Reid To Romney On Tax Returns: Not Good Enough
Mitt Romney’s Real Effective Tax Rate
Paul Ryan Faces Tough AARP Crowd
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Dylanology & the Birther Conspiracy
We’re all individuals, with our own uniquenesses, contradictions and oddities. Yet if you tell a demographer a few key pieces of information about yourself they can give pretty good odds on the range of viewpoints you’re likely to have, life patterns and choices.
Some people though somehow break the mold.
Read More →iGot One!
Scenes from the shopping crush today for the new iPhone 5.
Picture of the Day
Shuttle Endeavor on final journey with fighter escort over Los Angeles.
Romney Plays the California Card
Romney says Obama’s America is becoming a socialist hellhole like California … where he just bought a new house.
Hrrrmmmm
Rick Newman notes that when Romney released his preliminary 2011 tax return estimates in January he was reporting $20,901,075 in adjusted gross income. The final returns released today show $13,696,961 in adjusted gross income.
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Harry Reid Decries Mitt’s Tax ‘Manipulation’
Harry Reid goes back to war with Romney’s tax returns.
Romney: The Campaign is Going Great!
Rommey tells 60 Minutes: Our campaign “doesn’t need a turnaround. We’ve got a campaign which is tied with an incumbent President” … “we’re tied in the polls. We’re all within the margin of error. We bounce around.”
So What Did Romney Actually Release?
So what did Romney actually release? Not much. Here’s a quick read on what we learned and what remains hidden.
Walker Lowers the Boom on Mitt
Republican super-hero Gov. Scott Walker expresses “frustration” with Mitt Romney, thought Ryan mojo would “transfer over to our nominee” but hasn’t seen it yet.
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How Mitt Compares To The Rest Of Us
We put together this chart a few weeks ago to show how Romney’s effective federal tax rate compares to the average rate of other income brackets. (Keep in mind that was when Romney was saying he paid close to a 15 percent rate, so we used that number; today’s release shows that his 2011 rate was 14.1 percent.)
Oh, Mitt
Romney artificially inflated 2011 taxes after saying, “I don’t pay more than are legally due and frankly if I had paid more than are legally due I don’t think I’d be qualified to become president.”
A Few Of The Romney Tax Highlights
Here’s the key part of the blog post about the new Romney documents that the Romney campaign has posted, written by R. Bradford Malt, a partner at Ropes & Gray, LLP, who has been the trustee of the Romneys’ blind trust since 2003:
Read More →Alabama GOP Chair Goes Birther, Says Obama's Communist Upbringing 'Verified'
The head of the Alabama Republican Party this week supported a bizarre vein of the already bizarre birther movement.
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MapBox Aims For Open Source, Digital Map Revolution
“What a crazy week,” said Eric Gundersen, CEO of MapBox, a cloud-based digital map publishing company, in an interview with TPM. Gundersen’s point is well taken, given his small 25-person startup, based in Washington, D.C., just won a $575,000 grant from the journalism innovation nonprofit the Knight Foundation. The grant was awarded to MapBox specifically to allow the company to focus most of its resources over the next few months on improving its own main source of map data…
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Reid To Romney On Tax Returns: Not Good Enough
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is no longer insinuating that Mitt Romney paid no federal taxes over the last 10 years. But he’s showing no contrition and continues to maul Romney for withholding tax returns from voters. “The information released today reveals that Mitt Romney manipulated one of the only two years of tax returns he’s seen fit to show the American people - and then only to ‘conform’ with his public statements,” Reid said in an official response to the release of…
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Alabama GOP Chair Goes Birther, Says Obama’s Communist Upbringing ‘Verified’
The head of the Alabama Republican Party this week threw his support behind one of the most far-fetched theories of the already bizarre birther movement.
Speaking to a group of GOP diehards on Wednesday in Fairhope, Ala., party Chair Bill Armistead raved about a film called “Dreams From My Real Father.” The movie claims President Obama’s grandfather was a CIA agent who convinced Barack Obama Sr. to marry his teenage daughter to hide the fact that she’d been secretly impregnated by a communist.
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What Romney’s Taxes Reveal – And What They Don’t
Mitt Romney released his 2011 tax returns Friday, along with a brief summary of his 1990-2009 tax returns. The Romney campaign is asking voters to take its word on the details of his previous returns, but the new information helps address some of the big questions surrounding his finances – like whether he once paid zero taxes. Other questions – like Romney’s offshore holdings – are still unclear. Below is a guide as to some of the big revelations – and biggest remaining…
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Mitt Romney’s Real Effective Tax Rate
Mitt Romney’s 14.1 percent effective federal tax rate in 2011 would’ve been lower if he’d deducted all of his charitable contributions from his nearly $13.7 million in income. But after estimating that he paid at least 13 percent of his income in taxes in each of the last 10 years, Romney opted not to deduct nearly $1.8 million worth of charitable contributions last year to artificially lift his tax liability. So what would Romney’s effective tax rate have been if he’d deducted all…
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Kickstarter Cracks Down On Hardware Projects, Says It’s ‘Not A Store’
Kickstarter, the New York-based web company that has become nearly synonymous with “crowdfunding” – the trend of Web users posting project ideas online and soliciting donations from other users in exchange for small gifts or copies of the resulting work – has a message for all aspiring project creators: “Kickstarter Is Not a Store.” In a striking effort to crack down on the ostentatious claims by an increasing number of Kickstarter projects focused on developing hardware –…
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McCaskill Uses ‘Legitimate Rape’ Debacle To Cast Akin As Extremist In Debate
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) wasted no time using Rep. Todd Akin’s (R) talk of “legitimate rape” against him in the Missouri Senate debate Friday. Both candidates tried to paint the other as too far on the fringes for Missouri’s heartland electorate. McCaskill tied Akin to Rep. Michele Bachmann in her opening statement; Akin alleged repeatedly McCaskill had voted with President Obama “82 percent of the time.” McCaskill rejected Akin’s suggestion that he represents the middle of…
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Paul Ryan Booed Throughout AARP Speech (VIDEO)
Paul Ryan’s speech to AARP’s national conference in New Orleans did not go over too well with the audience. The Republican vice presidential nominee, who has led his party in proposing a privatization plan for Medicare, drew repeated jeers and catcalls as he made the case for Mitt Romney’s platform on entitlements. Easily the worst moments came as Ryan discussed repealing the Affordable Care Act, which increased prescription drug and preventive service benefits for seniors. “The…
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Trust In Media At New Low; Fewer Americans Following Political News
Not only is trust in the media at an all-time low, fewer Americans are paying attention to political news this year, a Gallup survey released Friday shows. Asked how much trust and confidence respondents have in the mainstream media – newspapers, television and radio – to report accurately and fairly, 60 percent said not very much or none at all. Just 40 percent of respondents have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the media. According to Gallup’s results, this negative view …
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Swing-State Poll: Obama Lead Grows
President Obama leads Mitt Romney in a new poll of 12 key swing states. Obama leads 49 percent to 44 percent in the poll from Purple Strategies. The poll is a combined sample of likely voters in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, and also shows good news for Obama in over-sampled results for Ohio, Virginia, Florida and Colorado. Last month’s Purple Poll showed Romney with a slight edge in …
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Biden Speech Most Watched Of The 2012 Conventions
The numbers are in, and the title of most watched speech of either party’s national convention this year belongs to Vice President Joe Biden. Nielsen estimates that there are roughly 289.7 million TV viewers in the United States. Of those viewers, 14.7 percent watched Biden’s speech on the final night of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. President Obama came in second with 13.7 percent. Mitt Romney ranked third with 12.5 percent. And former President Bill Clinton came …
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SNL Mocks Romney, Fox News In Special Election Edition Spoof
In a special Thursday election segment of “Saturday Night Live”, the late-night comedians took aim at Mitt Romney’s recently revealed disparaging remarks against the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay income taxes, and the “Fox and Friends” coverage of the Republican candidate. Jason Sudeikis, playing Romney, said in a slightly altered clip that when he refers to that 47 percent of Americans who will never vote for him, he doesn’t mean senior citizens, U.S. soldiers or southern…
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