I can’t say I’m shocked to learn that Penn State coach Joe Paterno and other university officials knew about Jerry Sandusky’s little “problem” for 14 years and chose to overlook it. Men, especially powerful men, have gotten passes for sexual predation since the dawn of time.

But there was a time when even powerful men were held accountable for losing money. The AP reports that JP Morgan Chase has now admitted losing $4.4 billion on one little trading “oopsie,” yet CEO Jamie Dimon still has his job. It seems that “too big to fail” applies to big-shot executives, too.

And then there’s this:

Mitt Romney testified to Massachusetts officials in 2002 that he maintained business ties during his Olympics work, undermining his argument that he had no connection to Bain Capital or related companies after 1999. Notably, his campaign has refused to deny whether or not he ever held meetings with Bain during his time in Salt Lake City.

Romney, who at the time was trying to convince the state Ballot Law Commission that he should be allowed to run for office in Massachusetts despite living in Utah the last three years, did not directly address his work with Bain Capital. But, in testimony obtained by the Huffington Post, Romney said that he returned home for “a number of social trips and business trips that brought me back to Massachusetts, board meetings, Thanksgiving and so forth.”

Romney noted that he remained an active member of the board at Staples, where Bain was an early investor and a company Romney frequently cites on the trail, and LifeLike, a toy company where Bain was heavily invested at the time.

If you go back to what Mittens was saying while he was an Olympics honcho, 1999-2002, it appears that he turned day-to-day operation of Bain over to others but was kept in the loop about what the company was up to and probably weighed in on major decisions. He retained his title and salary until 2002. It also appears he fully intended to come back to full-time management of Bain until late in 2001, when he decided to run for Massachusetts governor against acting governor Jane Swift. Steve Kornacki:

It was only in late 2001, when Swift’s governorship began to implode, that running in 2002 became a serious option for Romney. And it was only in 2002 that Romney actually struck a severance agreement with Bain. Before Swift’s demise, Romney’s only other possible post-Olympic political opportunity had involved Utah’s governorship, which was possibly going to open up in 2004. In the summer of ’01, Romney took some tentative steps to put his name in the mix for that race, but it was still several years away and there were real questions about how viable he’d be if he ran.

And, you know, this makes sense, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Except that Mittens wants to be inoculated from certain actions taken by Bain during that 1999-2002 period.

Romney didn’t start pushing the idea that he’d severed all ties with Bain in ’99 until late in the ’02 campaign, when Democrats played up Bain’s closure of a Kansas City steel plant, a move that cost 700 workers their jobs. Confronted with this potentially damaging attack, Romney pleaded ignorance, insisting he couldn’t have had anything to do with the closure because it came two years after he’d left. That’s the story he’s stuck with ever since – and especially this year, as national Democrats have taken up the GST story.

Now, it may be that he had no direct input into the GST closing. But in the long run, would it not have been better if he had come up with some plausible reason why closing the plant was a good decision? He could have said something like “I wasn’t in on that management decision but I defend the actions of my company because blah blah blah,” and tossed out some numbers and business-speak that no one really understands, and it might have shut everyone up about it. Instead, he told a disprovable lie.

Alex Pareene writes,

If you’re planning on running for president, here are a few quick things you should probably do:

Make sure your tax returns and finances are in order
Make sure you’re not blatantly lying about some major portion of your biography.

Mitt Romney seems to have decided to do neither, I guess because he thought no one would check?

Romney seems to be trying to bluff it out. He is thumping his chest and demanding an apology for things the Obama campaign said about him. If the things being said are demonstrably true, however … well, he is cordially invited to hold his breath until he gets that apology.

The list of disprovable lies Mittens has told about President Obama is ponderously long, and I don’t know if they’ve all been compiled in one place. Here is a list of lies from just one speech. But we all know Republicans have been allowed to get away with lying for some time. Maybe Mittens went a lie too far.

Because there are no problems facing that nation that requires their attention, today the House will take its 33rd floor vote to repeal Obamacare. Republicans still haven’t come up with anything to replace it with, of course.

On tax cuts, Obama decides to fight, Ezra Klein writes. Yesterday, the President proposed

… a one-year extension of the Bush tax cuts for families making less than $250,000 and, through his press secretary Jay Carney, promising to veto any effort to “extend tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.” It’s a strategic decision that could have a tremendous effect on the economy — and thus on the president’s chances in the fall.

Ezra says this is politically riskier than it sounds, because it could set off a market panic during the height of the presidential campaign. His argument is based on data showing that markets and job growth slumped dramatically last year during the debt ceiling fight. I’m not sure I buy that argument, but I think it would hurt Obama worse politically if he didn’t fight the extension of the tax cuts.

A New York Times economics blogger says that cutting taxes on income above 250,000 would reduce the economy:

Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, estimates that allowing tax cuts for Americans who earn above $250,000 to expire at the end of 2012 would reduce gross domestic product growth in 2013 by $40 billion, or about 0.24 percentage points.

Allowing the “middle class” tax cuts to expire would shave an additional 1.06 percentage points off economic growth. That means letting all of the Bush tax cuts phase out would cut about 1.3 percentage points from growth.

Yeah, but Moody’s has little credibility with me. And Krugman says the reduction on top earners would mostly be felt by the top earners and have little or no impact on anyone else.

The important point politically is that the President is daring congressional Republicans to stand in the way of extending middle-class tax cuts because they are holding out for millionaire tax cuts. And Mittens, possibly for the first time in his life, has taken a firm stand. He is opposing the President —

Mitt Romney blasted President Obama’s push to repeal the Bush-era tax rates on incomes over $250,000 per year, saying it “will kill jobs.”

In an interview with WHKT-AM, a Virginia radio station, on Tuesday morning, the presumptive GOP nominee said the proposal would impose “a massive tax increase on job creators and on small business.”

He also called it “another kick in the gut to the middle class in America.”

Yeah, keep that up, Mittens. This is the guy who assures us there is “nothing hidden” in the tax returns he won’t release. This is the same guy who says he didn’t know anything about investments in the Caymans and Bermudas, including (one assumes) the Bermudas corporation he set up himself in 1997 and then transferred to his wife’s trust the day before he was inaugurated governor of Massachusetts.

So, one must ask, has Mittens himself ever looked at his own tax returns to see what’s in them?

At Vanity Fair, Dan Amira says everyone, including the President, is mis-reporting the president’s tax plan. The tax is on income, not individuals; it is on income over $250,000, not on individuals making more than $250.000. So if the tax cuts are continued on income below $250,000, the very rich would still get those cuts, too. And be sure to see the one chart that shows us what the tax cut fight is about.