Sunday, September 2, 2012

Last Call

The Mitt Romney tax return story will not go away, not with stuff like this in the news.

The New York attorney general is investigating whether some of the nation’s biggest private equity firms have abused a tax strategy in order to slice hundreds of millions of dollars from their tax bills, according to executives with direct knowledge of the inquiry. 

The attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, has in recent weeks subpoenaed more than a dozen firms seeking documents that would reveal whether they converted certain management fees collected from their investors into fund investments, which are taxed at a far lower rate than ordinary income.
Among the firms to receive subpoenas are Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company, TPG Capital, Sun Capital Partners, Apollo Global Management, Silver Lake Partners and Bain Capital, which was founded by Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for president. Representatives for the firms declined to comment on the inquiry. 

Mr. Schneiderman’s investigation will intensify scrutiny of an industry already bruised by the campaign season, as President Obama and the Democrats have sought to depict Mr. Romney through his long career in private equity as a businessman who dismantled companies and laid off workers while amassing a personal fortune estimated at $250 million. 

Some executives at the firms said they feared that Mr. Schneiderman, a first-term Democrat with ties to the Obama administration, was seeking to embarrass the industry because of Mr. Romney’s roots at Bain. Others suggested that the subpoenas, which were issued by the attorney general’s Taxpayer Protection Bureau, might be part of an effort to recover more revenue for New York under state tax law. The attorney general’s office does not have the power to enforce federal tax laws.

You can bet New York wants that tax revenue.  You can also bet the more Republicans scream about how it's sooooo unfair for anyone to be going after tax loopholes.  And New York is holding all the leverage here.  You want to be on Wall Street?  You have to play by Empire State rules.  Merry Christmas, Eric.  Take them to the cleaners.

Podcast Versus The Stupid!

Our special coverage of the national party conventions continues with today's bonus show, Million Dollar Boobie Part 2.  Bon and I discuss Condi Rice, peanut tossing jackasses, Romney in Cincy, Springfield's spineless city council, and more.

Listen to internet radio with Zandar Versus The Stupid on Blog Talk Radio


We'll have more for you on Monday's Labor Day special show too.  Give it a listen.

Old School Awesome

Zap! Atari and Microsoft today launched Atari Arcade, an excellent example of how HTML5 can change the way we play video games.
The portal of retro entertainment -- primarily launched to celebrate Atari's 40th anniversary -- includes Asteroids, Centipede, Combat, Lunar Lander, Missile Command, Pong, Super Breakout, and Yars' Revenge. The best part? It's free, and doesn't require Flash, Java, or any other plug-in to play, running solely on HTML5.
That means you can play these classic games in modern versions of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and other HTML5-enabled Web browsers (such as those on Android and iOS devices). Talk about the perfect way to sneak a little game time in somewhere.
Awesome fun, and it brings back so many memories.  I got my first Atari when I was four, in 1980.  They were still a revolution, and I cannot tell you how many hours I *ahem* wasted playing the likes of Super Breakout and Night Driver.

Enjoy!

Cops Slam Nurse On The Ground

Two L.A. cops pull a woman from her car, handcuff her, and slam her into the ground again.  The five foot four inch woman is helpless to protect her face or body.  It looks more like an amateur wrestling move.  She's so much smaller than them it's disgusting.  And the best I can tell, besides some reflexes going off, she never resists arrest.

Watch the video to hear the outcome.  Spoiler alert: you'll be pissed.


I'm At WRMONEY In Cincinnati

Mitt Romney's first campaign stop after the convention?  Right here in Cincy yesterday.  Southwest Ohio will determine who wins the state, and Ohio may determine the Presidency, just look at 2004.  Romney wants to turn out Boehner Country and the northern suburbs and Dayton as much as he can to tip the scales, but Hamilton County can go either way and both sides know it.  Obama won here 53-46 over McCain in 2008, for Romney to win the state he's going to have to win Hamilton County...and he knows it.

Returning to campaign mode on Saturday –– the first day of college football - Romney offered several sports-related analogies.

Obama, he said, promised more jobs, but “23 million people are out of work or stopped looking for work or underemployed.

Let me tell you, if you have a coach that's 0-23 million, you say it's time to get a new coach. It’s time for America to see a winning season again and we're going to bring it to them.”

Romney really is a moron.  He's basically saying having any unemployed or underemployed Americans is Obama's fault.  If having ANY unemployed or underemployed Americans is grounds for not being re-elected, then no President should be.  In fact, basically every President we've ever had is, by the standards of Romney's idiotic sports metaphor, a "losing coach".  Hell, Mitt Romney himself was a losing coach as Governor of Massachusetts, right?  Jesus.   Oh, but it gets worse.

Romney also mentioned Neil Armstrong, the former astronaut and University of Cincinnati professor from Indian Hill who died last week.

“I will do everything in my power to bring us together, because united, America built the strongest economy in the history of the earth,” Romney said. “United, we put Neil Armstrong on the moon.”

We did, Mitt.  And we did it by using the government to do it.  And I'm sure Neil Armstrong would cold cock you for the way your party treats government employees and college professors:  as burdensome cancers on society that need to be cut out so that you can afford more tax cuts.  Jackass.

And as far as uniting America?  This is the guy running ads saying Obama is making it easier for those people to get welfare.  It's an awful, racist, divisive lie and the Romney campaign admits that being a racist bunch of assholes has been their most effective ad campaign so far.  That's the kind of "uniter" Mitt Romney is, a disgusting con man playing on fear and hatred in order to drive people to the polls.

President Obama's response was in Iowa again on Saturday.  He summed up the entire RNC in one sentence:

The president recalled the GOP convention as a look backward. “It was a re-run — we’d seen it before,” he said. “You might as well have watched it on a black-and-white TV.”

Well played with the double entendre, Mr. President.

The only thing Romney will do to unite us is make all of us poor to make him rich.

Jackass.

[UPDATE]  Speaking of jackasses, I see Hugh Hewitt is convinced the election in 2012 will cement Ohio's permanent red state status or something, with Romney and Senate candidate Josh Mandel winning in a fashion that "won't even be close".    He gives five reasons (Ohio loves Kasich and the GOP leadership, Ohio loves fracking, the Catholic vote will abandon Obama, the Jewish vote will abandon Obama, and Sherrod Brown is a, "uber-leftist") as to why, all of which are laughable when you look back at the 2011 election where the Jewish and Catholic vote helped viciously smack Kasich down. 

This state has union autoworkers Hugh, and they know which side left them for dead.  Kasich's at 41% approvalThings are getting closer for Josh Mandel, but that's because the state's been close.  It always is.  Brown continues to lead in poll after poll. And let's not forget that the GOP leadership is suing to stop people from voting.  And fracking?  Yeah Hugh, people like earthquakes in Ohio.  Not even Kasich wants that in an election year.

Don't speak up about the Buckeye state's politics unless you know something about them, Hugh.