In a previous post, we noted allegations that Mitt Romney held fundraisers overseas. Donations from foreign nationals would contravene American electoral law.

We know that one event took place London, at a $25,000 per couple dinner. Romney's hosts were located at the center of the LIBOR scandal:

One of the fundraisers was originally supposed to be hosted by Bob Diamond, the chief executive of Barclays - until Diamond pulled out following his resignation from the company, which paid more than $450 million for allegedly trying to manipulate the interbank interest rate. The Washington Post reported that one of the co-chairs of the fundraiser, Barclay's lobbyist Patrick Durkin, has helped raise more than $1 million for Romney.

In response to Romney's fundraisers, a group of British lawmakers called on "Barclays and its executives to cease fundraising for political candidates immediately and to concentrate entirely on repairing confidence and trust in the banking system instead." The liberal advocacy group Americans United for Change, meanwhile, released a web video saying that "Big banks write checks for Romney so they can write their own rules." 

That wording certainly conveys the impression that executives for Barclays -- a British bank -- donated to Romney.

Another event took place in Israel. From Veterans Today:

During his next international stop, at a closed 50,000-dollar-a-plate fundraiser for Israeli sworn citizens and American donors, he credited Israel’s “providence “and “culture” for the economic disparity between Israelis and Palestinians.

Romney walked out of the small private event with one million dollars for his presidential campaign.

But the question is: Were the contributors Israeli or American? Haaretz published this story before the event:

Romney arrives on Saturday, which is Tisha B'av, when Jews fast to commemorate the destruction of their holy temples. The fast will take place on Sunday, and about 90 minutes after it ends, Romney will attend a $50,000 dollars-a-plate fundraising event in Jerusalem. Since only U.S. citizens can legally donate to political campaigns, it's good to know that there are American immigrants doing well enough to attend.

Do I detect a note of captious humor here? Did this Haaretz writer just wink at us?

Another Haaretz story notes that the media was initially barred from covering the event; eventually, Romney relented and let reporters in.

There were also fundraisers in "private homes."

The Wall Street Journal claims that all of Romney's fundraisers took money only from American expatriates, and that Obama has been doing the same thing.

If you want to see the actual law prohibiting raising funds from foreigners, here it is: 2 U.S.C. § 441e : US Code - Section 441E: Contributions and donations by foreign nationals. The wording is about as clear as law gets.

Fundraising events outside of America's borders are increasingly common. The American Conservative writes:

When a U.S. citizen chooses to live in another country, it might be for a good reason like a job opportunity, but it also might be because he or she actually prefers the other country and regards the United States only as a place of birth that provides a useful passport. Deliberately seeking money for a U.S. political campaign among expats resident in foreign lands should therefore raise some serious concerns.

My question is simple. How can we know that all the money came from American citizens? A cynic may presume the worst if we have no way to verify what actually occurred.

As for the "Obama does it too" argument: Frankly, I'd be happy if both the Republican and Democratic candidates were knocked out of contention by fundraising scandals. A lot of conservatives would also enjoy that spectacle. Permalink

Is Romney ineligible? Maybe. During his rather ill-advised journey overseas, he held fundraisers. Very quiet fundraisers. Addicting Info points out that it's against the law for foreign nationals to contribute to a candidate or to a party.

So just what happened at those fundraisers? Before we get all het up about this, we need to have more information. Permalink

I support Rob Zerban, who is running against Paul Ryan in Wisconsin. (Yes, Ryan can legally run for re-election to Congress while also running for veep.) While I normally don't run campaign spots in this blog, you may want to look at this one -- if only for that brief, jaw-dropping clip of Dick Cheney. Permalink

Skydancing has an interesting post up about the heat wave in southern California. Bottom line: The Powers-That-Be have asked the citizenry to jack the AC up to 78 degrees in order to keep the stressed-out power plants operational. This directive has lots of Californians steaming.

Naturally, there's now a lot of talk in CA about making the shuttered San Onofre nuke plant operational again. Even locals who hate nuclear power love to drive by this plant (located just off the San Diego Freeway), if only because...well, look at it. Whoever designed this thing was a visual artist of great wit. The nipples even have red lights on top.

Skydancing author Quixote smells a big, fat, nuclear-powered rat...

They’ve been bewailing the temporary shutdown of the San Onofre nuke like the loss of the last drop of drinking water. (The thing has cracks in hundreds of steam pipes due to design flaws.) It provides 2200 Megawatts. It’s loss is terrible. We’re all dying out here.

A complete load of horsefeathers. I live near two natural gas power stations, and they’re barely ever even on. If it’s as bad as all that, you’d think they’d have to use them, yes? One produces 560 Megawatts, the other 1516MW. But they don’t. Especially the 1516MW one. If I see it running two days out of the year, that’s a lot. Admittedly, I don’t spend my life staring at it, so I might miss a day or two, but not much more than that. The other one seems to run maybe 14 days out of the year.

Of course, Californians have been snookered previously by the energy mavens. Remember the Enron scam? At the time, you were called a "conspiracy theorist" if you said that the crisis was deliberately manufactured. Nobody says that now.

Do the Powers That Be hope to get away with that scam again? They must think that California is filled with big boobs. Permalink

Did you know that Mitt Romney drove a car into a vehicle driven by a Catholic Bishop? Did you know that one of Romney's passengers died? And did you know that Romney has lied about the incident ever since?

This little-known scandal deserves far more attention than it has so far received.

In 1968, Romney was a Mormon missionary in France, zooming his Citroen through the small town of Bernos-Beaulac, when he slammed headlong into a car driven by a Bishop named Jean Vilnet.

Romney was in a coma for days afterwards, or so he says. (The point has been disputed.) One of his passengers died -- and therein lies a scandal.

For many years, Mitt claimed that the accident killed a drunken priest named Albert Marie, who had caused the collision by swerving at high speed into Romney's lane. That story was not true. The "priest" did not die, was not drunk, was not traveling at high speed, and was not at fault.

For what it's worth, the "priest" was then, and is now, a bishop; his name is not Albert Marie. Although Mitt Romney spoke French well, he apparently didn't understand how nomenclature works in France: The final part of a male first name may be a traditionally female name, attached with a hyphen -- and in religious families, that name is usually Marie. As it happens, the full name of the man Romney hit is Jean-Félix-Albert-Marie Vilnet.

Bishop Vilnet, who was at the Second Vatican Council, is still alive at the age of 90. The injuries he suffered in 1968 were not life threatening. (He drove a very sturdy Mercedes.)

So why would Romney later claim to have killed a priest? He knows full well that he did no such thing.

Moreover, the authorities established that Vilnet was not drunk at the time.

Bishop Vilnet, then 46 years old by American count, was not drunk, not speeding, and not out of his own lane.  He was driving along and Romney hit him.

That 1968 accident took place when Mitt Romney ignored painted roadway lines and went head-on into an on-coming left turn lane, opposite the post office at Beaulac, France. Concrete traffic separators were added later on.

Thanks to Google Earth, we can see the crime scene, which has not changed significantly since 1968. In the above "street view" photo, the truck happens to be in the spot where Romney made his unfathomably sharp turn. Even without the traffic separators, it's hard to imagine how a sober driver could go so severely off course.

Romney claimed that the "priest" was going 120 kilometers per hour on a "mountain road." In fact, the Bishop was either stopped or coming to a stop in a left-hand turn lane.The photo of Vilnet's Mercedes indicates a head-on collision; he was not turning.

As noted above, someone did die in that crash: A woman named Leola Anderson, a passenger in Romney's overcrowded vehicle. She wore no seat belt. Her family believed Romney's lie about the drunk priest who didn't live to take any questions.

Let that sink in: Romney lied to the children and the husband of a dead woman. (Duane Anderson was seriously injured in the crash. He may have had little idea as to how it happened.) In order to save his own ass, Romney told a whopper to grieving survivors.

Investigation finds an astonishing cover up story. NY Times, Wash Post, Guardian, Boston Globe -- all present closely fit versions of this tale in their archives. Photographs there are mislabeled. Names are incorrect. The initial description of the roadway and the impact are inaccurate. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney asserted in 2007 that the other driver, whom we now know was Bishop Vilnet, was prosecuted.

None of it holds up.

It should be noted that in 1968, Mitt Romney's father, George Romney, had presidential aspirations. True, Nixon had sewn up the nomination by the summer of 1968; however, if the Democrat had prevailed in that year's general election, George Romney would have been considered the likeliest Republican nominee in 1972. (Back then, Reagan seemed too far to the right. Different times!)

Forty years later, other survivors in the car were told by the 2008 Romney campaign not to speak to reporters about what they saw that day. For a full (but somewhat confusing) account of the continuing cover up, see here.

Right-wing apologists attempting to explain away this incident ("Hey, at this late date, who knows what really happened...?") cannot escape one key fact: Bishop Vilnet is still alive, even though Romney said that the man died. There is no possible way Romney could ever have been mistaken on that point. The only possible reason for telling such a lie would be to escape blame for the death of Leola Anderson. Romney hoped to pin the blame on a dead man, even though the man wasn't really dead.

The obvious comparison goes to Chappaquiddick. How many books have been written about Ted Kennedy's accident? Most of those books were filled with lies and half-truths. The worst of the lot is Leo Damore's obnoxious concoction, published (but of course!) by Regnery -- with help from the despicable Lucianne Goldberg. 

Yet Kennedy always took full responsibility for the events of that night.

"But that's different!" I can hear some of you saying. "Kennedy was drunk!"

No, he wasn't. No-one who saw him that night claimed that he was inebriated. You've been brainwashed by decades of right-wing propaganda. Unlike Romney, Kennedy drove at night on an unlit road and did not see a turn (unmarked by reflectors or barriers). Everyone on the island knew the turn onto the bridge to be dangerous; residents thought that an accident was just a matter of time.

Romney's accident, by contrast, was just bizarre. Was he drunk when he drove headlong into Bishop Vilnet's Mercedes? I don't know. Given Romney's Mormon heritage, alcohol use seems an unlikely explanation -- but the accident itself remains very strange.

Ted Kennedy manned up: He took full responsibility. He never told a single lie about the tragedy. Mitt Romney, too cowardly to take responsibility, falsely blamed a "dead" cleric.

Kennedy was haunted for the rest of his political life by the ghost of Mary Jo Kopechne. Yet I doubt that anyone will ever ask Mitt Romney why he lied to the family of Leola Anderson. No-one will ask him why he tried to blame a "drunk" priest, who was not drunk and who did not die. If any journalist ever does dare to question Romney about this matter, you know damned well that Fox News and Rush Limbaugh will go into fits of apoplexy. Reporters are allowed to ask such questions only of Democrats.

Conservatives may remake the past; liberals have no such privilege.

For decades, political hit man have screamed about a cover up at Chappaquiddick. There was none. (And please don't think you can take me to school about that incident.) Mitt Romney, however, provably lied about his culpability in the vehicular death of Leola Anderson.

He lied.

Update: A reader has passed along a link to a NYT story from 2007 that would seem to confirm Romney's version. The writer, Michael Paulson, did the kind of digging I didn't expect, although he is imprecise about sourcing.

The driver of the car that hit Romney, according to an account in a local newspaper at the time, was a 46-year-old man, Albert Marie, from Sireuil. Marie, according to French Mormons who responded to the accident, was a Catholic priest; in an interview this spring, a priest at the parish in Sireuil confirmed that the church's former pastor, now deceased, was Albert Marie. Many of the Mormons familiar with the accident say they believe that the priest was inebriated at the time of the crash but that assertion could not be confirmed.

The priest was traveling with his mother, Marie-Antoinette Marie, and a 48-year-old woman, Marguerite Longué, neither of whom could be located.

Normally, the NYT would cite a specific publication and date, so that's a bit of a red flag right there. Still, I'm impressed by the level of detail. On the other hand, we have an actual photo of the injured Bishop recovering in the hospital, taken around the same time.

Someone is telling a very, very elaborate lie. I'm going to get to the bottom of this. I hope.



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Paul Krugman today responds to a particularly inane column by William Saletan, one that I had planned to talk about yesterday but didn't. In this piece, Saletan tries to install Paul Ryan as an official member of the Serious Persons Club:

Ryan is a real fiscal conservative. He isn’t just another Tea-Party ideologue spouting dogma about less government and the magic of free enterprise. He has actually crunched the numbers and laid out long-term budget proposals.

Nope. He really is just another Tea-Party ideologue. As for the alleged number-crunching -- well, here's Jacob Weisberg, as quoted by Krugman:

His plan projects an absurd future, according to the Congressional Budget Office, in which all discretionary spending, now around 12 percent of GDP, shrinks to 3 percent of GDP by 2050. Defense spending alone was 4.7 percent of GDP in 2009. With numbers like that, Ryan is more an anarchist-libertarian than honest conservative.

Krugman:

This is just a fantasy, not a serious policy proposal.

So why does Saletan believe otherwise? Has he crunched the numbers himself? Of course not. What he’s doing – and what the whole Beltway media crowd has done – is to slot Ryan into a role someone is supposed to be playing in their political play, that of the thoughtful, serious conservative wonk. In reality, Ryan is nothing like that; he’s a hard-core conservative, with a voting record as far right as Michelle Bachman’s, who has shown no competence at all on the numbers thing.

I'd say that the situation is even worse. Saletan wants to induce political hypnosis.

I don't know if you've ever seen actual hypnotic induction, but the process takes a lot longer in real life than in the movies. After repeating certain verbal images for an hour or so, the hypnotist can create a false reality. The subject may even be implanted with false memories, which will linger long after the trance has ended.

That's what Saletan is up to. He writes:

Maybe, like me, you were raised in a liberal household. You don’t agree with conservative ideas on social or foreign policy. But this is why God made Republicans: to force a reality check when Democrats overpromise and overspend.

Democrats overspend? Democrats overspend? Did this fool just say that DEMOCRATS overspend?

Snap. Wake up. Break the trance. Cast off your false memories. The next four paragraphs will tell you what actually happened...

1. Ronald Reagan came into office promising fiscal responsibility. He then ran up a national debt exceeding that of all previous presidents combined.

2. George H.W. Bush made the deficit substantially worse.

3. When Bill Clinton left office, the government was in the black and the national dialogue focused on the question of what to do with the surplus. Remember those days?

4. Under George W. Bush, the nation promptly went back into the red. Dick Cheney said: "Reagan proved deficits don't matter."

As the more honest Libertarians will confess, pork spending skyrocketed during the Dubya years -- especially in the red states. Generally speaking, the productive blue states sent in more tax money than they received in goods and services, while the red states (especially in our useless south) were leeches. The Republicans stole from California and New York to feed the ungrateful pigs of Dixie.

The Iraq war -- the great elephant-in-the-living-room of recent history -- cost more than THREE TRILLION DOLLARS, according to the Washington Post.

The true cost of the Wall Street bailouts remains unknown. We do know that the Bush administration committed to propping up banks that could have been purchased outright for much less money. As all readers of Matt Taibbi's Griftopia (just one volume in a small library of works on the great debacle) can tell you, the crisis occurred only because conservatives refused to regulate the scammers who bundled together crap-backed loans and sold them as AAA-rated financial instruments. While Bush's SEC looked the other way, the fat cats and the scamsters paid off the lawmakers to rewrite the rules -- and conservatives snubbed all liberals who proposed ways to fix this culture of legalized graft.

As for the situation today: If ideologues like Ryan would allow tax rates and government employment rates to return to Reagan-era levels, jobs would be plentiful, the deficit would go down (given modest reductions in defense spending), and Medicare and Social Security would keep bubbling along as before.

Yet William Saletan, in defiance of all history and all logic, joins with the voices who chant the mantra "Democrats overspend." Nothing backs this all-too-common misperception except the constant repetition of lies.

If we allow hypnotists like Saletan to recite this induction script, eventually they'll have you thinking you're a chicken. Permalink

Ayn-droid Paul Ryan is not just Mitt's veep choice -- he's also running for re-election in Wisconsin. His opponent is a fellow named Rob Zerban, and polls indicate that he stands a chance -- arguably a better chance today than two days ago, since Ryan has indicated that he would rather seek higher office than serve his district.

Zerban is the genuine article. Unlike Ryan, he owned small businesses and created actual jobs. He also has a record as a conservationist. Here's how he differentiates himself from his opponent...

Paul Ryan supports ending Medicare. I support Medicare for All.

Paul Ryan supports lowering taxes on the rich. I want the rich to finally pay their fair share.

Paul Ryan thinks the way to create jobs is tax giveaways for Big Oil, Wall Street, and other big corporations. I'm a small businessman who fights for the little guy.

Paul Ryan is pro-life. I am pro-choice. Tell me when to stop...

Zerban is asking for a donation of three bucks. C'mon -- three bucks. That's less than the price of a fast food hamburger, for cryin' out loud.

The Zerban/Ryan race is no longer just about a single congressional district. Paul Ryan is the rising star in the GOP: He's young, deceptively ingratiating, well-spoken, capable of thinking on his feet. In other words, he's dangerous -- dangerous in a way that clowns like Bachmann, Perry and Gingrich are not. The Republican party, beset by a talent shortage (hey, they're running Romney...!), is obviously grooming Ryan for the presidency. He is the face of the Libertarian menace that threatens to plunge this nation into a new age of feudalism.

I'm asking you to support Zerban because he can stop Ryan's rise -- cold. More than that: I think Rob Zerban is a decent man with decent ideas. He is precisely the sort of politician this country needs. (By the way, Russ Feingold endorses him.) Permalink

I used to say that Barack Obama was the worst thing to happen to the modern Democratic party. Now, even though I still don't like the guy, I advise readers to vote for him -- or at least, to vote against Romney. What caused this shift in attitude?

If forced to point to a single article which encapsulates my fears, I would choose this one, in which Grover Norquist brags of his ability to control a President Romney.

We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don't need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget. ... We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don't need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate.

Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States. This is a change for Republicans: the House and Senate doing the work with the president signing bills. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.

A startling statement, this -- especially if one recalls that Republicans built "fearless leader" cults around Reagan and both Bushes. Norquist explicitly stated -- months ago -- that the real architect of domestic policy would be Paul Ryan. Grover considers Ryan to be either his partner or his creature.

Way I see it, Grover Norquist = Palpatine and Paul Ryan = Darth Vader. I was going to liken Romney to General Grevious, but Grevious isn't robotic enough.

Michael Kazin of the New Republic predicts that Ryan will be the most powerful VP in our history -- yes, even more controlling than Dick Cheney.

Although Ryan is young enough to be Romney’s son, it is his ideas which thrill the conservative policy wonks. And if Republicans win, it is Ryan’s policies which GOP partisans will demand the new administration push through Congress. So when Romney introduced Ryan today as “the next president of the United States,” it may not have been just a meaningless mistake, caused by the excitement of the occasion. In a the grip of an unconscious fear of being overshadowed by his running mate, Romney may have committed a classic Freudian slip.

If I were more of a conspiracy theorist, I would suggest that the slip was intentional.

Jonathan Chait continues with this "Who's in charge here?" theme...

What makes Ryan so extraordinary is that he is not just a handsome slickster skilled at conveying sincerity with a winsome heartland affect. Pols like that come along every year. He is also (as Rich Yeselson put it) the chief party theoretician. Far more than even Ronald Reagan, he is deeply grounded is the ideological precepts of the conservative movement — a longtime Ayn Rand devotee who imbibed deeply from the lunatic supply-side tracts of Jude Wanniski and George Gilder. He has not merely formed an alliance with the movement, he is a product of it.

In this sense, Ryan’s nomination represents an important historical marker and the completion of a 50-year struggle. Starting in the early sixties, conservative activists set out to seize control of the Republican Party.

Now, I am enough of a conspiracy theorist to suggest that Romney chose Ryan as a way of motivating his party's dirty tricksters: "You now have something to fight for. Do your work."

Why on earth would Romney even want to be President in name only? Well, there is the not-inconsiderable fact that Ryan's budget would reduce Romney's tax burden to less than one percent.

Only someone deep in the throes of hallucination would claim that there would be no difference between an acting President Ryan and a re-elected President Obama. Liberals have no choice but to reconcile themselves to the re-election of a bad president, because Ryan and Romney really are that freakin' scary. As activists used to say back in the 1980s: Vote on Tuesday, protest on Wednesday. Permalink

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A spectre is haunting America -- the spectre of Libertarianism. To illustrate the point, Mitt Romney has chosen Paul Ryan as his running mate.

After a a quick scan of the reaction from Blogistan Left, I haven't seen a single "Uh oh." From HuffPo:

If Romney were to win with Ryan on the ticket, he would have a mandate to make sweeping changes not only to the size of government, but to programs like Medicare and Medicaid that are products of former President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program.

The Randroids have been aching for this fight. Very well: If we must have it, let's have it. Let's make this election about Medicare and Social Security. Last year, an ABC News poll found that...

...65 percent of Americans oppose changing Medicare to a system in which the government would give seniors vouchers with which to buy private insurance. Opposition was essentially the same in a Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard School of Public Health survey when the idea came up 15 years ago.

The language may matter, in that even most Republicans, 56 percent, oppose Medicare vouchers, as do more than seven in 10 Democrats. And opposition soars to 84 percent of all Americans, including nearly three-quarters of Republicans, if government payments failed to meet the full cost of seniors' insurance coverage.

They're quite the pair, Romney and Ryan: One of them avoids taxes by using schemes available only to the ultra-rich, while the other insists that the U.S. lacks the revenue to pay for Grandma's surgery.

Of course, Ryan has a history of advocating tax loopholes for his donors. He has also applied the label "class warfare" to any attempt to raise taxes on the very affluent, even as he advocates raising taxes on the middle class. Ryan's proposed budget would have given away trillions of dollars to corporations:

In all, those tax breaks amount to a $3 trillion giveaway to the richest Americans and corporations, according to the Tax Policy Center. Repealing the repatriation tax would add roughly $130 billion to that.

This morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Ryan insisted that the plan would generate the same amount of revenue as the government currently receives. In true Ryan form, though, he wouldn’t say how...

If Romney loses, blame the Tea Party. They forced him to veer right at a time when candidates traditionally play to the center. Choosing Ryan will please the hard-liners and the Ayn Randroids, but it will alienate many swing state voters.

Given the many failures of our current president, Romney should be jogging miles ahead of Obama by now. The teabaggers fitted the Republican candidate with iron running shoes. I hope the GOP leadership understands this lesson. Then again, if they didn't learn from the Sharron Angle debacle, perhaps they are unteachable.

What a posthumous triumph for Ayn Rand! History may say that ghost of the Great Cigarette Hag destroyed the Republican party in what should have been their year of gold. The GOP could have had the strength of Atlas, but they chose to shrug. Permalink

Well, this humble blog has gotten a lot of attention as the "Huntsman/Reid" rumor made the rounds. (See below.) However, Greg Sargent of the Washington Post has managed to do something I could never do: He spoke to Jon Huntsman Sr. on the phone.

Jon Huntsman the elder has denied being Reid's source for the claim that Mitt paid no taxes. I'll take him at his word. So that's that.

In our previous post, we showed evidence that the source could not be the younger Huntsman, the one who ran for president.

That said, the door remains ever-so-slightly cracked open. 

“That’s absolutely false,” Huntsman said of the speculation. “I have absolutely no knowledge of Bain or Mitt Romney’s tax returns.”

Abby Huntsman (daughter of Jon Jr. and granddaughter of Jon Sr.) co-wrote an article about Bain execs who said that Mitt would never have run for president if he (Mitt) knew that his taxes would be released. I don't think that Abby's co-author, Ryan Grim, is the one who got through to those Bain guys. So someone in the Huntsman clan knows someone at Bain who, in turn, knows about Mitt Romney's tax returns.

I take some umbrage at this...

Chuck Warren, a Salt Lake Republican strategist who endorsed Romney in the primary and has fundraised for the younger Huntsman's gubernatorial bid, dismissed the speculation as "ridiculous."

"I mean, people who believe this are the same people who espouse a theory that Big Foot is making crop circles with his space ship," said Warren, whose firm is Silver Bullet. "Besides the obvious fact that Mr. Huntsman is not Gov. Romney's accountant... he is simply a more honorable man than that.

Well, Chuck, how do you account for Abby's article, referenced above? Nobody claimed that anyone in the Huntsman family is Romney's accountant. I just said they have sources at Bain. Abby's piece indicates as much. Maybe you should talk to her.

I have no opinion on the Bigfoot issue. But I find it easier to believe in Sasquatch than in that wild tale about Joe Smith and his golden plates.

And now if you'll excuse me, Chuck, I'm off to grab some burgers with the Three Nephites. You know how those guys are: Lots of great stories, but they never pick up the check. Permalink

What a strange sight! My readership stats rose well above normal yesterday, thanks to a link from, of all places, The Daily Kos. Stranger still, the link was embedded in a post written by none other than Markos Moulitsas. Turns out that Kos thinks that Jon Huntsman Sr. snitched to Harry Reid about Mitt Romney's tax situation. He (Moulitsas) was kind enough to link to my earlier post, which fingered Jon Huntsman Jr.

I became extremely annoyed with Moulitsas back in 2008, when, in the throes of the Obama virus, he transformed his site into an every-bit-as-ghastly mirror image of The Free Republic. (If the cartoon to your right confuses you, click on the link above for context. Also see here.) If not for the vile antics of the Kossacks, we might have had a real Democrat as president during the past few years.

That said, I think Moulitsas is much less enamored of Barack Obama these days. His readers certainly seem disillusioned; few of them will vote for Obama, although many will vote against the despicable Romney. For my part, I like Hillary Clinton less than I did before. (She should have stayed in the Senate.) Perhaps we can all agree that both parties have mutated into weird mechanisms designed to keep the best candidates away from the nomination.

That said, I'm grateful for the link. Moulitsas' piece includes one key piece of evidence that gives us even better reason to look at the Huntsman family:

Remember it was a Huntsman daughter who penned an article at HuffPo with Ryan Grim that had sources saying Romney would have never ran if he knew he had to open up his tax filings. 

Does the Huntsman family talk Romney's taxes around the dinner table?

The reference goes to this fascinating article by Abby Huntsman and Ryan Grim. Abby Huntsman, born in 1986, is the daughter of the former presidential candidate. She doesn't normally partner up with Grim -- and Grim, in his other work, does not discuss having sources inside Bain Capital. Yet the above-linked piece references such sources. I thus presume (tentatively) that Abby was the one who rang up a couple of Bain head honchos and got them to speak, though not on the record.

Makes sense. Abby's grandfather is a business partner of Robert C. Gay, Bain's financial manager, and her father ran the Huntsman chemical company at a time when they got an influx of money from Bain. She's a well-connected young lady.

Let's look at the HuffPo piece in question...

Mitt Romney has been determined to resist releasing his tax returns at least since his bid for Massachusetts governor in 2002 and has been confident that he will never be forced to do so, several current and former Bain executives tell The Huffington Post. Had he thought otherwise, say the sources based on their longtime understanding of Romney, he never would have gone forward with his run for president.

Bain executives say they've been instructed to keep company and Romney-specific information completely confidential, tightening the lockdown on an already buttoned-up company.

So...is that it? Is my theory almost sorta kinda proven?

Nope.

In fact, it has been shot down by Ryan Grim's most recent piece. We now have a named person willing to talk about Reid's source:

"This person is an investor in Bain Capital, a Republican also, and somebody who has been dealing with Romney's company for a long, long time and he has direct knowledge of this," said Reid aide Jose Parra, referring to Romney's tax returns.

Parra teased the details in an interview with Mario Solis-Marich on KTLK’s Diverse LA radio program, according to audio of the show provided by the station.

Reid Chief of Staff David Krone previously described the source to Politico as a successful businessman, and CNN's Dana Bash reported that the source was "credible."

How (you must be asking) do those paragraphs damage the "Huntsman diddit" theory? The damage came in the form of an update:

Parra now says he doesn't know whether Reid's source is Republican. In an email to HuffPost, he wrote:

"I do not know the party affiliation of the source, how long he invested with Bain, or his relationship to Romney beyond the fact that he was an investor with Bain Capital, as Senator Reid has previously stated."

(Emphasis added.) Ah well. That rules out Jon Huntsman the younger -- Abby's dad. Everyone knows that he's a Republican. No-one who works in D.C. could possibly make a mistake about a thing like that. 

But.

Markos Moulitsas fingered Jon Huntsman the elder -- Abby's granddad. And God help me, I now think that Kos is right.

It is very conceivable that someone like Parra might presume the elder Huntsman to be a Republican early in the day and then later issue a correction. Most people would automatically assume that Huntsman Sr. favors the GOP, since his son ran for that party's nomination. But, contrary to expectations (and unknown to most people), Reid received fairly hefty campaign donations from Huntsman Sr. -- a fact which Parra may have learned from Harry Reid himself.

The elder Huntsman may well be an independent.

So my theory was wrong. But not, I believe, far wrong.

I now think that Reid spoke to Huntsman Sr. -- who, based on his relationship with Gay, is certainly in a position to know about Mitt's tax hideaways. Gay is the go-to guy for anyone who wants to keep a mountain of money away from the IRS.

In any case, the motivation for bending Reid's ear remains the same: The Huntsman clan can't stand Romney. (It's a Mormon thang.) And Junior now wants Reid's help in securing a position with the World Bank.

By the way, Jon Huntsman is persona non grata at the upcoming Republican convention. That fact seems relevant.

The "Senior" theory makes sense. After all, Reid's source will probably be identified one day. Maybe real soon. Junior would not have "dropped a dime" personally, since he does not want to ruin his shot at the 2016 nomination. Of course, he would have a shot only if the GOP snaps out of its "tea" trance and decides to go moderate.

One final point. Some of my readers may question whether we can call Jon Huntsman Sr. a Bain investor. It's fair to presume that he has received Bain stock, especially now that Bain is trying to get its mitts (so to speak) on Huntsman Corp. Permalink

I receive mass mailings from both the right and left. I never ask the conservatives to de-list me, because the goofy memes they pass along often spark story ideas. Here's one I didn't expect: There's a movement afoot to ask Republican delegates to abstain on the first ballot at the Republican National Convention. They want to dump Romney in favor of someone else.

The folks behind this mass mailing don't mention a web page, and the email address points to something called "Mass Media Distribution." It seems that the movement is headed by these people. I think they're Jews for Jesus.

(Is the term "Jews for Jesus" still used? They claim to be Christians, yet they spell God "G_D." Which, by the way, is a fairly new-ish thing for Jews to do. I haven't seen any English-language examples predating 1970. And before you write in with your tiresome predictabilities: Yes, yes, I know all about the Hebrew tradition. I said "English-language," didn't I?)
 
The Dumpers -- I like that term: Let's get it into circulation -- may be small in number, but they reflect a growing unease in Republican circles. CNN:

"Conservatives still have doubts about Romney," said Darrell West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution. "They continue to worry that he's not conservative enough, and that even when he says conservative things, he doesn't really mean them."

Many conservatives remain chary of Mitt -- but are they ready to join the Dumpers?

The Dumpers who sent me that mass mailing point to Romney's falling poll numbers in the swing states. What really bugs them, of course, is Mitt's religion:

But, the worst is ahead: If Romney leads the GOP ticket, "DUMP ROMNEY" says, voters in the all-important swing states will likely reject him as they learn the content of Mormon dogma, Romney's personal history as a religious leader of that sect, and what those things portend on explosive issues of race, religion and sexuality.

"Learn the contents"? Come off it. Everyone who cares about religion in America already knows all about Mormonism.

Side note: American evangelicals have an odd habit of presuming that you've never heard their rap before. Every time I run into someone who hopes to save my soul, that person seem genuinely surprised to learn that I am already quite familiar with the doctrine of justification by faith alone -- not works, just faith faith faith! In fact, the first time someone tried to blow my mind with that trip was back when Nixon -- or was it Johnson? -- sat in the oval office. The proselytizer's attitude seems to be: "Wait -- you say you know about that, and you're still not going to go to the church I want you go to? No. Not possible! You must have heard a garbled version. Let me restate it for you yet again. And again and again and again. I'm sure I can find the magic words..."

Admit it. You've had the same annoying argument with the same kind of annoying personage, haven't you?

And now let's get back to our main story. Although there isn't much left to tell....

The Dumpers genuinely believe that Romney is too damned librul and insufficiently intolerant of gayness.

"DUMP ROMNEY," both the Tampa convention memo and the book, asserts that the "USA is indeed a 'Chik-fil-a Nation' - a country committed to traditional marriage and sexuality - partly because we're loaded with 'Chik-fil-a Swing States.'"

Their solution:

What if enough of us were to realize just in time and in accord with RNC Rules – which necessarily empower “small-r” republican delegates to derail a doomed train – that one of the GOP primary survivors or AN ENTIRELY NEW NAME can and must be drafted as the 2012 Republican nominee?

What if Santorum, Gingrich, Ron Paul or other liberty lovers were suddenly to recognize, as a function of all the disturbing facts cited herein, what a deep betrayal, what profound negligence it would be to endorse Romney on stage in Tampa?

This is hilarious. As though those Republicans could fare better in the general. (What, no Michelle Bachmann? Hm. Methinks some Chik-fil-aters are a little squicked by the "first husband" visual.)

Personally, I would prefer to see Ron Paul as the nominee, though I don't want him to be President. For one thing, he's the most honest of the bunch. Most of all, I'd like to have the election focus on hardline Libertarian issues. Let's make this election all about getting rid of Social Security and Medicare and the minimum wage. No weasel words, no equivocations, no cosmetics.

I say we should have it out over that stuff, once and for all. Let's brand the GOP forevermore as the party that wants you to work for three bucks an hour. Let's brand the GOP forevermore as the party that wants to put Grandma out on the job market -- or on the streets, or in your back bedroom. And you pay her doctor bills. On three bucks an hour.

Yeah. I'm fine with that.

The Dumpers prefer to talk about religion, of course. They're zealots. In their zealotry, they overestimate the number of people who think as they do.

If they were less fanatical, they might see the obvious: The Republican primary candidate who stood the best chance of defeating Obama was always Jon Huntsman. A Mormon. And even more of a Librul Damned Socialist than Mitt is.

If a successful Mormon governor of Utah is too liberal for today's GOP -- and if Mitt Romney, who ran to McCain's right a mere four years ago, is too far to the left to please our current crew of tea-stained reactionaries -- what the hell has happened to this country? Permalink

Is there an independent source for the rumor that Jon Hunstman is Reid's source on the Romney "no tax" allegation?

A reader emailed me a little while ago, asking me if I’d heard the rumor that Harry Reid’s source for his statement that Mitt Romney paid no taxes for ten years is none other than Jon Huntsman. Yeah, that Huntsman. The same Jon Huntsman who called Romney “dishonest” during the Republican primary campaign,  and who still hasn’t endorsed Mitt Romney, fellow Republican and fellow Mormon. It makes you wonder….

In point of fact, Huntsman did endorse Romney. Politico called it "a cold embrace." Apparently, Huntsman was hoping that his rival would offer jobs to some suddenly-unemployed Huntsman campaign staffers. But the Romney camp made no such offer...

But the real obstacle, another Romney source explained: “You help your friends,” which the two are most certainly not.

Huntsman’s endorsement was chilly...

A month later, Huntsman was talking about the need for a third party...!

Is it possible...? Even I have had a difficult time accepting the possibility that Romney paid no taxes for the better part of a decade. I've presumed that the tax bill was surprisingly tiny, and that Reid's source, in a bit of jolly hyperbole, rounded that low figure down to zero. However, this excellent piece demonstrates that rich people do indeed have ways of offering zilch to Mr. Tax Man...

John Paulson, the most successful hedge-fund manager of all, bet against the mortgage market one year and then bet with Glenn Beck in the gold market the next. Paulson made himself $9 billion in fees in just two years. His current tax bill on that $9 billion? Zero.

Frank and Jamie McCourt, who own the Los Angeles Dodgers, have not paid any income taxes since at least 2004, their divorce case revealed. Yet they spent $45 million one year alone. How? They just borrowed against Dodger ticket revenue and other assets. To the IRS, they look like paupers.

In Wisconsin, Terrence Wall, who unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in 2010, paid no income taxes on as much as $14 million of recent income, his disclosure forms showed. Asked about his living tax-free while working people pay taxes, he had a simple response: Everyone should pay less.

One reader wrote to this blog arguing that, even if Reid is right, this brouhaha amounts to nothing, since Romney no doubt stayed within the law. I'm sure he did. But if more Americans understood how the law works, they would demand change. Permalink

Perhaps the funniest thing Colbert has ever done. Permalink

Gay Obama: Now this is too rich. Jerome Corsi, the Tea Party favorite, has a new revelation: Not only is Obama gay, he secretly "married" his Muslim Pakistani roommate during his Harvard days.

Remember, Corsi represents the teabaggers. These are the folks who have taken over the Republican party.

Silent John: In a previous post, we noted that John McCain -- whose campaign vetted Romney in 2008, and who may thus be in a position to know -- had refused to say whether he thinks Harry Reid lied about Mitt's taxes. Now he has been interviewed on that topic. But his wording is odd: Although he says that Reid went "over the line," he still won't call Reid a liar. 

Notice that McCain entire response is to attack Reid on a personal level. The response from most of the right-wing has been the same; RNC chairman Reince Preibus even called Reid a “dirty liar.” Yet, John McCain, of the few public figures to have seen Romney’s tax returns just couldn’t bring himself to say “Harry Reid is lying.” Nothing he’s said contradicts Reid in any way. Why not? He would know, wouldn’t he?

Lone nut: In our previous post on the Sikh temple massacre perpetrated by Wade Michael Page, we linked to two news interviews with eyewitnesses who spoke of multiple assailants. This site, previously unknown to me, thoughtfully argues in favor of a "lone shooter" scenario.

Then there are the eyewitnesses, two of whom said on air that four gunmen were responsible. One was heresay from an injured uncle, the other from a man inside the building at the time. As I've said before, eyewitness testimony is the worst form of evidence on Earth. If a crime gets committed in broad daylight and witnessed by ten people, eight of them will have radically different stories. This is a known fact among law enforcement and scientists so any testimony that is radically different from the others must be taken with a grain of salt.

Alex Jones and others are already hyping this story up, even though the evidence clearly suggests a single gunman. Why? The number of people wounded and killed was very low. If four gunman were there, there would be a lot more dead people. The number killed directly confirms to a person with a single handgun and an agenda. Police were on the scene quickly and three individuals getting away seem far fetched at best. Only two eyewitnesses say anything about multiple gunmen, the rest confirming the single shooter theory. Trust me, it is impossible to get that many people to lie about what they say when their lives were at risk. What would be their motivation? I highly doubt threats would have been used as that could blow up in their faces, so if the majority say one gunman, it is most likely one gunman.

I am not inclined to be so dismissive of eyewitness testimony. Still, I can't fault this writer's argument: Four shooters should have produced more corpses. That said, it seems very possible that Page had helpers, even if they did not carry weapons.

I have a similar problem with the two eyewitnesses who spoke of multiple shooters in the James Holmes "Dark Knight" massacre. Credible as those witnesses are, neither one saw two separate gunmen at the same time. And we can't escape the fact that most witnesses spoke of only one assailant. Permalink

(Note to visitors from Naked Capitalism: The link to this post advises you "Caution: foil ahead." Fair warning. But rest assured that this is the foiliest thing to appear here in a while, and that the shame-filled author pledges to keep these pages mostly aluminum-free henceforward.) 

In our earlier post identifying Jon Huntsman as the likeliest person to have informed Harry Reid about Romney's tax situation, I floated the idea that this whole brouhaha could be what spies -- well, some spies -- call a "double bubble" operation.

This could all be a trick designed to embarrass the Democrats -- an exploding cigar, if you will. It's an old gambit: First you feed false (but seemingly credible) information to an opponent, who goes public with what he thinks he knows. Then you demonstrate, in a very public forum, that what your mark thinks he knows just ain't so. Hilarity ensues.

As readers pointed out, the best-known recent example of the double-bubble technique targeted Dan Rather. I talked about other examples in this 2007 post. Usually, the double bubble involves forged documents which a journalist or other target is allowed to see but not copy.

But you don't need to go to that kind of trouble. One can create a mighty fine bubble through a simple telephone conversation -- especially if the guy blowing the bubble is someone as credible as Jon Huntsman.

So the question before us is this: Did a double bubble operation trick Reid into saying what he said? Did Team Romney employ this tactic in order to make the Democrats look bad when Mitt finally unveils the hidden tax forms?

Think about it.

Under normal circumstances, a release of those hidden tax returns would create a week of bad headlines for the Mittster. No-one doubts that he has socked away a large chunk of change in shady offshore bank accounts. And the mysteriously monstrous IRA is just bizarre.

The only way to avoid those headlines would be to turn the guns around. At this moment, nobody is asking: "Did Romney use legal but questionable means to avoid paying his fair share?" Instead, everyone is asking: "Did Harry Reid lie when he said that Romney paid no taxes whatsoever?"

If Romney can prove Reid a liar, then whatever goop lurks in those tax forms -- however unsettling, however icky -- will seem innocent. Team Romney will be able to control the narrative.

Not only that. Some conservatives (including at least one official Libertarian) are using the Reid controversy to pressure Obama into releasing his college records. The best defense is, as they say, a good offense.

There's a lot of BS in the Libertarian's piece. Wayne Allen Root avers that Harry Reid said what he said at the behest of the White House, even though that presumption comes to us bereft of proof. Root doesn't even claim to have a source of inside information; apparently, a band of angels whispered in his ear.

Nevertheless, Root also raises some genuinely interesting points, ones that I myself have mentioned in previous posts.

After reminding us that no-one can recall seeing Barack Obama on campus during his student days at Columbia, Root asks:

The first question I’d ask is, if you had great grades, why would you seal your records? So let’s assume Obama got poor grades. Why not release the records? He’s president of the free world, for gosh sakes. He’s commander-in-chief of the U.S. military. Who’d care about some poor grades from three decades ago, right? So then what’s the problem? Doesn’t that make the media suspicious? Something doesn’t add up.

Secondly, if he had poor grades at Occidental, how did he get admitted to an Ivy League university in the first place? And if his grades at Columbia were awful, how’d he ever get into Harvard Law School? So again those grades must have been great, right? So why spend millions to keep them sealed?

Third, how did Obama pay for all these fancy schools without coming from a wealthy background? If he had student loans or scholarships, would he not have to maintain good grades?

Root thinks that Obama got into those schools because he wasn't really a citizen. That idea, of course, is crap. Root may not be a birther, but we're definitely in birther territory.

In a series of posts (start here), I have posited another reason for Obama's remarkable college career. Even though many people will consider my theory irredeemably outre, I posit that Obama came from a CIA family; as a young man, he received help from "on high" in return for services rendered. I suspect that Obama's oddly unverifiable career as a Columbia student may have been a cover. Who knows what he was really getting up to during that time? Why else would a very prestigious university (with an undeniable history of close relationships with the intel community) keep a non-student student on the books?

Wayne Madsen picked up on this theory and wrote some long-ish pieces looking into a possible Agency connection. Unfortunately, many people mistrust Madsen because he too often relies on unnamed sources. (Besides, that guy is even weirder than I am.) Perhaps I should be grateful that he did not cite my work.

A few conspiracy-crazed oddballs have also carried this theme into Deep Wackyland: Here's an example and here's another. Just goes to show ya: You can't mention the spooks without bringing on the kooks.

Of course, most righties won't touch the evidence pointing to a CIA connection. Y'see, conservatives just love love love all conspiracy theories -- except for any theories which target western intelligence agencies. Those theories are Thoughtcrime.

(Incidentally, I would not be entirely surprised to learn that birtherism itself originated in a double bubble ploy directed against the Republicans. Over the past few years, we've seen a surprising number of forged "Kenyan" birth certificates with Barack Obama's name on them. Forgeries don't make themselves. It's possible that conservatives did the dirty work -- but maybe the forgers were people who wanted to make conservatives look like dimwits.) Permalink

Y'know why I love this? It explains why I can't stand Republicans and why I think Obama is a failure.


I see a lot of Islam-bashers doing "oppo" research on Mohammed. One basher even wrote an interesting but unconvincing book denying Mohammed's existence. I figure turnabout is fair play.

(That's an official portrait of Joe Smith. The head's too small.)


I don't know if the quote is accurate, but I bet it is.

Incidentally, my earlier post on the Harry Reid controversy has been getting some play.  That article offers evidence indicating that Jon Huntsman was Harry Reid's source for the claim that Romney paid no taxes.

Jon Huntsman has been tellingly silent about the Reid controversy. (Speaking in general terms, he did advise Romney to divulge his taxes.) I would like the Huntsman theory to receive wide circulation, because I would like him to respond to it.

You know who else has said nothing in response to the Reid brouhaha? John McCain. One may be able to read much into his silence, since McCain's team had a chance to go over Romney's taxes.

I bet Nancy Pelosi knows Reid's source.

John Sununu -- without a shred of evidence -- says that Barack Obama made Harry Reid lie. Any Republican who slams Reid while excusing Sununu stands exposed as a hypocrite.

As you may recall, one of the reasons I point to Huntsman as the source is the fact that he is on very friendly terms with Harry Reid. Did you know that, a year ago, Reid said that he favored Huntsman for president? Permalink