The presidential campaign starts for real

Last week marked two major turning points in the presidential campaign. It was the week that Romney was finally forced to venture beyond the warmth and comfort of Fox News, and it was the week that Obama decided to engage with a brutal ad declaring, "Mitt Romney's not the solution. He's the problem."

The Romney camp does not seem to have been prepared for this onslaught.

They want to be talking about the economy, but Team Obama have forced them to incessantly respond to questions about Romney's tax returns, his status as a 0.01%-er and unflattering questions about his business career.

After months of attacking Obama with blatant lies, Romney is reduced to demanding an apology for the suggestion that he was 'responsible' for the activities of Bain Capital at a time that SEC documents list him as its sole shareholder, President, CEO and chairman (while at the same time, FEC documents, curiously, list him as "retired").

It is not hard to see where the Obama campaign will be going next.

Romney has set himself up as the poster child for the Wall Street culture of wealth without responsibility that caused the fiscal crisis in the first place. And while the leveraged buyouts that made Romney rich may seem far removed from the mortgage securities collapse, the basic mechanism was remarkably similar: Overstate the value of an asset, borrow against it, pay yourself a huge management fee from the borrowed money, and make sure someone else picks up the bill when the whole scam collapses.

Expect to hear that it doesn't take any real business knowledge or expertise to make money the way Romney did. All it takes is connections to the right circle of cronies and a complete lack of moral scruples.

And they'd be right. Read the rest of this post...

Of cats and dogs and Brie, a little Paris blogging

I'm in Paris for my annual cat-sitting, scheming with Chris on AMERICAblog 3.0, and medical tourism.  I thought I'd share some random photos/thoughts from the past week.

Right before I left Chicago a few days ago, it was finally time for Sasha to get another haircut.  I like her hair long, but it tends to get a bit unkempt, owing to her half-terrier status (she's a Yorkie-Bichon mix).  That along with the 100 degree weather meant it was time for her summer cut.  I cut her back to about 1/4 inch, which I like (didn't at first, maybe I've gotten used to it).

Sasha pre-haircut:

Sasha post-haircut:

Sasha is not thrilled when I travel - either with her or without her.  She's gotten quite attached to me, as I'm told small dogs are bred to be.  That means it's hard for me to even go into the backyard, without her frantically searching for me through the window.

Upon arriving at Chris and Joelle's place in Paris, I was welcomed by my foster pets Sushi (the grey) and Nasdaq (the black).  Both cats know me well, and like me, though this was the first year that both decided to take up residence on my luggage at the same time.

Sushi was taking a respite from his other new favorite sleeping locale, the drawer in the kitchen (which was recently removed in order to be repaired - the stuff on the floor is the previous content of the being-repaired drawer).  Chris and Joelle's artist friend Serge painted their entire kitchen, and apartment, by hand (but with ornate designs in each room - the kitchen had, of course, a country food theme):

Another fun addition to a French kitchen is the toaster that's big enough to warm croissants and baguettes, but adjustable to do toast too (not that anyone here ever makes toast) - I've got three croissants in this thing in the photo:

Along the theme of food, here's Chris buying cheese at the cheese counter at the local supermarket, the Inno.  You can click the photo and see a much larger size.

This was a cute sign above the cheese counter.  It reads:

If I had a son
to marry off,
I would tell him:
"Beware
the girl
who loves neither wine,
nor truffles,
nor cheese."

And this, below, is a screen capture of an episode of the Borgias I was watching last night.  (Great show.)  And who should appear but one of Chris and Joelle's neighbors here in Paris, Jemima West (playing Jeremy Irons' new love interest, Vittoria/Vittorio).  We're all good friends with her parents, and Chris and Joelle have known Jemima since she was a little girl.  I met Jemima a few years back.  Just a wonderful young woman - British by blood, French by birth, and a fascinating, beautiful mix of the two.  Jemima just got one of the lead parts in a new movie about vampires, called Mortal Instruments.  Keep an eye on this one, she's going places.

And here's another shot of someone who wishes I weren't going places.

Read the rest of this post...

Romney's top campaign adviser: Mitt "retired retroactively to 1999"

The Romney people seem to have given up on even trying to make the race hard for Obama.  From National Journal:

Mitt Romney's top campaign adviser [Ed Gillespie] insisted on Sunday that Romney has no responsibility for any decisions made at Bain Capital during the three years from 1999 to 2001, during which he claimed that he had resigned from the company to go run the Olympics in Utah, explaining that Romney had "retired retroactively to 1999" from the company.

Then Gillespie accidentally shoots a torpedo in Romney's claim that he didn't do any substantive work at Bain during his leave of absence - a leave that left him as CEO, Chairman of the Board, and President - because he was just too gosh-darned busy to do anything else.

"There may have been a thought at the time that he, that it could be part time, but it was not part time," he said. "The Olympics was in a shambles. There was corruption."
Gillespie said that, even if Bain Capital had thought Romney could take a part-time leave of absence from the company, the reality of the demands of the job was different.

"If that's what it said, maybe that's what they thought at the time was that he could do it part time," Gillespie said. "It was not a part-time job. It was a 16-hour a day job."

But there's a problem with Gillespie's explanation. If Romney was working 16 hours day at the Olympics, and therefore couldn't find time to have anything to do with Bain, then how did he find time to travel cross-country to "most" of Staples' board meetings during the same period? From Politico:

Romney told the Massachusetts election panel in 2002 that he remained active in a number of companies while in Utah, including Marriott and Staples, the office supply giant he helped create through investments from Bain.

During his ballot commission testimony, when asked whether he continued to serve on boards while working on the Olympics, Romney answered: “Yes.”

“I immediately resigned from the board of Sports Authority located in Florida, feeling it could present a conflict of interest with my Olympic responsibilities and of course the travel could be challenging as well. I remained on the board of the Staples Corporation and Marriott International, the Life Like Corporation. And I remained as a corporator of the Belmont Hill School,” he said.

Asked specifically about the Staples board, Romney said there were four to five meetings a year and he returned to Massachusetts “for most of those meetings. Others I attended by telephone if I could not return.”

In other words, his "16-hour-a-day" job at the Olympics did not stop Romney from being involved in the decision-making of other corporations - it even gave him enough time to fly across the country to board meetings - so the excuse doesn't work for Bain either.  If Romney had time to fly home to be at several Staples board meetings, he had time to sit in on at least one Bain board meeting by phone.

And if Romney could attend at least one Staples board meeting by phone, do we know that he didn't do the same for any of Bain's board meetings?  Have the minutes of Bain's board meetings at the time been released?

And how strange that Romney found the time to fly home for several Staples board meetings, when busy working 16 hour days at the Olympics, but he chose not to have anything to do with Bain, a company where he was the sole stockholder, CEO, president and chair of the board, AND a company that Romney had a huge amount of money invested in, since he was the sole stockholder.  Is it credible to believe that Romney had time to spare for just a few board meetings, and he chose Staples over his own company?  Seriously? Read the rest of this post...

George Will: Romney hiding something bad in his tax returns

George Will says on ABC's This Week that Mitt Romney is hiding something bad in his tax returns:

WILL: Look, what Mitt Romney has said is he has released, and I quote, "all that's necessary for people to understand something about my finances." Now, the something is a pregnant word. And people are going to say there's -- the cost of not releasing the returns are clear. Therefore, he must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.

Then GOP consultant Mary Matalin joins in and says absolutely nothing other than GOP talking points. All the other people on the show have their biases, but you can tell they're also giving analysis. There's zero analysis from Matalin. It's all talking points she got from the Romney campaign. It's not clear why anyone has her on at all if she's unwilling to even give a little original thought.

MATALIN: He -- let's -- can we put some real facts on the table? Because we keep saying we -- this, that, and we don't know. We know the facts. He took a leave of absence to go run the Olympics in 1999. He never returned to Bain. He filed everything with the SEC that was absolutely by the law, letter and spirit of the law that the SEC required. ....

George Will responds to Matalin, as does former Bush-Cheney 04 chief strategist Matthew Dowd:

WILL: But, Mary, Mary, is it not what you call a "real fact" that Mitt Romney gave to the McCain campaign, when it was considering him as a running mate, 23 years of tax returns?

MATALIN: So what -- what if we -- let's say he -- he gives 23 years, we could put two decades of tax returns out. Is that going to produce two jobs? Is it going to produce anything toward a mandate, anything toward the debate about what this is about? Is the charge -- is the charge that he's hiding...

(CROSSTALK)

DOWD: Mary, you know -- you know -- you know, if -- if that was -- that if you -- I said that's truth serum in that cup, and you were advising a candidate like Mitt Romney in this instance, you would say, "We've got to get this out there." You would say, "We've got to get this out there to deal with this."

Dowd then goes on to repeat a point I made the other day - it's ironic for Romney to call Obama a liar when Romney started off his campaign by using an out-of-context quote to make it look like Obama had said a phrase that's actually attributed to John McCain:

DOWD: To me, the problem is the president is doing exactly what he needs to do because he wants to cover up on a failed record. He's doing exactly what he thinks, the ends justify the means, I'm going to attack this guy, tear him down, and that's what I need to do, because the direction of the country is bad.

But Mitt Romney -- this is like karma to me. Mitt Romney did the same exact thing that Barack Obama is doing to him. He did it to Newt Gingrich. And he -- he's saying the exact same thing that Mitt Romney is saying. It's like, you're taking my record out of context. I can't believe you're saying -- he did the same thing to Rick Santorum.

So now, all of a sudden, he's running against a -- in a general election against a very professional group of people, against a very astute politician, against a Chicago machine who's doing the same thing he did, and now he's sitting there saying, "I can't believe you're doing this. I can't believe you're doing this."

Read the rest of this post...

Trial Lawyer Mike Papantonio: Let's not cover it up; Romney has a criminal side to him

I always enjoy Mike Papantonio because he knows what he's talking about (he's one of the best litigators in the country) and he's not afraid to say it.

Here's Papantonio and Cliff Schecter on Ring of Fire Radio talking felonies, Romney, Bain and the Tea Party love of all three.

Money quote (at 1:51 in the clip below):

This man [Romney] will be running the country if he is elected, and we need to know that he has that frigging criminal side to him. Let's not cover it what it is. He has a criminal side to hm.

A good discussion throughout. Watch:



The Tea Party analysis starts at 2:31. That's followed by a discussion of Romney's $102 million IRA.

About how that's even possible, there's this (via Chris in Paris; my emphasis):

Tax lawyers and accountants suggest an answer: Romney may have made use of an Internal Revenue Service loophole that allows investors to undervalue interests in investment partnerships when first putting them into an IRA. These assets can produce returns far in excess of those that could be generated from other investments made at the capped level.

An investor could even set an initial value for a partnership interest at zero dollars, because under tax regulations an interest in a partnership represents future income, not current value, said Chris Sanchirico, co-director of the Center for Tax Law and Policy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

So all these Bain partnerships and offshoots — they're worth nothing when created. Then they go under the IRA umbrella and they bloom like a bed of roses. Voilà.

You can do that too. All you need is enough money to buy the laws you want from Congress.

Did I say conscienceless? I meant it if I did.

GP

To follow or send links: @Gaius_Publius
  Read the rest of this post...

Is British Airways googling passengers really that creepy?

I'm not seeing it.

British Airways’ announcement that it plans to start doing Google image searches of some customers so its staff can greet them by name isn’t sitting well with privacy advocates. “Since when has buying a flight ticket meant giving your airline permission to start hunting for information about you on the Internet?”, the delightfully named Nick Pickles of UK-based privacy group Big Brother Watch griped to the London Evening Standard.

I’d say it has always meant that, Mr. Pickles, since I’ve never heard of any law requiring anyone to get permission before Googling someone. Even so, the privacy backlash does suggest that we draw a line between computers tracking us and actual people tracking us. Most of us seem to be OK with websites installing cookies on our computers so they can recall our preferences (language, region, password, and so forth). And while a few of us may still have qualms about Google’s computers scanning our emails to serve us personalized ads, most seem to have accepted even this level of automated intrusion. But when a stewardess looks up publicly available information, we get queasy in a hurry.

As far as I can tell, British Airways is being open and honest about what it’s doing. The purpose of its “Know Me” program, according to a press release, is “to collate a wealth of data from every experience the customer has with the airline and translate that into meaningful service for that individual.”

Hard to find that too objectionable compared to everything else companies do these days with data we not only don't control, but don't even have a full grasp of what it even is.

Having said that, this may be the difference between privacy in Europe and (the lack of) privacy in America.  The fact that this kind of things sets off warning bells to privacy advocates in Europe may not simply mean that they're a bit anal.  It might just mean that Europe, or at the least the UK, has a much healthier concern (or expectation) about an individual's privacy than those of us across the Atlantic. Read the rest of this post...