Harry Reid ups the ante

I take back every mean thing I said about Harry Reid being a spineless, ineffective, hapless little sad sack. Well okay, maybe I don't take it back, because it was true then but I'm just wild about the new Harry Reid -- steely eyed warrior -- now. Every GOPer in America, from the big time power brokers to the angriest, meanest foot soldier in the base has been hurling every ugly smear they got at him and he hasn't flinched. In fact, Reid keeps raising the stakes:

"This person is an investor in Bain Capital, a Republican also, and somebody who has been dealing with Romney’s company for a long, long time and he has direct knowledge of this,” said Reid aide Jose Parra, referring to Romney’s tax returns.

Parra has since walked that a little back:

"I do not know the party affiliation of the source, how long he invested with Bain, or his relationship to Romney beyond the fact that he was an investor with Bain Capital, as Senator Reid has previously stated."

But no matter. There is every reason to believe Harry has a credible source for the allegation. I'm proud of him for standing firm and keeping it in the news cycle. It's a question the voters want answered and Harry is fighting not just the Republicans, but a complacent, cynical media to demand that answer on our behalf. Which is how the system used to work though most of the cool kids on the DC beat aren't old enough to remember it.

And perhaps our concern trolls could ask why Romney won't release information the voters have a right to know instead of hurling themselves onto the fainting couch because Harry is so "rudely" pressing the question. Clearly there's something big in those returns Romney wants to hide or else he would have shut this down by releasing them.

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When the party's over

DougJ is home so my guest gig at Balloon Juice is done. Glad it came up when I had time to fully enjoy the community of like minded people. Kind of the opposite of my life at the Detroit News. Not to say that both aren't good in their own ways.

Meanwhile, I never expected to say, "Damn, but I'm proud of Harry Reid."

Didn't think he had it in him to stand up to the GOP onslaught. Even better, Nancy Pelosi stood up for Harry today with the perfect response. Harry Reid is telling the truth. Someone did tell Harry Reid that Mitt didn't pay any taxes. The burden of proof under the current rules of political discourse, invented by the GOP themselves, is now on the Mittster. He could prove them wrong in a New York minute by releasing the tax returns. Raising the question -- again -- why won't he just do it?

Judging from the mass hurling onto the fainting couches in The Village, it looks like a brilliant move on the eleventy level chessboard to me. Happy to see the Democratic party playing the game well for a change.

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Harry Reid turns up the heat on Romney

I'm late in offering up a hearty round of applause for Harry Reid's showdown with Slippery Mitt over his tax returns. TBogg's tribute to Honeybadger Harry, in its full delicious snarkery, has the backstory covered so I won't recap the details again.

Moving on to today, Harry has the Mittster so flustered he was whining to the media this afternoon that he did too pay lots of taxes and Harry should stop being such a big meanie. He wants Harry to STFU already, to which Harry Reid laughs derisively.

"It's hard to say which is more insulting to Americans' intelligence, Mitt Romney's tax plan or his refusal to show the American people what's in his tax returns," Reid said in a statement. "Romney seems to think he's above the basic level of transparency and openness that every presidential candidate has lived up to since his father set the standard in 1968."

"In short, Romney's message to Nevadans is this: He won't release his taxes, but he wants to raise yours."

Harry is talking about Rmoney's magic tax plan which according to the Mittster is the secret formula that will eliminate the deficit and leave us all with our pockets stuffed with money the government didn't take from us. Or something like that. Apparently he didn't expect anyone to fact check that claim.

It's a little short on details but the experts incinerated Mitt's plan within hours. Greg Sargent shifts through the embers and distills the Rmoney tax plan down to its core essence.

One thing that’s important about the new Tax Policy Center study — which found that Mitt Romney’s plan would raise the middle class’ tax burden to pay for a tax cut on the rich — is that this isn’t a he-said-she-said-dispute. One of two things is true:

1) Romney’s proposed across the board tax cut disproportionately benefitting the rich would require, if it is to remain revenue neutral, the closing of loopholes that would mean that the tax burden goes up for people under $200,000. Or:

2) Romney’s plan isn’t actually revenue neutral — it won’t close the loopholes necessary to pay for its tax cuts — which means it would explode the deficit.

Even America's most timid fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, couldn't find a Pinocchio lurking in the Tax Policy Center's analysis of the plan.

Meanwhile, House Dems want answers about Mitt's mysterious IRA.

Heartening to see the Democratic party fighting back with some coherence. I only wish they had shown the same sort of energy towards advancing liberal policies in the last three and a half years as they now employ to keep their hands on the reins of power.

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Mitt Romney is not like us people

FSM on a broomstick, we know Slippery Mitt's tax returns are different.

A top campaign official who worked for Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) 2008 presidential bid and helped select his running mate said Sunday that Mitt Romney's tax returns "do not look anything like the average American," but held nothing which prevented him from being on the ticket.

That official would be Steve Schmidt who is now saying he viewed the tax returns. If memory serves, only a few days ago, Schmidt claimed he didn't see them at all. Why doesn't somebody ask him about that? And if there's nothing in bad them, then Slippery Mitt should fracking release the last ten years so the voters can see for themselves just how different he is from "us people."

Bit weary of the excuse, so easily accepted by our prime time prima donnas of the media, that Mitt just doesn't want to give the Obama campaign thousands of pages of oppo to "distort and use in attacks." It's only oppo if he's got something to hide. We're talking about appropriate disclosure here and asking questions about the facts revealed in the returns is not an attack no matter how many damn Pinocchios Kessler thinks those questions deserve.

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You people want too much

Social net outrage of the day comes to us via Ann Romney backing Slippery Mitt's tax return embargo. Her rhetorical slip into snobbery inspired the hashtag #youpeople on the twitter. Within hours it was trending.

“We’ve given all you people need to know and understand about our financial situation and how we live our life,” she said.

I watched the clip at the link and I'm with Steve M.. I'm not inclined to make a federal case out of the phrase "you people." There's not one person on this planet who hasn't used that term, though granted it's usually in jest. You probably said to a group of friends as some point in your life, "You people are all crazy!" Or all drunk. Or all wrong. Or something.

Her voice inflection gave no added weight to the words. It's just a figure of speech and she clearly didn't mean it as an insult. But it wasn't said in jest either. And even when said in jest, it's worth noting the phrase indicates putting yourself outside, and indeed above, the group. The group in Ann's case being all of us who are not Romneys or their intimate inner circle. As Charlie so often reminds us, to the Romneys, all us people are the help.

But the real outrage was in the context of the entire remarks. Ann is effectively saying, my husband is a good man on the surface and we've given out all the financial details the public deserves to know to judge his value. We don't have to justify our wealth, or the means by which we obtained it, any further to the people.

I'm beginning to think Ann understands the internets better than anyone else on Team Rmoney. She figured out the shiny object to distract the narrative. The words "you people" (the subtle dog whistle is silent)were catnip for the snarkerati. For the first time in almost two weeks, my tweet stream was mostly playing the #youpeople game and not talking the tax returns. With gives Ann the added bonus of having pissed off "teh left." That shit energizes the GOP's angry base. Something the Rmoney campaign desperately needed to do.

Ann Romney practiced that line. She knew it would come up. She chose the perfect words. So Ann wins the day and well played. Of course, it's summer silly season. Few will remember any of this by election day. And in a way, everybody is having fun. So there's that...

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About that George Romney quote

You've heard the quote a hundred times by now but I, for one, never knew the genesis of the George Romney tax return quote. It's an interesting story. He initially refused when his biographer asked him for just one year. Hence the quote:

"Release of the document, while it might serve a political purpose, would not prove very much, he argued. One year could be a fluke, perhaps done for show, and what mattered in personal finance was how a man conducted himself over the long haul." [...]

George Romney, however, called Harris back and surprised him.

"Stumped by this argument, I was not prepared for the move that it eventually led him to make: He ordered up all the Form 1040's that he and Mrs. Rome had filed over the past twelve years — including those profitable ones from when he saved the American Motors Company from bankruptcy and became a millionaire on the company's stock options."

The returns revealed an ethical businessman and a concerned citizen. Harris went on to write a glowing account of how George Romney became a self-made man of means who used his money to make the world a better place. Decidedly not driven by obscene acquisition and accumulation of power. He also paid his taxes without complaining.

Romney also payed an income tax rate several times that of his son's roughly 15%: He payed more than half of his income in taxes some years, and paid a total rate for the period over 50%.

Makes me wish we could retroactively replace the son with the father on this year's ticket.

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Conservatives in disarray

Not difficult to see how very nervous the cons have become about the Bain issue. The stretch to find even the slightest plausible false equivalence is no longer confined to the outer reaches of the Zombie Breitbart zone. This is possibly the silliest post ever published at Volokh.

Turn on the Drudge siren. President Obama can't bring up Rmoney's outsourcing because his tax returns show he made money from foreign sources.

Their returns do not disclose which foreign countries are responsible for paying the Obamas the $2.7 million in foreign source income, but the overwhelming bulk of it must come from payments resulting directly or indirectly from book sales. Nonetheless, the Obamas did report a total of $3,611 in foreign passive income in 2009 and 2010, a type of income that most often results from investments in foreign countries. Like some of the foreign investments for which Romney has been pilloried, this Obama passive foreign income might result from the foreign investments of U.S. financial entities in which the Obamas invested.

Oops. Addendum to the paragraph.

[See update below; the passive income indeed came from the foreign investments of a U.S. entity in which the Obama's had an interest (Michelle Obama in a beneficiary), but it is not one over which they had any control over the investments.]

So, in other words. Nevermind. (To be read in Emily Latella's voice)

By what stretch of logic is selling a couple million dollars worth of books and declaring a few thousand in passive income the same as this?



But beyond that, Jim seems to have missed the irony in that he could examine President Obama's tax returns because, Obama released his. That Romney hasn't released his tax returns is at the crux of their Bain problem. So, not helping. Neither to help Romney or inform the public.

I'm so old I remember when Volokh cared about the latter. They were the only conservative blog on my blogroll back then, when blogrolls ruled the ranking systems.

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Media putz on tax returns

I was going to blog this ridiculous post about tax return disclosure but it deserves much more serious snarkery than my limited skills can deliver, so just go read TBogg snark out ABC's Matt Negrin.

There's effectively two guys running for president. One released multiple tax returns. One didn't. One has super secret foreign investments. The other one doesn't. That's the only story. Negrin's idiot false equivalencies are lamer than the lamest troll in newspaper comment sections. Small wonder the public is so misinformed when a major network passes this off as "serious" journalism.

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Romney's mystery money

Latest ad from the DNC is pretty good. I would have skipped one of the newsroom clips and found a Romney one myself, but then again I don't know how to make these videos, so I suppose I shouldn't criticize. Judge for yourself.



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One year could be a fluke, just for show

Vanity Fair's investigative piece on Romney's money it the gift that keeps on giving. Bless them for reopening the call for the Romneybot's tax returns. Truth Team is on the case. They have a decent summary of the big questions about Romney's foreign investments and they just released a new web ad.



Thinking it's a little too long. They could cut the newsroom view out though and use the last 30 seconds or so with the Romney clips as a teevee ad. Pretty sure it would resonate in my market which is mostly poor Republicans.

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