Needlenose

There’s every reason to expect the next month or two to be the dullest part of the 2012 presidential race.  It doesn’t make much sense for the candidates to make their strongest, sharpest arguments when the public isn’t likely to tune in until the respective party’s conventions at the earliest (and really, not until the formal debates in September).

But then again, the polls are close enough to make the advisers on both sides nervous… and, well, they’ve got to say something between now and late summer, don’t they?

As a political junkie (meaning I think about things normal people shouldn’t bother with), I’ve wondered how this dynamic would affect Team Obama’s reelection strategy.  So this report of the president’s appearance in Iowa Thursday night intrigued me:

Speaking directly to Iowans, Obama used local lingo to slam Romney: “Governor Romney came to Des Moines last week and warned of a prairie fire of debt,” he said. “But he left out some facts. His speech was more like a cow pie of distortion.”

Then he quipped, “I don’t know whose record he twisted the most – mine or his.”

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Don’t get me wrong; attacking his opponent’s personal credibility makes a lot of sense for an incumbent running during difficult economic times — the basic argument is, “You may not think I’m doing a great job, but hell, you can’t risk handing the keys to this guy!” And it’s an especially obvious case to make against someone as glibly dishonest as Mitt Romney has been all year long.  But the danger in making truthfulness an issue this early is that invites the false equivalence-loving media to nitpick every statement that comes from any Democrat between now and November, so they can comfortably blame both sides.

For that matter, Politico (a bellwether for such things) considered it a problem for Team Obama to simultaneously argue that Romney was both insincere and a rigid conservative.  As Ed Kilgore snarked:

Is it really confusing or risky to depict Romney as an empty suit in the thrall of radicals? … I’ve also heard from anxious Democrats who fear that calling Romney a flip-flopper could make him more attractive to swing voters: “Being a flip-flopper might actually help Romney. It shows he’s not an unreasonable person.”

Really? People who don’t like the ideology Romney has been incessantly peddling for the last two presidential cycles are going to vote for him because they believe he’s an incorrigible liar?

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In fact, it may just be that Obama’s reelection staff felt like they couldn’t help using the ammunition Romney has been giving them.  The video above shows their effort at making Mitt’s recent “I stand by what I said, whatever it was“ line as infamous as John Kerry’s “I voted for it before I voted against it” — and it seems like pretty sharp stuff, almost fall-campaign caliber.

And they haven’t even dragged out the “Etch-a-Sketch” yet.  By October, this could get nasty.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

You probably read about Thursday’s  mini-firestorm in the blogosphere: the report that a wealthy right-winger, Joe Ricketts, was considering a $10 million super-PAC ad campaign reviving old charges about President Obama’s supposed connections to Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

You may have missed the punch line, though.  The denial issued by Ricketts described him as “a fiscal conservative,” and his super-PAC is (rather ludicrously) named the “Ending Spending Action Fund.”

Unsurprisingly, though, it turns out that he and his family — who own the Chicago Cubs — are quite fond of government money when it’s going into their pockets.  As the Chicago Tribune reports:

The long-shot prospect of taxpayer help to renovate Wrigley Field grew more remote Thursday, upended by revelations that the patriarch of the Chicago Cubs’ ownership team had been offered a plan for using a super PAC to run racially tinged attack ads that linked President Barack Obama to his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright…

Cubs Chairman Tom Ricketts phoned the mayor, but Emanuel didn’t return the call.

“He’s not interested in talking right now,” said a source close to Emanuel….

About six weeks ago, Emanuel said he was in the “final stages” of talks with Cubs ownership over a public-private deal to help renovate an aging but historic sports shrine.

The idea already faced a tough time in Springfield, where Gov. Pat Quinn and lawmakers are struggling to agree on staggering cuts in taxpayer-supported human services and getting a handle on runaway public worker pension costs. Helping the wealthy Ricketts family was hardly a priority at the Capitol.

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Meanwhile, you remember Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, who flaunted his conservative political leanings after helping win the World Series in 2004 by campaigning for George Bush–and then John McCain in 2008 and Massachusetts’ Scott Brown in 2010?  (As Brian McGrory of the Boston Globe notes, Schilling praised Brown as being “‘for smaller government,’ and lauding Brown’s opposition to ‘creating a new government insurance program.’’’)

Well, Schilling didn’t mind the government insuring him when the state of Rhode Island gave him $75 million in guaranteed loans for a business venture.  And today it turned out that Schilling’s company has burned $50 million of that money, admits it can’t meet its payroll… and has “asked for additional help from the state.”

But I’ll bet you anything Schilling would get mad if you called it welfare.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Somewhere in the (temporarily) lost archives of Needlenose are a set of posts regarding the rise of the international ruling class.  We’re entering a period never foreseen by Marx and Engels – rather than reaching international worker solidarity, we’re instead seeing the rise of international rich person solidarity, where the uber-wealthy park their citizenship wherever convenient (e.g. so-called ‘countries’ which charge them minimum/no taxes) to avoid paying taxes.  Logical I suppose, given how mega-companies, not content with paying politicians to lower their corporate taxes to ridiculous low levels, are finding ways to ‘park’ their sales and profits in offshore tax havens.

Think I’m crazy?  Then see how Facebook Founder Eduardo Saverin is ‘re-citizening’ to Singapore in order to avoid paying billions in taxes.  And he’s just the most egregious, merely following in the footsteps of  another 1,780 wealthy ‘deadbeats’ who want to enjoy all the benefits of living in our modern society while paying little (proportionally speaking) of the costs.

I am still amazed when I run into Americans solidly in the ‘lower 99%’ who defend the wealthy.  Marx had a label for them – class traitors.  Watch ‘class warfare’ become fashionable again after a few years of a Romney/Boehner/McConnell/Roberts government (or else we really are pretty fucking stupid).

*Update 5-18-12* Limbaugh *loves* tax dodgers