Mittens and Another Damn Lie

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The facts: Per Judd Legum, “Since 2005, Ohio has had in person early-voting in the three days prior to the election. This year, however, the Republican legislature in Ohio eliminated early voting during this period, except for members of the military.”

The Obama campaign sued the state of Ohio to restore early voting for everyone. Here is the brief. A quote:

A preliminary and permanent order prohibiting the Defendants, their respective agents, servants, employees, attorneys, successors, and all persons acting in concert with each or any of them, from implementing or enforcing lines 863 and 864 of Sec. 3509.03 (I) in HB 224, and/or the SB 295 enactment of Ohio Revised Code § 3509.03 with the HB 224 amendments, thereby restoring in-person early voting on the three days immediately preceding Election Day for all eligible Ohio voters.

The Mittens version of events:

“President Obama’s lawsuit claiming it is unconstitutional for Ohio to allow servicemen and women extended early voting privileges during the state’s early voting period is an outrage,” he said in a statement posted to Facebook Saturday afternoon. “The brave men and women of our military make tremendous sacrifices to protect and defend our freedoms, and we should do everything we can to protect their fundamental right to vote. I stand with the fifteen military groups that are defending the rights of military voters, and if I’m entrusted to be the commander-in-chief, I’ll work to protect the voting rights of our military, not undermine them.”

The above quote is taken from an article in The Hill.You have to read the article nearly to the bottom to find out what the Obama campaign’s lawsuit actually is about. That liberal media strikes again.

Mitt and Taxes

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I cannot improve on Tbogg’s analysis of the Harry Reid “outrage” on Mitt’s taxes. Do read. I don’t know if Reid really heard what he said he heard; I do know that this has got to be getting under Mitt’s thin and privileged skin.

Meanwhile, House Dems are joining forces to demand that Mittens explain how the amount of money in his IRA came to exceed the GDP of Micronesia.

Romney’s most recent financial disclosure form revealed that his tax-deferred individual retirement account holds upwards of $100 million — an amount that awkwardly showcases his enormous wealth but also raises legal and ethical questions.

IRAs are intended to allow workers to put away modest sums of money each year in order to help finance a middle class retirement. The savings are tax deferred, but there’s a legal limit — now $6,000 — on how much each IRA holder can contribute annually.

Now top Democrats on the Budget, Ways and Means, and Education and Workforce Committees want to know how people of Romney’s wealth can end up with 100,000 times that much money in a single IRA, and how much the tax and investment strategies they employ cost the Treasury in revenue every year.

In a letter Thursday to senior officials at the Treasury and Labor departments, Reps. George Miller (D-CA), Sander Levin (D-MI), and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) want to know: Is this legal? How easy is this strategy to get away with? How much does it cost the government every year? And what can be done to end the practice?

“[W]e are alarmed to learn that wealthy taxpayers may be taking advantage of a tax subsidy that is designed to provide for retirement to instead accumulate massive amounts of tax-sheltered assets,” the lawmakers write. “Given your commitment to the rule of law and equitable treatment of taxpayers, we hope that you will evaluate this issue carefully to ensure that a select few are not being provided with a loophole that allows for wrongful tax evasion.”

And the Obama Campaign has published and interactive map to show people how much taxes would go up in each state of Mittens is elected.

I can’t remember a time when the Dems were this coordinated. Praise be.

Romney is promising jobs, jobs, jobs. He’s saying he will create 12 million jobs in his first term, which would beat Bill Clinton’s record in his first term. Well, that sounds grand. But Mittens a little vague about where these jobs will come from. He seems to think his mere presence in the White House is all that’s needed.

How will Romney create 12 million jobs?

Romney economic adviser Glenn Hubbard put out a white paper yesterday explaining the goal, but as the Huffington Post’s Jon Ward notes, “The paper was less actuarial work with raw data and specific numbers, however, and more of an economic philosophy argument based largely on the premise that simply by undoing much of what President Obama has done since taking office, the economy would recover at a faster pace than it has been from the recession that began in late 2008.”

Still, the paper states that “history shows that a recovery rooted in policies contained in the Romney plan will create about 12 million jobs in the first term of a Romney presidency.” Notably, the paper does not provide much historical evidence to support this claim, and where it does look at history, it focuses on unemployment rates, not job creation numbers.

In other words, if we clap our hands and vote for Mitt, the jobs fairy will leave jobs under our pillows. This is so stupid it doesn’t even rise to the level of pandering.

Moveon Misstep?

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Lay off the horse, I say again. Right now every progressive/liberal/Democratic ad buy should be zeroing in on Romney’s tax policies and nothing but Romney’s tax policies, until every American hears about what Mittens has in store for them. Snarking about the expensive horse comes across as petty, IMO, and at this point is just message clutter.

Update: Olympic news — U.S. gymnast Gabby Douglas just won the gold medal in the women’s individual all-around competition. She is the first American woman to win the team and individual all-around in the same year.

Romney’s Tax Policies Are a Joke

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Typical —

A new study describing Mitt Romney’s tax cut proposals as an average tax increase for 95% of Americans is “a joke,” according to Romney adviser Eric Ferhnstrom. But policy aides offered no indication they plan to offer more details on Romney’s plan in order to clarify how it would be paid for and what they assumed its effects would be.

This goes on all the time in the Mittens camp. Someone will issue a criticism, with supporting data, of a proposed Romney policy and explain why that policy would have bad effects. And the Romney camp will just say “no, that’s a lie,” without offering a counter-argument.

In this case, what counter-argument the Romney camp offers is simply a fantasy.

Mitt Romney’s policy director Lanhee Chen claims that a new study showing 95% of Americans would see a tax hike under Romney’s tax reform plan is “biased” and fails to take into account the explosion of economic growth that will occur under Romney’s administration.

Bring on the Underpants Gnomes.

Very, very simply, Mittens is proposing across-the-board tax rate cut, plus elimination of some taxes that only the wealthy pay, plus increases in the defense budget, because spending more money on defense — whether the Pentagon needs it or not — proves you are Serious. And this will be revenue neutral, they claim, paid for by spending cuts and by eliminating some tax deductions, although he won’t say what would be cut or eliminated.

The Brookings Institute (and I’ve seen this elsewhere) look at this and say that the only way this would be revenue neutral is to eliminate tax deductions that benefit the Middle Class and cut spending on programs that benefit the poor and Middle Class, meaning that it would amount to an effective tax increase on most Americans.

Ezra Klein explains,

The Tax Policy Center bent over backwards to make Romney’s promises add up. They assumed a Romney administration wouldn’t cut a dollar of tax preferences for anyone making less than $200,000 until they had cut every dollar of tax preferences for everyone making over $200,000. They left all preferences for savings and investment untouched, as Romney has promised. They even tested the plan under a model developed, in part, by Greg Mankiw, one of Romney’s economic advisers, that promises “implausibly large growth effects” from tax cuts. The fact that they couldn’t make Romney’s numbers work even when they stacked all these scenarios on top of one another shows just how impossible Romney’s promises are.

The reason Romney’s plan doesn’t work is very simple. The size of the tax cut he’s proposing for the rich is larger than all of the tax expenditures that go to the rich put together. As such, it is mathematically impossible for him to keep his promise to make sure the top one percent keeps paying the same or more. …

… “Families with children currently receive 57 percent of the available tax expenditures examined in this exercise but 23 percent of the revenue reductions. Thus a reform that imposed an across-the-board reduction in tax expenditures would increase taxes much more on families with children than on childless adults.”

It’s obvious the Mittens crew hasn’t worked out how their promises will be filled. In fact, when asked for details, they say that’s up to Congress.

But asked on a conference call whether the Romney campaign would offer up any more details on how they believe their plan would work instead, policy adviser Jonathan Burks demurred, saying it would be up to Congress to help fill in the blanks.

“The governor’s plan essentially lays out the parameters that he wants to achieve: lowering the tax rate by 20 percent, achieving revenue neutrality, and maintaining progressivity and within that he would write a tax plan that achieves those goals,” he said. “So, it’s not a question of ‘today we have a 2000 page tax plan that could be scored.’”

In other words, he’s expecting the help to make it work.

Update: Krugman —

And the Romney people respond with deep voodoo, invoking the supposed fabulous growth effects from his tax cuts. And who could argue? Remember how the economy tanked after Clinton raised taxes? Remember how great things were after Bush cut them? Oh, wait.

Mitt Romney v. Jared Diamond

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Jard Diamond, author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel, says Mittens is misrepresenting his work.

It is not true that my book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” as Mr. Romney described it in a speech in Jerusalem, “basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.”

That is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it. …

… Even scholars who emphasize social rather than geographic explanations — like the Harvard economist David S. Landes, whose book “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations” was mentioned favorably by Mr. Romney — would find Mr. Romney’s statement that “culture makes all the difference” dangerously out of date. In fact, Mr. Landes analyzed multiple factors (including climate) in explaining why the industrial revolution first occurred in Europe and not elsewhere.

Reminds me of …

If Mittens is true to form, he will ignore Jared Diamond and continue to mischaracterize his books.

BTW, I watched Mrs. Mittens’s horse perform in the Olympics just now, on a live stream, and she did pretty well. I have no idea if she’s a contender for a medal, though.

Update: Horse currently in 6th place, in the preliminaries. Update: Finished 13th for the day. In this competition, that is very respectable.

Rememer, Rafalca is America’s Horse. Literally. We’re payin’ for her oats.

Mitt’s World

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There’s a profile of billionaire Jeff Greene in New York magazine that’s worth reading. Greene thinks the folks who live in the Hamptons need to be a lot less oblivious about what’s going on in the middle class.

“This is my fear, and it’s a real, legitimate fear,” Greene says, revving up the engine. “You have this huge, huge class of people who are impoverished. If we keep doing what we’re doing, we will build a class of poor people that will take over this country, and the country will not look like what it does today. It will be a different economy, rights, all that stuff will be different.”

So, yeah, he’s worried about his own skin, but you get a sense that he understands that upward mobility is getting more and more impossible, and people are sinking.

This past April, at the Milken Conference, the annual confab hosted by the felon turned philanthropist, Greene sat on a lunchtime panel with Charles Murray, the author of Coming Apart: The State of White America, and historian Niall Ferguson, whose recent book could have been called the same thing. “Do you see this?” Greene asked the audience, pointing to a slide that showed the widening income gap. The crowd, whose members had paid the $6,000 entry fee to get investing tips, not guilt trips, made restless noises. Then there was a smattering of impressed applause, followed by uneasy laughter. Greene blinked, surprised. “People look at Occupy Wall Street as, This is just a little kind of a disorganized joke,” he said, raising his voice. “If we take another 10 percent of middle-class America’s income, who knows what kind of other social unrest could happen in this country and the changes that could happen to our way of life?”

You might remember that Charles Murray’s new book postulates that the reason so many white folks are falling into poverty is that they have abandoned American cultural values. The white middle class is sinking because they aren’t getting married and going to church and being “industrious.” Hold that thought.

Get this:

More often than not, fears like these manifest as loathing for the current administration, as evidenced by the recent wave of Romney fund-raisers in the Hamptons. “Obama wants to take my money and give it to do-nothing animals,” one matron blurted at a recent party at the Pierre for Dick Morris’s Screwed!, the latest entry into a growing pile of socioeconomic snuff porn geared toward this audience.

Greene, a registered Democrat, isn’t buying this school of thought. “It is kind of a problem in America that so many Americans believe if they elect a different president, everything is going to be fine. This whole idea of American exceptionalism, that we’re the greatest, when people don’t have health insurance, don’t have housing,” he says, swinging past the guesthouse, which has 360-degree views of the bay, and the staff house, which does not. “There are all these people in this country who are just not participating in the American Dream at all,” he says. This makes him uncomfortable, not least because they might try to take a piece of his. “Right now, for some bizarre reason, a lot of these people are supporting Republicans who want to cut taxes on the wealthy,” he says. “At some point, if we keep doing this, their numbers are going to keep swelling, it won’t be an Obama or a Romney. It will be a ­Hollande. A Chávez.”

So, basically, at least part of the 1 percent appears to believe they are the 1 percent not because they got really, really lucky or enjoyed extraordinary opportunity, but because they are inherently better than everyone else — More virtuous, more deserving, more industrious, even if they are living on an inheritance.

This takes us to Mitt’s statements about Palestinian culture — yesterday he denied he had said anything about Palestinian culture, and then he published an op ed in National Review restating his remarks on culture.

I strongly suspect this is the real Romney. It explains why he doesn’t think he needs to explain anything. He doesn’t need to show his tax returns. He doesn’t need to cultivate good relations with the peons in the press corps. He’s just inherently superior, and everyone ought to be able to see that. And all America needs is more “freedom,” which means tax cuts for the rich and less regulation for the financial sector.

See also Paul Waldman, “Mitt Romney Thinks You’re a Sucker.”

Whiplash Mitt and the Swing Voter

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Random thoughts that don’t necessarily hang together to make a coherent essay —

Yesterday I read a number of analyses of Mitt’s Gaffapalooza Tour that decided it would have no impact on the fall election. Most voters, especially “independent” ones, care more about domestic issues and aren’t interested in the Middle East or what gets printed about the candidates in the British tabloids, they said.

While there’s some truth to that, it’s not all-the-way true. First, I question how much issues, foreign or domestic, really factor into voters’ decisions on presidential candidates. Those of us who are politics junkies care passionately about where the candidates stand on this or that issue, but we’re a minority. I think at least a large chunk of voters, especially “independent” ones, vote with their guts and not their heads. They vote for the guy who feels right to them. In the event neither candidate really feels right, they vote against the guy who frightens or angers them more.

IMO in an incumbent, cluelessness is a bigger sin than incompetence. An incumbent whose performance hasn’t been all that great, but who seems to understand how the electorate is seeing things, and who can persuade voters that he “gets it,” whatever it is, probably will be re-elected. IMO Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush failed to win re-election mostly because the electorate got frustrated with them for not “getting it.” On the other hand, George W. Bush could screw the pooch up one way and down the other and still make a lot of Americans feel he was their guy, like it or not.

IMO Romney can’t sing that song. No way, no how. I don’t care how white he is. Except to the ideologically blinkered, Romney is just too much of a space alien, even to white people. Of course, there are plenty of those who would vote for a white space alien over a black human.

Yesterday there was some muttering that Mitt’s foreign tour probably helped him more than hurt him with the Republican base. That’s no doubt true, although it hardly matters. I read another analysis, somewhere, that said Mitt has a floor of between 40 to 45 percent of voters who will vote for him no matter what. I suspect that’s true. About the only way he could attract fewer than 40 percent of the vote is if someone video-recorded him eating a baby. Maybe not even then. Because to between 40 to 45 percent of voters having a Kenyan Muslim foreign usurper communist n***** in the White House just feels all wrong, and any other (white/right-wing) candidate will get their vote. Baby eater or not.

So, anything that ingratiates him even more with that 40 to 45 percent doesn’t concern me, because it’s not going to get him more votes than he will get anyway. Well, unless baggers and wingnuts get a pass to vote twice.

Nate’s got Mittens at 48 percent right now, and he may hang on to that. But that’s unlikely to win the election, especially since Mittens is losing in many of the “big” electoral college states, like New York and California.

And I sincerely believe that once we get past the conventions and more people begin to pay attention to the campaign, Mitt’s social awkwardness and general cluelessness will be more evident to more people. Right now I suspect that at least a small sliver of that 48 percent only knows what Mittens looks like and that he was a businessman who made a lot of money, and that might appeal to them, but they’re not going to stick with Romney when they get a closer look at him.

The gaffes of Mitt’s foreign trip may not register with tuned-out voters consciously, but I do think a steady drip, drip, drip of bad press about a candidate does sink in to the American collective subconscious and impacts how voters feel. That’s what killed Al Gore in 2000, IMO, and allowed the vote to be close enough so that Bush could steal it in Florida. Regular Fox News/Rush Limbaugh news consumers are inoculated, but there aren’t enough of them to give Mittens a win by themselves.

Also, I think if Mittens’s foreign tour had gotten him some good press, or even better, cheering crowds such as Obama got in 2008, that would have given Mitt a big boost, and swing voters possibly would feel more comfortable with him. That would have been significant. However, he didn’t get that.

So, while the foreign trip may or may not have a direct impact on the election that will show up clearly in polls, I think indirectly it was huge.