Month: January 2012

A reader makes an important distinction:

Frum’s examples in his argument about the virtue of firing people or the danger of not firing people is not analogous to the mass (and not-so-mass) layoffs after a leveraged buyout or corporate merger. People get fired not because they are incompetent but because other employees can do those jobs, or simply to reduce overhead.  The competence or incompetence of the laid off is often not even weighed before the decision is made.  You can’t compare the decisions a president makes on keeping or firing appointees and staff to that.

I’ll go further and say that often the laid-off employees had no responsibility for the financial difficulties of the company.  Those things are determined by the business plan, strategic decisions made by management, etc.  Not the competence of someone in the accounting department.

Jim DeMint told Laura Ingraham today that he'd like to see a "Republican party that embraces a lot of the libertarian ideas." Hmmm. Even Maggie Gallagher now asks:

Ron Paul called for other conservatives to drop out to consolidate his position as the anti-Romney candidate. He’s taking one in five evangelical Christians’ votes in New Hampshire, according to the exit polls — his share, in other words. The latest Reuters national poll shows Romney at 30 percent, Gingrich at 20 percent,  Paul at 16 percent, and Santorum at 13 percent. When do we start taking Ron Paul seriously?

Daniel Foster argues at NRO that Paul is best positioned to be the "Anti-Romney": 

Paul has shown a level of rationality and maturity that contradicts the caricatures. By contrast, Newt Gingrich, the would-be anti-Romney who flew higher and fell further than all the others, is looking ever more like an embittered fringe candidate running on pure spite, caring but little about the damage he may be doing to the party or the chances of defeating Barack Obama. So which is the serious Anti-Romney, and which is the nut?

James Poulos floats a Romney-Paul ticket. Michael Medved wants to see the candidate give a "big speech" for credibility purposes:

If he truly counts as a savvy, mainstream conservative, why wouldn’t he want to apologize without equivocation for racist newsletters, distance himself from extremists and bigots, make it clear that he’s not bitterly anti-Israel, and unashamedly embrace the Republican Party—which, for all its faults, remains the only possible vehicle to move the nation in a more conservative direction? 

He has publicly said his actions remain a flaw in his record and character. And he is not bitterly anti-Israel. He just wants the US to have a normal healthy relationship with the country, rather than the dysfunctional fusion that threatens both. And he's against all foreign aid, not just to Israel (although Israel's prosperity and massive military superiority in the region makes aid, to my mind, absurd).

Readers push back against the others:

It’s very nice that Bain produced $2.5 billion in gains for their investors and that the company made great profits and high returns.  But that’s not what Romney is running on; he’s declaring, again and again, that he’s an experienced JOB CREATOR, that he knows how to create jobs, and that in his time at Bain he created jobs.  If he wants to run on how much money he made for his investors, then I agree that there’s no real reason to attack him for that – he did a hard job very well by that metric.  But as long as he insists that he also helped people who were not investors in Bain Capital, and takes credit for creating jobs, it’s perfectly legitimate to look at the job-creation record.  Especially since the supporting evidence his campaign provided is so laughable.

Another writes:

I'd like respond to your reader who asked, "Aren't we mature enough as a country to acknowledge that sometimes companies need to let employees go in order help their bottom line?" We sure are. Everyone knows layoffs, bankruptcies and turnover are part of life. We deal with it on a regular basis. No one begrudges the local businessman who has to let an employee go because of tough times.

The problem with your reader's point is that there is a difference between accepting that layoffs and firings are a part of life and admiring the people who do the firing, especially when those people don't even run the businesses.

The reason Romney's work at Bain is such a liability is that he is the guy who was brought in to do the firing. He didn't build new businesses, he didn't create jobs in the way a guy who opens up a local hardware store creates jobs, and he cashed in whether or not the business actually succeeded. Americans believe in fairness. Success is supposed to be earned through hard work and playing by the rules. To those of us who aren't of the finance world, there's something inherently unfair about an investor making a massive profit even as the business he invested in fails. It makes us feel like the game is rigged. That's Romney's Bain problem.

Another:

I work at a company owned by Bain and not far from another company owned by another private equity firm, so I have experienced and heard about much of what these firms do. Most Americans appreciate a free market system in which those that produce the best goods and services at the best value should be successful and become wealthy. However, when people become fabulously wealthy at the expense of others while producing nothing but investment gain for the investors, I think most Americans take pause. The company down the way is an illuminating example of this flaw in our system that firms like Bain take advantage of.

In 2004 this company was bought by a private equity firm. In order to fund the buyout the PE firm issued bonds. They then used the proceeds to pay themselves back. Essentially they leveraged the target company in order to fund their purchase of the target company. They then got back everything and left the take-over company with a mountain of debt. The interest alone on this debt is more than the company’s operating profits. The PE firm then fired the management, 1/3 of the workers, installed pay freezes and reduced benefits. The new management team that the PE firm installed were paid massive salaries (the new CEO made seven times what the former had). Obviously, the situation could not hold and the company declared bankruptcy. In order to get the bankruptcy approved, the company was forced, at the urging of the PE firm, to jettison its long-time pension plan. Now the company has about half the workforce it once did, lower wages relative to cost of living, worse benefits and no more pensions.

This is just one example, and I don’t know how the Bain takeovers were structured under Romney, but I don’t think calling what they do ‘looting’ is very far off at all. Investors and PE firm management make off like bandits in these cases. When they are taken over and stripped and laden with debt they are much more exposed to economic factors. The companies may survive and may even thrive given a favorable economy, but one hiccup can easily start them down the road to ruin.

Another:

Can we acknowledge that the party that started using this line of attack against Romney was not the Democrats (contra reader #2)? Newt went down this road weeks and weeks ago, trying to tap into his angry party's populist fervor and reaping a weird bump from it. And most of the liberal commentaries I've seen have bent over backwards exploring the nuance of his "I like firing" moment, while still underlining the reasons it might hurt him (not to mention arguing him on the actual merits of the full comment: most of us can't get rid of our insurance providers). 

I guess we'll have to wait to see the actual lines of attack the Obama campaign settles on, but this isn't some left-wing anti-business smear happening. The call is coming from inside the house.

One more:

If Romney thinks he has a Bain problem now, just wait until this summer. The most anticipated summer film, and what will likely be the biggest film of the year, is The Dark Knight Rises. And the sociopathic villain is … Bane.

Alan Massie thinks it's now only a matter of time before Scotland leaves.

This clip is worth watching from beginning to the very end (the Dish posted a shorter version that didn't include the impassioned ending). You see a man meet a machine:

Andrew Kaczynski investigates Romney's "evolution" on gay rights. The campaign has disavowed a 2002 Gay Pride flyer championing equal rights on behalf of Romney and his running mate Kerry Healey. If they could airbrush history to remove the evidence, they would. But Josh Barro, a former Romney volunteer, says the Romney camp is full of it:

A former intern to Mitt Romney publicly stated on Monday that as a candidate for  governor in 2002, the Massachusetts Republican did authorize and disseminate flyers championing equal rights for gay citizens. The statement, made by the Manhattan Institute's spokesman Eric Ferhnstrom told The Huffington Post on Sunday.

Barro, who served as an intern on Romney's gubernatorial campaign, explained that on Pride weekend in 2002, the campaign sent about a half-dozen interns to a "post-parade festival on Boston Common" to hand out flyers proclaiming that "all citizens deserve equal rights, regardless of their sexual preference." 

"The thing was organized by a full-time staffer," Barro added. Ferhnstrom, who served as communications director on that same campaign, told The Huffington Post on Sunday that the Romney's election team had not been involved in producing or handing out the flyers and that the former Massachusetts governor shouldn't be held accountable for them. "I don't know where those pink flyers came from. I was the communications director on the 2002 campaign. I don't know who distributed them … I never saw them and I was the communications director," Ferhnstrom said.

What's more, Romney almost marched in the parade. Barro points to a "long list of the outrageously nice things Mitt Romney has done for gay people" (from the perspective of a far-right conservative group in Massachusetts). 

Another Iranian nuclear scientist was assassinated by a car bomb in Tehran today. Goldblog is as puzzled as I am by the rationale for this act of terrorism:

If I were a member of the Iranian regime (and I'm not), I would take this assassination program to mean that the West is entirely uninterested in any form of negotiation (not that I, the regime official, has ever been much interested in dialogue with the West) and that I should double-down and cross the nuclear threshold as fast as humanly possible. Once I do that, I'm North Korea, or Pakistan: An untouchable country.

I'd like to raise another simple question: is not the group or nation responsible for the murder of civilians in another country terrorists? Do not car-bombs of civilians count as terrorism?

Another act of moral imagination: what would the US do if another country started placing car bombs on US soil to kill American scientists? And how do we effectively condemn terrorism when we are simultaneously either conducting or condoning it? Or is this simply the Mossad trying to bait Iran into war? If so, what did we know about this, if anything?

Update: Jonah Goldberg argues that the assassination was actually spontaneous combustion:

Another Iranian scientist has blown up …

It remains a blight, and one created by politics, not national security:

No one expected matters as deeply felt as 9/11 to remain entirely outside of partisan politics, but the idea of Gitmo was cast soon after the attack, amid a political campaign. Republicans made it an issue in the midterm elections of 2002, marketing it as a “robust” or “proactive” approach to defending the nation against terrorists. The message worked marvelously, scoring enormous gains for the G.O.P.

Unknown to most Americans, though, just before the fall vote, representatives of the CIA and FBI went to the White House to break the bad news: Gitmo had been filled not with dangerous Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but with a bunch of nobodies. Political considerations plainly dictated the response. The government would not review the prisoners’ cases or grant releases, we were told; instead, “the president has determined that they are all enemy combatants.”

That's Cheneyism: the crudest politics with the dumbest results. And please don't forget Mitt Romney's pledge last time around: he'd "double Gitmo" as president. Y'all ready for that?

(Photo: Protesters march against the 10-year anniversary of holding detainees in Guantanamo Prison during a demonstration January 11, 2012 in front of the White House in Washington,DC. The White House insisted Monday that Obama was determined to close Guantanamo, which accepted its first prisoners on January 11, 2002, four months after Al-Qaeda flew hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. By Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images)

Stephen Hayes looks ahead: 

Romney is by far the best organized candidate in Florida. His super PAC is pummeling Newt Gingrich in the mail and in television ads on the conservative panhandle. And his super PAC, Restore Our Future, has plans to buy more. His campaign is already running ads in Florida (he's on his second message, according to one Florida GOP consultant), including a new ad targeting Spanish-speaking Floridians. But the story of the Florida primary may be absentee ballots. As of the beginning of this week, 413,000 Floridians had requested absentee ballots for the January 31 primary – some 46,000 of which have been returned. Romney’s team has quietly kicked off an elaborate plan to encourage supporters to vote absentee … Romney advisers believe that it’s possible that the campaign will have met half of its vote total goal in Florida before polls open on January 31.

Marc Caputo has more on the above ad. Pema Levy discusses the implications of Romney's tone-deaf approach to immigration.