Posts

Do Republicans Wish They Retroactively Had Let Newt Sustain His Bain Attacks?

/57 Comments/in /by

[youtube]BLWnB9FGmWE[/youtube]

Two soundbites from the Sunday shows have made a big stink: Mitt Romney’s former Bain partner, Ed Conard, admitting that Mitt was legally CEO of Bain until 2002. And GOP fixer Ed Gillespie, distancing Mitt from the outsourcing Bain did by insisting Mitt had “retroactively retired” before all the bad stuff happened but while (Conard confirmed) he was legally CEO.

All that’s on top of the fact that Mitt was profiting mightily from this vulture capitalism and siphoning the money to his offshore havens in Bermuda and Cayman Islands, which we’re not yet really talking about.

More telling, though, is the list of Republicans now calling on Mitt to release more his tax returns:

  • Columnist Bill Kristol
  • AL Governor Robert Bentley
  • Lobbyist and former MS Governor Haley Barbour
  • Columnist George Will
  • Strategist Matt Dowd
  • Strategist Ana Navarro
  • Strategist John Weaver

Now, none of these people–with the possible exception of Barbour–are big insiders who have any leverage over Mitt. Moreover, I can’t think of any way that any of them would definitely know the content of Mitt’s tax returns.

But what if they do? What if they know or suspect that those tax returns would expose not just Mitt’s role in Bain (including how much they paid him in salary in 2001 and 2002 to do, Mitt claims, absolutely nothing), but how much money he siphoned away to tax havens so as to avoid paying his fair share to the country he now wants to lead? What if they know the tax returns will doom his campaign, and want to force him to release them now, while they can still replace him with Chris Christie or someone else? (To be fair, with such a diverse mix of GOPers, I suspect they’ve got different motives for their comments, including–some of them–good faith belief releasing the forms would be best.)

Which makes me think back to the week in January when the GOP had the chance to fully expose what Mitt did at Bain–with the video Newt’s SuperPAC released above–but backed off that chance. (h/t ZachBeauchamp for finding a working copy)

Newt released the video on January 7. By January 10, Newt accused Mitt of undermining capitalism. But then, on January 11, he reversed himself, claiming he overstepped and asking his SuperPAC to edit the video, using the same claims of inaccuracy advanced by fact checkers that have foundered on the obvious facts included in SEC filings now. But by January 17, he was calling on Mitt to release his tax returns. Newt won the South Carolina primary on January 21. On January 24, Mitt released a single tax return, showing he paid very little in taxes and had tax shelters in Switzerland (now closed), Bermuda, and Cayman Islands, but revealing nothing about what he did in the key years in 2001 and 2002. Since Mitt won the nomination, Newt has even warned Democrats not to attack Mitt on the same terrible Bain record he himself did.

I sort of get the feeling Newt knows what’s in Mitt’s tax returns. Indeed, I’ve seen oblique tweets from a few Republicans this weekend saying “I told you so” and paying off debts, leading me to believe more than a few Republicans tried to warn their party that this Bain thing would blow up and are now being vindicated.

Read more →

George Will Goes Bipolar Over Brown

/137 Comments/in , , , /by

What can brown do for you? If you are George Will, apparently only mow the yard or fill the water glass at the local stick in your butt snob steakhouse. In the latest condescending pile of rancid, rambling garbage by Will, set for tomorrow’s Washington Post, Will defecates on about everybody he can find over the immigration law fiasco in Arizona:

“Misguided and irresponsible” is how Arizona’s new law pertaining to illegal immigration is characterized by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She represents San Francisco, which calls itself a “sanctuary city,” an exercise in exhibitionism that means it will be essentially uncooperative regarding enforcement of immigration laws. Yet as many states go to court to challenge the constitutionality of the federal mandate to buy health insurance, scandalized liberals invoke 19th-century specters of “nullification” and “interposition,” anarchy and disunion. Strange.

Uh, hey George, in the first place Pelosi is right, and your discreetly veiled misogynistic demeaning of her, and offensive put down of her hometown of San Francisco, are intellectually impertinent and scurrilous. The rest of the paragraph is such a non-sequitur you have to wonder about the stability of the mind authoring it.

Arizona’s law makes what is already a federal offense — being in the country illegally — a state offense. Some critics seem not to understand Arizona’s right to assert concurrent jurisdiction. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund attacks Gov. Jan Brewer’s character and motives, saying she “caved to the radical fringe.” This poses a semantic puzzle: Can the large majority of Arizonans who support the law be a “fringe” of their state?

“Some critics”, namely George Fucking Will (that is what the “F” stands for, right?) do not seem to understand the concept of Federal preemption. Maybe Will is one of those conservative headcases who consider the Tenth Amendment the most supreme law of the land; but it is not, and there is a reason serious minds term such morons “Tenthers” in the same vein as the nutjob Birthers. Clearly George Will would not know a proper legal argument of “concurrent jurisdiction” if it hit him in the ass. The rest of that paragraph is gibberish unworthy of a grade school response.

Popularity makes no law invulnerable to invalidation. Americans accept judicial supervision of their democracy — judicial review of popular but possibly unconstitutional statutes — because they know that if the Constitution is truly to constitute the nation, it must trump some majority preferences. The Constitution, the Supreme Court has said, puts certain things “beyond the reach of majorities.”

What? This paragraph makes Charles Cheswick and Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest look sane. You have got to be kidding me. The link is to the Cliff’s Notes, because it appears George Will Is not familiar with the great American novel.

But Arizona’s statute is not presumptively unconstitutional merely because it says that police officers are required to try to make “a reasonable attempt” to determine the status of a person “where reasonable suspicion exists” that the person is here illegally. The fact that the meaning of “reasonable” will not be obvious in many contexts does not make the law obviously Read more →

The Vaunted WaPo Fact-Checking Process

/20 Comments/in , /by

I’ve mostly stayed away from beating up George Will for his propaganda denying global warming. There was not much way I could improve on ThinkProgress’ and Media Matters’ multi-part response to Will.

But I’m fascinated by WaPo Ombud Andrew Alexander’s column on the controversy. It’s a vast improvement over Debbie Howell’s columns as Ombud, not just for his willingness to rethink his own early defensiveness, but because he names names of those who screwed up. 

First, the editing process. My inquiry shows that there was fact-checking at multiple levels.

It began with Will’s own research assistant, Greg Reed. When the column was submitted on Feb. 12 to The Washington Post Writers Group, which edits and syndicates it, Reed sent an accompanying e-mail that provided roughly 20 Internet reference links in support of key assertions in the column. Richard Aldacushion, editorial production manager at the Writers Group, said he reviewed every link. The column was then edited by editorial director Alan Shearer and managing editor James Hill.

Next, it went to The Post’s op-ed editor, Autumn Brewington, who said she also reviewed the sources. 

The editors who checked the Arctic Research Climate Center Web site believe it did not, on balance, run counter to Will’s assertion that global sea ice levels "now equal those of 1979." I reviewed the same Web citation and reached a different conclusion.

It said that while global sea ice areas are "near or slightly lower than those observed in late 1979," sea ice area in the Northern Hemisphere is "almost one million sq. km below" the levels of late 1979. That’s roughly the size of Texas and California combined. In my mind, it should have triggered a call for clarification to the center.

But according to Bill Chapman, a climate scientist with the center, there was no call from Will or Post editors before the column appeared. He added that it wasn’t until last Tuesday — nine days after The Post began receiving demands for a correction — that he heard from an editor at the newspaper. It was Brewington who finally e-mailed, offering Chapman the opportunity to write something that might help clear the air.

Here’s a snapshot of the editorial process that–journalists would tell you–makes newspapers infinitely superior to blogs.  Greg Reed sends a bunch of links. Richard Aldacushion "reviews" every link. Autumn Brewington "reviews the sources." Read more →

One Night of Indigestion for Obama

/in , /by

By now you’ve heard that Obama risked indigestion just days before his inauguration to reach out to the other side.

Barack Obama took the next big step in his Republican charm offensive on Tuesday night, when he dined with several of the nation’s most prominent conservative pundits.

The president-elect arrived at the Chevy Chase, Md., home of syndicated columnist George Will shortly after 6:30 p.m., according to a press pool report. Greeting him at the residence were other luminaries of the conservative commentariat, including the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol, New York Times columnist David Brooks, and Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post.

Just two comments about this. First, remember that two out of three of these men sort-of endorsed Obama as the election came to a close (indeed Brooks was a fan from early on). Here’s Brooks, enthusing over Obama’s self-efficacy in October.

But other candidates are propelled by what some psychologists call self-efficacy, the placid assumption that they can handle whatever the future throws at them. Candidates in this mold, most heroically F.D.R. and Ronald Reagan, are driven upward by a desire to realize some capacity in their nature. They rise with an unshakable serenity that is inexplicable to their critics and infuriating to their foes.

Obama has the biography of the first group but the personality of the second. He grew up with an absent father and a peripatetic mother. “I learned long ago to distrust my childhood,” he wrote in “Dreams From My Father.” This is supposed to produce a politician with gaping personal needs and hidden wounds.

But over the past two years, Obama has never shown evidence of that. Instead, he has shown the same untroubled self-confidence day after day.

Here’s Will, attacking the Republican ticket’s shared inability to think with complexity, in October.

Palin may be an inveterate simplifier; McCain has a history of reducing controversies to cartoons. A Republican financial expert recalls attending a dinner with McCain for the purpose of discussing with him domestic and international financial complexities that clearly did not fascinate the senator. As the dinner ended, McCain’s question for his briefer was: "So, who is the villain?"

Read more →