ownership of dead tree newspapers make sense:  To a much greater degree than the broadcast medium, they can engage in long form journalism that sets the tone for a campaign, and so politicians curry favor with him.

The papers may not generate profits, but they allow him to curry favor with politicians and regulators, which in turn make the size and scope of his broadcast and satellite operations possible.

H/t Cthulhu at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Hun, Some of Rmnney's Tax Evasion Was Pretty Simple

Basically, he took management fees and converted them to carried interest, in order to secure the lower capital gains rate:

Two and Twenty. Private equity fund managers are compensated in two primary ways: management fees and carried interest. The management fee, traditionally two percent annually, is paid to the managers to cover overhead, salaries, and so forth. The carried interest, traditionally twenty percent, is a share of the profits from the underlying investments. My paper Two and Twenty described the typical arrangement. Management fees are taxed at ordinary income rates; carried interest is often taxed at capital gains rates. I focused in the article on why the carried interest portion is better viewed like bonus compensation and should be taxed at ordinary income rates.

Management Fee Conversion. Current law on carried interest is already a sweetheart tax deal for private equity, but why not make it better? Private equity folks are not the type to walk past a twenty-dollar bill lying on the sidewalk. In the 2000s it became common for private equity fund managers to “convert” their management fees into carried interest. There are many variations on the theme, but here’s how many deals worked: each year, before the annual management fee comes due, the fund manager waives the management fee in exchange for a priority allocation of future profits. There is minimal economic risk involved; as long as the fund, at some point, has a profitable quarter, the managers get paid. (If the managers don’t foresee any future profits, they won’t waive the fees, and they will take cash instead.) In exchange for a minimal amount of economic risk, the tax benefit is enormous: the compensation is transformed from ordinary income (taxed at 35%) into capital gain (taxed at 15%). Because the management fees for a large private equity fund can be ten or twenty million per year, the tax dodge can literally save millions in taxes every year.

The problem is that it is not legal. Because the deals vary in their aggressiveness, there is some disagreement among practitioners about when it works and when it doesn’t. But in my opinion, and the opinion of many tax practitioners, the practices that were common in the private equity industry in the 2000s became very, very questionable, and it’s unlikely that they would have stood up in court.

Tax attorney and professor Victor Fleischer does the dumpster diving in Gawkers Bain document dump and this is the first bit of specific skulduggery that I've seen as a result.

Pass the Popcorn…

Gawker has acquired a cache of nearly 1000 internal documents detailing activities at Bain Capital, and they appear to show some fairly arcane tax avoidance schemes used by Rmoney to hide income from the IRS:

Mitt Romney's $250 million fortune is largely a black hole: Aside from the meager and vague disclosures he has filed under federal and Massachusetts laws, and the two years of partial tax returns (one filed and another provisional) he has released, there is almost no data on precisely what his vast holdings consist of, or what vehicles he has used to escape taxes on his income. Gawker has obtained a massive cache of confidential financial documents that shed a great deal of light on those finances, and on the tax-dodging tricks available to the hyper-rich that he has used to keep his effective tax rate at roughly 13% over the last decade.

Today, we are publishing more than 950 pages of internal audits, financial statements, and private investor letters for 21 cryptically named entities in which Romney had invested—at minimum—more than $10 million as of 2011 (that number is based on the low end of ranges he has disclosed—the true number is almost certainly significantly higher). Almost all of them are affiliated with Bain Capital, the secretive private equity firm Romney co-founded in 1984 and ran until his departure in 1999 (or 2002, depending on whom you ask). Many of them are offshore funds based in the Cayman Islands. Together, they reveal the mind-numbing, maze-like, and deeply opaque complexity with which Romney has handled his wealth, the exotic tax-avoidance schemes available only to the preposterously wealthy that benefit him, the unlikely (for a right-wing religious Mormon) places that his money has ended up, and the deeply hypocritical distance between his own criticisms of Obama's fiscal approach and his money managers' embrace of those same policies. They also show that some of the investments that Romney has always described as part of his retirement package at Bain weren't made until years after he left the company.

H/t Americablog, and the documents can be examined here.

It also appears that it's getting coverage in the main stream old media (ABC) as well.

Heh.

Mitt Picks a Running Mate

So, Mitt Rmoney has picked Paul Ryan as his vice presidential running.

Only in America could be someone who idolizes a virulently anti-religious atheist with the sexual morals of a rabid mink in heat could be considered the savior of the Republicans, and conservative politics.

Of sourse, it is America, so Paul Ryan, who is such a fan of hack writer Ayn Rand that he requires his staff to read every page of Atlas Shrugged.

He's also the guy who put forward a budget that eliminated Medicare, which led to some very surprising losses in special elections for the GOP.

I can't imagine that Willard needs to appease the party's right-wing base this badly, so I gotta figure that this is a ploy to get Obama to stop talking about his tax returns, or lack thereof.

If you don't know who Paul Ryan is, I would refer you to Charlie Pierce on what a contemptible piece or work he is.

BTW, Michael Moore had the tweet of the day:

Link

This might be unfair to Charles Manson.

Read the Rude Pundit

Read his full throated endorsement of Harry Reid's accusation against Mitt Romney. (NSFW)

I completely agree with his sentiments.

H/t Cthulhu^* at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

^*No, not the unspeakably malevolent super-being, the contributor to the Stellar Parthenon.^†
†OK, I've never seen the two of them together, so Cthulhu might actually be the Cthulhu, but the mere fact that he is on a BBS, interacting with humans^‡ would seem to mitigate against this.
^‡Yes, I know, this is the internet, where no one knows if you are a dog.

Well This Might Explain the Whole Tax Return Thing

Marcy "Emptywheel"  Wheeler finally has a decent theory as to why Mitt Rmoney is refusing to release his taxes.

Basically this theory concludes that Reid (a fellow Mormon) has good information that Romney has been shorting the Mormon Church on his tithes:

For the record, I think Mitt has multiple reasons to hide his tax returns. I think it’s largely about what his returns would say about his business practices, it’s partly about his tax shelters, and, one way or another, it’s about his relative loyalty to his church and his country.

But here’s a thought.

Harry Reid, Mormon, and Senator from Nevada, is the one leading the charge to return attention to Mitt’s tax returns.

He attributes his claim that Mitt paid no taxes for ten years to someone who invested with Bain. Now he may know his purported Bain-related source because he travels the halls of power. But Bain has very close cultural ties to the Mormon Church–according to some, improperly so. Moreover, because Mitt and other Bain execs have given so much to the Mormon Church in the form of Bain stocks, high ranking Mormon insiders may have a better idea of what Bain Capital actually does–and how Mitt valued his holdings before he gave them to the Church–than most others.

So Reid may be calling out Mitt not just as a former boxer, but as someone who shares a very wealth-based and close knit faith with Mitt.

Add in the practice–which even an outsider like me saw when I lived in UT and worked for a predominantly Mormon company in the 1990s–of gossip about tithing, notably whether Mormon colleagues tithed pre- or post-tax. That’s another reason why Reid may have a better sense of what Mitt’s tax practices look like than DC pundits might guess on face value.

Finally, though, there’s this. If one of the reasons Mitt is hiding his tax returns does have to do with under-tithing (as the returns Mitt released may suggest), and not just his business practices and tax shelters, remember that both CO (2.15%) and especially NV (over 5%) have larger Mormon populations than average. Nate Silver considers NV the state with the biggest return on investment per voter (CO is 6th). These are lean Democratic states that Mitt might need to win if Obama’s attacks on Bain outsourcing continue to turn the race in the manufacturing swing states (though if Mitt doesn’t win FL and VA, it may be moot anyway). Driving down the Mormon enthusiasm for Mitt might be one way to boost Obama’s chances.

It's an interesting theory.

H/t Atrios.

He Can See Russia from His Mansions!

H/t Vonners at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Seen on Facebook

Heh

The Aqua Buddha Running Mate

I know that my track record sucks, but I am not predicting that Rand Paul will be Mitt Romney's running mate:

A day after endorsing Mitt Romney, Sen. Rand Paul said it would be an honor to run alongside the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.

"A year, year and a half ago, I was a physician in a small town," Paul, the junior Republican senator from Kentucky, told CNN's Don Lemon. "And it would be a great honor to be considered as a vice president for the Republican Party. I think that would be something that anybody who said otherwise would not be being truthful."

Paul, who on Thursday came out in support of Romney, said on CNN he had not discussed with the candidate the prospect of joining the GOP ticket.

Paul, a tea party favorite and son of presidential candidate Ron Paul, said his father "has always been my first choice," but that the nominating process favored Romney.

Rand Paul has said that he would have run this year had his dad, Ron Paul not run, and he is clearly very receptive to the idea of being Mitt's running mate.

Additionally, he has serious teabagger cred.

I would not call him a slam dunk, but to my mind, he is the most likely selection right now.