Month: August 2012

A reader writes:

This seems like a pretty big deal to me. If you read the Rolling Stone article in its entirety, it's clear that Romney blackmailed the FDIC into settling Bain debt at pennies on the dollar by threatening to remove what remaining cash assets Bain had that were owed the US government as bonuses rather than paying down the debt – and later following through on it. In other words, he screwed the American taxpayer out of millions of dollars while giving his buddies (and maybe himself) bonuses rather than paying Bain's debts.

This is Gordon Gecko at his worst.

Another:

So Mitt Romney … didn't build that?

The Romney campaign just released nine positively-charged web videos featuring testimonials (likely to be played at the convention tonight) about businesses saved by Romney and Bain. One video features Ray Fernandez celebrating Bain's help with his former employer, contact lens manufacturer Wesley Jessen:

Another of the nine videos features two women who say Romney saved their jobs when he took over Bain & Company Consulting:

Clearly this is Team Romney's most serious pushback over Bain, as the ads are essentially polar-opposite messages to those from Team Obama. The other videos feature: GOCOM CEO Ric Gorman, former Staples' Exec Ed Albertian, former Staples' Exec Jim MacDonald, Steel Dynamics Co-Founder Keith Busse, GT Bicycles's former CEO Mike Haynes, former Brookstone CEO Michael Anthony, and several executives from Alliance Laundry. The Obama campaign, meanwhile, is pushing back on Paul Ryan's lie-fest from last night:

They're also trying to pre-empt whatever Romney says tonight with this:

Meanwhile, the youth-oriented Super PAC Karl Rove formed with three other GOP orgs, Crossroads Generation, very quickly made a slick video around Ryan's fading Obama-poster line from last night:

In downticket news, Todd Akin, who is now tied with Claire McCaskill, has a new TV ad out trying to pivot off his "six second mistake" and turn it into an attack on McCaskill:

Lastly, Drudge:

Yes, apparently Ann Coulter has gotten into the fact-checking business.

Ad War archive here.

Michael Wolff reports on the Murdoch primary:

Murdoch is in transit from his hard-core right-wing period. If he is stoutly pro-business (anti-regulation, anti-tax, anti-deficit), he is also pro-immigration, pro-gun control, pro-choice, actively focused on ways to improve the educational system, and tolerant, if not libertarian, on most social issues. In some sense, he is the kind of Republican Mitt Romney would be if Mitt Romney believed he could get elected as the real Mitt Romney—that is, Murdoch would mutter, if there is a real Mitt Romney.

And that’s the rub for Murdoch. This is what he means when he tells people, in perhaps the most negative characterization he can make, that "Romney is not a fighter." This is not an ideological point. In the Murdoch lexicon, "fighter" means character—and clarity.

Yanzanica Brumfield cradles her month-old son Za'Tayrian at a flood shelter in a high school gym on August 30, 2012 in Kentwood, Louisiana. Local residents evacuated to the shelter after officials announced that a dam upstream in Mississippi was in danger of bursting due to rains from Hurricane Isaac. Tens of thousands of people along the Tangipahoa River were asked to evacuate the area due to the high flood risk. By John Moore/Getty Images.

Martin Feldstein posits that Romney's plan won't necessitate middle-class tax cuts:

Since broadening the tax base would produce enough revenue to pay for cutting everyone's tax rates, it is clear that the proposed Romney cuts wouldn't require any middle-class tax increase, nor would they produce a net windfall for high-income taxpayers. The Tax Policy Center and others are wrong to claim otherwise.

Several experts at the Tax Policy Center conducted an exhaustive re-run of Feldstein's math – and came up way short:

[T]he net effect would be cutting taxes on households above $200,000 and thus requiring net tax increases on households with less income. More broadly, both our analysis and Feldstein’s show that Romney’s tax plan cannot accomplish all of his stated goals. Either taxes must rise on those with income below $200,000, or tax preferences for saving and investment will have to be reduced, or revenues will be cut, or promised tax cuts for high-income households will have to be reduced. Trade-offs exist and solutions are possible, but tax reform cannot do everything that it is sometimes asked to do.

But that's not even the point, they add:

[T]he debate over what is or isn’t possible distracts from the more important question of what the Romney plan actually is. The governor could settle this issue quickly simply by describing how he’d pay for his tax cuts.

More on Mitt's tax math from Brad DeLong here. Previous Dish coverage here and here.

It's growing at a rapid pace, according to Jon Lee Anderson. Last weekend there were reports of "mass executions of as many as four hundred suspected rebels and civilians, including children, by regime forces in the town of Daraya near Damascus":

If there were ever gloves on in the regime’s response to unrest, they have now definitely come off. Indeed, everything about Syria’s carnage has acquired an exponential quality, including the death toll, which now must be rapidly approaching twenty-one thousand. Around two hundred people, mostly civilians, are reportedly dying every day now, twice as many as in June. Until Daraya, the hallmark horror was the May 25th massacre of a hundred and eight civilians in the town of Houla. The new standard is four times that.

(Photo: Paramedics treat a Syrian man who was wounded during shelling by Syrian government forces, at a hospital in Syria's northern city of Aleppo on August 30, 2012. The battle for Aleppo, Syria's second largest city, has been raging since July 20, with the army unable to dislodge the rebels. Civilians have been the hardest hit by the fighting. By Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images.)

"Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. The sight was so disgusting that people everywhere were ready to drop an H-bomb on Lower Manhattan and bayonet the survivors. But today that same insane greed ethos, that same belief in the lunatic pursuit of instant borrowed millions – it's dusted itself off, it's had a shave and a shoeshine, and it's back out there running for president," – Matt Taibbi.

More to the point, nine years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world (including me) nearly destroyed America's fiscal, strategic and moral standing in the world by an ill-conceived war in a Muslim country in the Middle East. And now, Mitt Romney is pledging a full-out war against Iran. They can learn nothing because they are never wrong – and the past is always wiped clean. The GOP has become the nemesis of conservatism: a hermetically sealed ideology that applies the same 1981 solutions whatever the problem, whatever the circumstance, whatever the date. It's a religious movement, not a political party. And it has fused its religious fundamentalism with economic fundamentalism.

One of the few upsides to hurricanes:

Ohio?

Ohio has a 30 percent chance of being the tipping-point state, meaning that it would cast the decisive votes in the Electoral College. That’s as much as the next two states on the list, Florida and Virginia, combined. It’s also as much as Colorado, Nevada, Iowa, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Michigan and North Carolina combined.

All of these states are competitive. But really, they exist along a continuum of electoral power rather than falling into binary categories of "important" and "unimportant." Ohio is at the extreme end of that continuum.