Returns Of The King

Mitt Romney threw a Friday afternoon news dump smokescreen today by releasing his complete tax return for last year only, showing A) his income estimates were off by 50% or so and B) the wheels are coming off for good.

OFA deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter said Mitt Romney's tax returns showed why the president's call for higher taxes on the wealthy made sense.

“Today’s release of Mitt Romney’s 2011 tax returns confirms what we already knew – that people like Mitt Romney pay a lower tax rate than many middle class families because of a set of complex loopholes and tax shelters only available to those at the top," she said in a statement. "Yet, Mitt Romney still wants to give multi-millionaires an additional $250,000 tax cut at the expense of middle class taxpayers who will see their taxes go up."

Stephanie Cutter is quite good at her job, folks.  Unlike the other team.

Cutter added that Romney still had not released any tax returns from before 2010, despite disclosing about one page of details on his effective tax rates from 1990-2009 on Friday.

Yeah, those details are a summary of Mitt's tax returns for the last 20 years, according to accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers.   Not the actual returns.  So, hey.  But it's notarized, right?  As Chris Hayes remarked on Twitter on Friday:

The tax returns are a good reminder that the trustee of Romney's "blind trust" is his personal attorney. Aka: it's not really blind.
— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) September 21, 2012

 Cutter cuts on:

"While the tax return for the one year released today continues to mask Romney’s true wealth and income from Bain Capital, leaving the American people in the dark about critical details about his finances,  it does confirm that he continues to profit from millions of dollars invested overseas," Cutter said. "These types of investments, the use of tax loopholes, and the resort to foreign blocker corporations enabling him to reduce his U.S. tax obligations, all raise basic and still unanswered question – why does Mitt Romney not just release the full returns , instead of the bare summary he has provided of the last 20 years, so voters can make their own judgments about Mitt Romney’s finances?   As Mitt Romney’s father said, candidates should release several years of returns, because one year could be a fluke. President Obama, Vice President Biden and nearly every other candidate in recent memory has met that test, but Mitt Romney continues to fail it.”    

Why Stef, you people don't get to sit in judgment of Romney, you know.

Funny part is the Romneys didn't take all the deductions they could of on Mitt's charitable giving, as accounting firm PWC explains:

The Romneys’ generous charitable donations in 2011 would have significantly reduced their tax obligation for the year. The Romneys thus limited their deduction of charitable contributions to conform to the Governor's statement in August, based upon the January estimate of income, that he paid at least 13% in income taxes in each of the last 10 years.

So the Romneys could have paid even less taxes, but they chose not to because of politics.

Better part, when Mitt loses in November, he can amend his tax return and get his lower tax rate back.  He has until Dec 31 to do that.

Absolute best part?

When Mitt Romney released his official 2011 tax return Friday, the GOP presidential candidate seems to have inadvertently called the United States a foreign country.

“If you have a foreign address,” the tax return instruction reads, “also complete spaces below.” In the space below, under “foreign country name,” Romney’s form reads “USA.”

The mistake was likely accidental, but the Harry Reids of the world must be asking themselves: Did Romney think his local address was in Switzerland?

This is now bordering on comical.

Brown 'N' Served

Last night was the first of the state debates for the Massachusetts Senate race between Republican Scott Brown, currently serving as Senator finishing out the late Ted Kennedy's term and Democrat and former Obama administration official Elizabeth Warren.  On the Rachel Maddow show after the debate, Barney Frank was brutal on the subject.

Frank pushed back against Brown’s claims that he was willing to work with Democrats, describing him as a “cog in this right-wing Republican machine.”

“A key moment came when Elizabeth Warren talked about Jim Inhofe who Scott Brown would like to make Chairman on the Committee on the Environment, who says global warming is a hoax and would dismantle the EPA,” he said on MSNBC. “And [Brown] said, ‘you’re not running against Jim Inhofe, you’re running against me.’ That’s not true. Elizabeth Warren is running against a Scott Brown who wants to make Jim Inhofe the chairman of the Environment Committee.”

“He’s not running for class president. He’s running for United States senator, and by the way, you’re right that you couldn’t get him to say the word ‘Romney’ with a subpoena. He talks about support for some of Obama’s policies, but he would vote to make Mitch McConnell the majority leader.”

And Warren made this point a number of times, reminding voters that as much as Scott Brown is trying to avoid Mitt Romney, in the end, he's a Republican who will vote for and has voted for Republican measures and obstruction in the Senate. 

There was also a very good exchange on climate change in the debate.  Brown absolutely believes in it, he says, but Warren counted with the fact that the rest of his party most certainly does not, and in the end, he'll vote with them to block any measures that would help stop it.

The same goes of course with abortion and women's rights.  It's a tough sell now that Brown has gone on record against these subjects time and time again.

Akin Can't Spell Or Woo Women Voters

On Tuesday, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the Missouri Senate candidate's campaign was forced to take down its "Women for Akin" site after the paper pointed out that one of the women in the prominent photo was not a supporter of Akin, and, in fact, worked on behalf of his opponent, incumbent Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.).

The website featured a photo of Akin with standing with his wife and two women, but one of the women was Corinne Matti, a tracker for the state's Democratic Party.

But that wasn't the only mistake. Text to the right of the photo read, "I'm a women and I support Todd." 

Of course, "women" should be the singular "woman."

For its part, the Akin campaign told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that this was a draft version of the site that wasn't yet supposed to go live. 

The paper heard from a McCaskill spokesperson, so click over to the Post-Dispatch to see what she had to say about the image.

They knowingly lied.  They are so desperate to show women love Akin that they had to hijack a photo of a woman they knew did not support them.

Personally, I'm glad that Akin didn't drop out of the race.  It all but guarantees McCaskill's victory.

Any woman who backs Akin is a traitor to her own kind.  The sole exception is his wife, who knew what she married.  But when she continues to compare the GOP's actions to rape, she is also doing her man no favors.

Crash and burn, baby.  Crash and burn.

Must-Read Article

Sandra Harmon, a successful TV writer and producer.  However, she got her start in New York when she was so young that $96 a month in rent stretched her resources.  It was also when she was raped and abused by a diplomat who knew her living circumstances, a man who knew she did not have a bed and offered to let her borrow one while she waited.

Harmon writes an amazing story, and the ending is not without satisfaction.  She's a tough, ballsy broad.  But she has a lot to say about legitimate rape, and the pregnancy that ensued, and what women could find themselves facing in the future under the same circumstances.  It is nervy of me to presume to speak for her, but I bet she would also surely be disgusted about Akin's wife comparing people's reactions to rape, saying they have caused him enough pain that it is similar.

No, this is a real story about what happens when a young, poor woman finds herself attacked through no fault of her own.  I've got a teaser here, but I very much recommend that you read the whole thing.

For the next few weeks, I tried not to think about what happened, avoided the neighborhood coffee shop and didn’t confide in anyone. I didn’t tell my mother because she was still angry I’d moved alone to Manhattan. I knew she wouldn’t understand, and would blame me. I thought briefly of going to the police, but remembered that Enrique, as an Chilean diplomat, was immune to prosecution. Besides, who would believe my word over his after I’d invited him to come up to my apartment with a bed? 

When my period didn’t come, I went to the doctor and learned I was pregnant. I was in shock. Getting pregnant with an unwanted child was one of the worst situations a poor young woman could get herself into. I didn’t want a baby, and there was no way I could have afforded one. I felt I had no choice but to get an abortion. But abortions were illegal, albeit not impossible. In those days, real doctors, wanted a thousand dollars, and I didn’t have it. All my salary went to pay for rent and groceries. 

I refused to even consider the not-so-secret world of incompetent abortionists who were not doctors, who emphasized speed and their own protection. They didn’t use anesthesia because it took too long for women to recover; they wanted them out as quickly as possible. Some abortionists were rough and sadistic, or even drunk. Setting up shop in cheap, rundown, often filthy apartments, or in the back room of a commercial store, or even in the back of a car, almost none took adequate precautions against hemorrhage or infection. Some women turned to dangerous self-abortions, such as inserting knitting needles or coat hangers into their vagina or uterus, douching with lye, or swallowing strong drugs or chemicals. Many women died, and others had been left with chronic illness and pain, or disfigurement or infertility.

His Own Pocket Universe

Rand Paul, Kentucky senator and professional idiot, showed up to offer his solution for health care costs:  insurance with deductibles so high that everybody pays in cash.

Capitalism has not been tried yet in health care. Most of health care is government-fixed prices and there’s very little capitalism. In fact, I’m a physician. In my practice, about 3% of my practice was capitalism. Those are people who came in with high deductibles or paid cash. That marketplace worked because we did bid down prices on things that people came in and paid for.

Sure.  See, without the profit motive in health care, people just get sick and expect insurance they're paying premiums for every month to actually pay for their health care, the crazy bastards.  You're supposed to be healthy, and not get sick, so you don't need to burden America with the cost of your illness.

Of course, when your deductible for everything is so high that you're basically paying cash up front for health care, it'll scare everyone into being healthier, right?

Well...

Furthermore, the idea that shifting costs onto consumers will force them to change their health-related behavior doesn’t hold water because 70 percent of national health costs derive from 10 percent of the population. That 10 percent consists of the Americans who have such extensive health care needs and high medical costs that their treatments fall well outside the scope of their deductibles — so in many cases, they don’t have either the incentive or the ability to choose to lead healthier lifestyles.

So people who are really sick, who really need health care the most, are responsible for most of the costs.  Capitalism would suggest we start addressing the issues with how that care is given out, not punishing people with health insurance that won't pay out 90% of the time.

Oh wait, Rand Paul.  Punishing the poor for being poor is all that matters to him.

Chik-Fil-A'holes

Looks like Chik-Fil-A really did fold on its support for anti-equality groups in order to get into markets like Chicago and California, and the right is now furious.

Chick-fil-A stopped funding traditional-marriage groups in an effort to open a new Chicago restaurant, but the company initially kept quiet about the decision, prompting gay rights groups to speculate that the company feared a backlash from conservative customers.

The Christian-rooted fast food restaurant agreed to stop funding groups such as Focus on the Family that oppose same-sex marriage in a meeting with the Chicago politician who had been blocking the company’s move there. Chick-fil-A wrote a letter to Alderman Joe Moreno affirming this, according to his spokesman, Matt Bailey, but the company initially wouldn’t allow his office to release the letter to the public. Three weeks later they relented.

“There was concern from them,” said Anthony Martinez, executive director for the Civil Rights Agenda, the Illinois lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender group that negotiated with both Chick-fil-A and the alderman to stop funding for so-called anti-gay groups. “They really didn’t want to announce it, really, but, of course, the alderman needed to clarify why he was changing his stance on them opening a restaurant within his ward.”

Chick-fil-A did not returns requests for comment, and has previously said it will not discuss the issue with the media.

And oh, the whining from the winger blogs on the right.   That prompted this "clarification" from the company:

“For many months now, Chick-fil-A’s corporate giving has been mischaracterized,” executives said in today’s statement. “And while our sincere intent has been to remain out of this political and social debate, events from Chicago this week have once again resulted in questions around our giving. For that reason, we want to provide some context and clarity around who we are, what we believe and our priorities in relation to corporate giving.

“A part of our corporate commitment is to be responsible stewards of all that God has entrusted to us. Because of this commitment, Chick-fil-A’s giving heritage is focused on programs that educate youth, strengthen families and enrich marriages, and support communities. We will continue to focus our giving in those areas. Our intent is not to support political or social agendas.

“As we have stated, the Chick-fil-A culture and service tradition in our restaurants is to treat every person with honor, dignity and respect — regardless of their belief, race, creed, sexual orientation or gender. We will continue this tradition in the over 1,600 restaurants run by independent Owner/Operators.”

Nobody who runs an openly religious business that makes political donations should expect to stay out of the limelight, folks.  You can't have it both ways, and that's what they are trying to do here.  And yes, the company has been playing the evangelical right for fools all this time.  Not hard to do, since most of them don't believe in science or facts.

Good luck with your chicken there, guys.

StupidiNews!

• The US has temporarily closed several facilities across countries like Indonesia and Sudan in anticipation of protests.
• President Obama admitted that he believed the inability to get the GOP to sign on to comprehensive immigration reform is his greatest failure of his first term.
• The Obama administration is touting success of its drone strikes on terror suspects, but the CIA would rather keep that information secret.
• The European Central Bank's plan to buy unlimited bonds to keep interest rates low for the PIGS countries is having decidedly mixed results.
• The World Wide Web Consortium group has moved the time clock up on HTML 5 to 2014 rather than 2022.

Last Call

Funny thing about policy specifics.  It turns out that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan do give them out from time to time if you listen and do a little digging.  They're pretty well hidden, as this week indicates.  And Mitt Romney isn't the only one with policy proposals that look pretty awful under the sunlight.

Paul Ryan gave away the current GOP game back in 2005, for instance, at arguably the most important and telling speech of his political career:  the Atlas Society’s “Celebration of Ayn Rand.”  The audio of the speech is still up at the Atlas Society's website.

But when you look at the fight that we’re in here in Capital Hill, it’s a tough fight. It’s a very important fight. But we need more people on our side to fight this fight. That is why there is no more fight that is more obvious between the differences of these two conflicts than Social Security.  Social Security right now is a collectivist system, it’s a welfare transfer system…..

And what’s important is if we actually accomplish this goal of personalizing social security … [Ryan laughs. Ed Hudgins overheard “personalizing”] personalizing social security … [laughter, applause] think of what we will accomplish. Every worker, every laborer in America will not only be a laborer but a capitalist. They will be an owner of society, they will be an owner and a participant of our free enterprise system, of our capitalist system. I would like to have more people on our team who are owners and believers in the individualist capitalist system than on the other side, and if every worker in this country becomes an owner of real wealth, of seeing the fruits of their labor come and materialize for their benefit, then that’s that many more people in America who are not going to listen to likes of Dick Gephardt and Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, the collectivist, class warfare-breathing demagogues.  

Now let's pause for a second here.  Ryan is saying that by privatizing...I mean, "personalizing" Social Security...by putting it in the hands of corporate America, American workers will then work harder because they are an "owner of society" at that point.  Social Security is a collectivist, welfare transfer system.

And here's the thing:  If what Ryan was actually proposing was that the American worker received the benefits of corporate ownership commensurate to the risk they are taking by handing over the equivalent of 15 or 20% of their current gross for 50 years to a company to invest, that would be great.  There's no way this happens, of course.  The opposite is true:  corporations see the benefits and profits, while individuals assume most of the risk.  See the current paycheck of any CEO compared to their lowest paid worker.  He continues:

So you have to understand that all they have to do is stop us from succeeding.  Autopilot will get them where they want to go. Autopilot will bring more government, more collectivism, more centralized government.  If we do not succeed in switching these programs, in reforming these programs from what some people call a defined benefit system, to a defined contribution system– from switching these programs—and this is where I’m talking about health care, as well—from a third party or socialist based system to an individually owned, individually prefunded, individually directed system.

We can do this. We are on offence on a lot of these ideas.  I was the principle author of the Health Savings Account law, which was an amendment I brought to the floor and passed in the Medicare bill in the last session of congress. Health Savings Accounts, personal accounts for Social Securities, these are the things that put us on offence, that get the– the individual back in the game and break the back of this collectivist philosophy that really pervades, you know, ninety percent of the thinking around here in this town.

In other words, health care, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare?  They have to be run like a business, in order to make a profit, not to provide care.  That's what "defined benefit system to a defined contribution system"  means.  You are not guaranteed benefits.  You will however, be guaranteed to have to pay into the system.

This is why running these programs like a business is a horrible idea.

Businesses fail.  It happens all the time.  Oh well.  So much for your retirement.  You get nothing.

This is Paul Ryan's America.  And in it, somebody has to lose.

Tiny Bubbles, In My Space-Time

Yeah.  So this is pretty awesome.  Make it so.

Researchers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) are carrying out lab-scale experiments to create tiny space-time warps with an aim to eventually achieving “Star-Trek”-style interstellar space travel.

According to the Alcubierre warp drive theory, proposed by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994, a spaceship could travel faster than light inside a bubble of negative energy that deforms the space-time continuum, compressing it in front of the craft and expanding it behind.

Harold “Sonny” White, from JSC’s advanced propulsion physics laboratory Eagleworks, attended the 100 Year Starship Symposium in Houston on Sept. 14 to present his lab’s findings.

White’s team is testing out mathematical equations relating to the physics of cosmic inflation using an instrument called the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer, which uses a laser to create little warp bubbles.

“We’ve initiated an interferometer test bed in this lab, where we’re going to go through and try and generate a microscopic instance of a little warp bubble,” White said, according to a July article in Roundup, JSC’s biweekly publication.

“And although this is just a microscopic instance of the phenomena, we’re perturbing space-time, one part in 10 million, a very tiny amount.”

Cannot.  Stop.  Headbanging.  Over how awesome this is.  Sure, it'll be generations or so before we end up doing anything practical with this, if it even works at macro scales without obscene amounts of energy, or at all, or without tearing a dimensional rift into the Chaos Realms and making the walls bleed.

But still!  Science!

The Mask Slips Again

...and Republicans accidentally tell the truth about their legislation.  Today's contestant:  Pennsylvania state GOP Rep. Daryl Metcalfe on the state's voter ID law, the law recently sent back down to the minors for review and a possible injunction.  Metcalfe gets caught talking on a radio show about the real aim of the law, to prevent Democrats from voting.

HOST: Are you absolutely convinced…that the methods to implement this law are effective and will in fact make sure no legitimate voter will be disenfranchised?

METCALFE: I don’t believe any legitimate voter that actually wants to exercise that right and takes on the according responsiblity that goes with that right to secure their photo ID will be disenfranchised. As Mitt Romney said, 47% of the people that are living off the public dole, living off their neighbors’ hard work, and we have a lot of people out there that are too lazy to get up and get out there and get the ID they need. If individuals are too lazy, the state can’t fix that.

Yeah, sure.  And poll taxes in the Jim Crow south proved how lazy and stupid black people were when they didn't have the money to pay for the privilege of voting.  The ID is free.  The documents you need in order to get the free state ID, well gosh, those cost money and time to obtain.  Too bad for them, right?

Why should the 47% be allowed to vote, anyway?  They vote Democratic, after all.  We can't have that.  If you say "Hey, I don't know if I'm going to vote" the Republicans in power will make that decision for you.

Jackass Jail Sentence

TACOMA, Wash. — A Washington state man who beat a neighbor's dog with a hatchet after luring it with treats has been sentenced to six months in jail.

The Pierce County prosecutor's office says 55-year-old Ricky Knowles was sentenced Monday after pleading guilty in July to first-degree animal cruelty.

Prosecutors say Orting police were called after neighbors saw the Pierce County man beat the dog in March. They say police found the dog — Kona — in Knowles' garage tied to a pole, bleeding from severe wounds to his head and neck. They say animal control officers had to cut a piece of wire from around the dog's neck.

Six months is not nearly enough, but it's a damn good start.  This man deserves no mercy, no kindness and no accommodation.  His actions are beneath that.

Springfield Mayor Calls Us Ignorant Hillbillies... And Then It Gets Stupid

One of the factors Springfield and Greene County must overcome in order to bring jobs to this area is our pervasive reputation of being a bunch of ignorant hillbillies.

When a company is looking for a new site to locate jobs, it looks at several key factors: the quality of schools, the quality of parks and recreation, the availability and quality of the workforce and the attitude of the community. And yes, it looks at whether a community can be described as “welcoming” to various populations that might be considered “different” from the mainstream.

It also checks out the mayor.  And the crooked-ass City Council. It looks at things like the Medicacom Ice Park, that fun little eyesore where they gave Mediacom exclusive rights to the city, so they hiked the rates to pay for their "gift" of an ice park.  Or the fact that they have no voice in government because City Council elections are too expensive, so they'll just tell us how our town will run.  Don't forget Bob's contempt when he said it was hard to find qualified people, meaning most of us are just too stupid to know right from wrong.

I think they'd be proud to see adults giving a damn about how their government is run.  A little salty language in front of teenagers?  Are we really going to pretend that doesn't happen or that the teenagers don't use the same language?

Really, that's his line?  That is what finally brings our mayor to shame?  Because I could put you to sleep with a thousand stories that should have.

What a jackass.

Big Not Rock Candy Mountain

Jon Stewart wins all the things.


This may be the most biting takedown of Romney's 47% video yet. (OK, video's odd, just click here for it.)

Senate GOP Blocks Veterans Jobs Bill

The Republicans in the Senate continue to make sure that we can send men and women to fight for our freedom in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, but when they come home, they're just worthless looters and moochers who get abandoned by the country they fought for.

The Senate blocked legislation Wednesday that would have established a $1 billion jobs program putting veterans back to work tending to the country’s federal lands and bolstering local police and fire departments.

Republicans said the spending authorized in the bill violated limits that Congress agreed to last year. Democrats fell two votes shy of the 60-vote majority needed to waive the objection, forcing the legislation back to committee.

Supporters loosely modeled their proposal after the President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps used during the Great Depression to put people to work planting trees, building parks and constructing dams. They said the latest monthly jobs report, showing a nearly 11 percent unemployment rate for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, merited action from Congress.

Democratic lawmakers turned to the legislation shortly before they’ll adjourn for the finals weeks of this year’s election campaigns. The bill had little chance of passing the House this Congress, but it still allowed senators to appeal to a key voting bloc.

“(With) a need so great as unemployed veterans, this is not the time to draw a technical line on the budget,” said Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, the bill’s lead sponsor, who faces a competitive re-election battle.

Republicans said the effort to help veterans was noble, but the bill was flawed nevertheless.

Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma said the federal government already has six job-training programs for veterans and there is no way to know how well they are working. He argued that making progress on the country’s debt was the best way to help veterans in the long-term.

“We ought to do nothing now that makes the problem worse for our kids and grandkids,” Coburn said.

Yeah, we wouldn't want to make things worse for kids and grandkids living in America's military families by keeping veterans unemployed or anything.

After all, soldiers, vets, and the unemployed are part of that 47% that would never vote for Mitt Romney and the Republicans. So screw em, let them rot in the streets while we cut taxes on the rich again.  I'm sure the hand of the free market will make it very profitable to care for veterans suffering from mental trauma, physical injury, or both someday, we just need to cut taxes on millionaires and billionaires until that happens.

Assholes.

StupidiNews

• CNN reports slain US Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens worried he was on an "Al Qaeda hit list."
• Italy's highest court has confirmed 23 convictions against US CIA agents in absentia over the kidnapping and rendition of suspected terrorist Abu Omar.
• A partial fishing rebound from 2010's Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster has resulted in a record seafood catch for 2011, according to the latest government figures.
• Possible manipulations in other key interest rates by banks means the recent LIBOR scandal may only be the tip of the iceberg.
• California has become the latest state to offer on-line voter registration ahead of November's elections.