enlarge

Credit: Blue Gal

And for those of you who think Newt is a "victim" of Citizens United, he's not. Open Thread below....

Here's a nice one from folk-blues chanteuse Karen Dalton. In his 1994 book Chronicles: Volume One, Bob Dylan wrote that "Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday and played guitar like Jimmy Reed... I sang with her a couple of times". Good Enough for me.

It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best
	Artist: Karen Dalton Price: $49.98 (As of 01/03/12 06:32 pm details)

DOWNLOADS: (53)

PLAYS: (950)

Embed

James Carville with the quote of the day while discussing the three way tie among Mitt Romney, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum as the vote counting during the Iowa caucuses progressed:

CARVILLE: There is one screaming, huge story here tonight and that is these Republicans just don't want to vote for Mitt Romney. I mean it's like you're trying to give a dog a pill. They keep spitting it up. Now, they're going to eat the pill, 'cause Romney's going to eventually be the nominee, but...

And it's the same thing he had before and he's got a weaker field. It just don't matter where he comes in, they don't want to vote for him.

Mitt Romney has been a staunch critic of China on the campaign trail for the presidency. But a businessman who hosted a Romney appearance in Clive, Iowa, seems to think that Romney's anti-China rhetoric is all talk and the President Romney wouldn't follow through on the harsh words.

Romney's stance has been unambiguous:

“I’ll clamp down on China that’s been cheating,” Romney said. “They’ve been stealing our intellectual property, our designs, our patents, our know-how, our brands, they’ve been hacking into our computers. That has got to stop.”

“I will stop it if I’m President of the United States,” Romney said.

Last week, Romney appeared at a campaign event in Clive, Iowa, at a business called Competitive Edge, owned by David Greenspon. Greenspon's company outsources work to China on a significant level. He isn't too worried about a Romney presidency:

“I think the rhetoric of a campaign is different than the actual application,” he said. “[Romney] will sit down and he will get the right people in, he will take the advice of maybe a Huntsman who will say, ‘this is how to handle China.’”

Greenspon explained:

"You need leadership, this is a leader. You can get all those other pieces and put them under that umbrella and you can get all of this right. I don’t think he’s an expert in every area, but I think of all the choices out there, he’s got all the elements to get us to where we need to go because he’s going to go get the team. We don’t have a team yet. We have to build that. So we now have a pretty good coach. And the coach that there are problems, and he knows that people have expectations and he also knows that he can’t do it immediately."

When it comes to actually governing, Greenspon said he expects Romney will take a much softer approach to China at the urging of his supporters in the business community.

“I think he would sit down with China, and he would sit and he would get brought up to speed with every one of the people that are now in our trading delegation — a lot of our companies make money there,” he said. “You’ve just got to find a happy medium.”

“I think the happy medium he’ll put together,” Greenspon continued. “I don’t think any of these words you can weigh by themselves as exclusive sound bites. That’s my understanding of it.”

I asked him if he’d talked to Romney about China. Greenspon said he “talked more about leadership,” but it was clear where he thinks Romney will come down on China once in office.

“I don’t have a complaint, I’ll put my two cents in,” he said of their conversations. “First get me the leadership and then we can figure out what the platform will be and its fine little minutiae.”

The above widget will give up-to-date results as the night wears on. And once we're done covering Iowa for a year, we're off to New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, etc. for a week each? Hardly seems fair.

Mitt Romney's final rally in Iowa Monday night included an interruption from #OWS protesters. He handled it as best as he possibly could, saying that he loved free speech and couldn't wait until Republicans and OWS protesters joined together to do it to Obama at one of his rallies.

Romney, of course, has the dubious distinction of being the guy who said "corporations are people." I can't imagine why he might be targeted by the 99 percent, can you?

The Montana Supreme Court issued a ruling last week that could possibly cause a Supreme Court challenge to the Citizens United decision. In a 2-1 decision, the court barred corporations in Montana from making contributions to campaigns.

Via SCOTUSblog:

The Montana majority, in an opinion written by Chief Justice Mike McGrath, said that a closely similar ban could withstand the Citizens United ruling because the Supreme Court had left open the possibility that a “compelling interest” would allow such a measure, and the majority found that interest in Montana’s past history and its present economic and political climate. Corporations are more likely to have corrupting influence with their political spending in Montana, the majority said, because it is a small state, its economy still depends upon outside corporate interests, and its political campaigns are not very expensive so they do not bring out heavy donations by individuals to compete with vast corporate treasuries.

The dissenters, the majority noted, had interpreted the Citizens United ruling as declaring “unequivocally that no sufficient government interest justifies limits on political speech.” Disagreeing, the majority said that the decision put a burden upon government to show that such a restriction satisfies a “compelling state interest.” It concluded: “Here the government met that burden.”

The McGrath opinion provided a vivid chronicle of the days in Montana’s past when the so-called “Copper Kings” bought and sold politicians and judges in the way that other people buy and sell consumer goods (a comparison that the majority attributed to Mark Twain). It noted that the states’ voters had had enough of that corruption, so they used their newly acquired initiative power in 1912 to pass the ban on corporate political spending.

I am in the process of reading through the ruling (found here). It's a fascinating read, walking through the history of mining and other industries in Montana. It emphasizes Montana's unique history, where outside corporations came in and transferred resources out of the state, courtesy of the politicians they bought.

The primary legal challenge is to the premise of the Citizens United ruling which suggests corporate influence in politics does not directly correlate to corruption. While I haven't read through everything yet, it seems clear that the Montana court was striking at the core of Citizens United with the strength of their unique history behind it.

It remains to be seen whether a challenge will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court or they'll just summarily strike it down. Stay tuned.

DOWNLOADS: (59)

PLAYS: (754)

Embed

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich insisted on Tuesday that that fellow candidate Mitt Romney was a "liar," but could support him over Barack Obama if the former Massachusetts governor became the eventual Republican nominee.

At a Monday campaign event, Gingrich had complained about Romney refusing to speak out against attack ads being aired by a pro-Romney Super PAC.

"Here is my simple tag line: Somebody who will lie to you to get to be president will lie to you when they are president," Gingrich told suporters.

In an interview Tuesday morning, CBS correspondent Norah O'Donnell asked Gingrich if he was calling Romney a "liar."

"Yes," Gingrich replied.

"You're calling Mitt Romney a liar?" O'Donnell pressed. "Why are you saying he is a liar?"

"Because this is a man whose staff created the PAC, his millionaire friends fund the PAC, he pretends he has nothing to do with the PAC - it's baloney," Gingrich said. "He's not telling the American people the truth."

After explaining that Gingrich had just called Romney a "flat-out liar," CBS host Bob Schieffer wanted to know if Gingrich could support Romney if he eventually won the GOP nomination.

"Sure," Gingrich said without hesitation. "I would support a Republican candidate against Barack Obama because I think Barack Obama is tearing the country apart."

"You're saying Mitt Romney would be a liar as president," O'Donnell pointed out.

"Yes," Gingrich agreed. "But less destructive than Barack Obama."

But there are some Republicans that even Gingrich would have trouble supporting over the current Democratic president.

In an interview with CNN last week, the Georgia Republican said that he could not vote for GOP hopeful Ron Paul.

Oh, what's a few earth tremors when it comes to sucking gas out of the earth? These anti-fracking types just need to count their blessings:

CLEVELAND (AP) - A northeast Ohio well used to dispose of wastewater from oil and gas drilling almost certainly caused a series of 11 minor quakes in the Youngstown area since last spring, a seismologist investigating the quakes said Monday.

Research is continuing on the now-shuttered injection well at Youngstown and seismic activity, but it might take a year for the wastewater-related rumblings in the earth to dissipate, said John Armbruster of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y.

Brine wastewater dumped in wells comes from drilling operations, including the so-called fracking process to extract gas from underground shale that has been a source of concern among environmental groups and some property owners. Injection wells have also been suspected in quakes in Astabula in far northeast Ohio, and in Arkansas, Colorado, and Oklahoma, Armbruster said.

Thousands of gallons of brine were injected daily into the Youngstown well that opened in 2010 until its owner, Northstar Disposal Services LLC, agreed Friday to stop injecting the waste into the earth as a precaution while authorities assessed any potential links to the quakes.

After the latest and largest quake Saturday at 4.0 magnitude, state officials announced their beliefs that injecting wastewater near a fault line had created enough pressure to cause seismic activity. They said four inactive wells within a five-mile radius of the Youngstown well would remain closed. But they also stressed that injection wells are different from drilling wells that employ fracking.

Armbruster said Monday he expects more quakes will occur despite the shutdown of the Youngstown well.
"The earthquakes will trickle on as a kind of a cascading process once you've caused them to occur," he said. "This one year of pumping is a pulse that has been pushed into the ground, and it's going to be spreading out for at least a year."

The quakes began last March with the most recent on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve each occurring within 100 meters of the injection well. The Saturday quake in McDonald, outside of Youngstown, caused no serious injuries or property damage.

Youngstown Democrat Rep. Robert Hagan on Monday renewed his call for a moratorium on fracking and well injection disposal to allow a review of safety issues.

"If it's safe, I want to do it," he said in a telephone interview. "If it's not, I don't want to be part and parcel to destruction of the environment and the fake promise of jobs."

He said a moratorium "really is what we should be doing, mostly toward the injection wells, but we should be asking questions on drilling itself."

The latest stories from the front lines of the labor fight across the country...