An American Experience

K Street's lament: Thanks, Mitt

2012-01-26T09:00:00.003-05:00

K Street defenders of tax perks for the wealthy weren’t looking for a poster child, but they’re stuck with one: Mitt Romney.

The release of his tax returns Tuesday put a private equity baron’s face on some of the issues lobbyists have worked on behind closed doors for years: the 15 percent capital gains tax, taxes on carried interest, and write offs.

“The focus Romney has put on these issues and the awkward inarticulate way he’s managed this makes it much more difficult for those lobbyists to do their job,” Democratic consultant Paul Equale said. “Now all of that stuff is out of the shadows and might be much more difficult to make a coherent, policy based case for it, especially because it is now the central issue in the Republican primary campaign.”

The atmosphere for the champions of the one percent was already tough this year. And the emergence of a new anti-hero just makes matters worse ahead of looming battles on Capitol Hill to extend the Bush-era tax cuts and a broader fight over tax reform expected in 2013.

One area that could take a hit in the tax debate is the family trust. Romney’s taxes, which follow all the rules, are an unwelcome reminder that the wealthiest people in the country can set up trusts for their children for tens of millions of dollars, without having to pay taxes on them. Romney and his wife set up $100 million trust funds for their sons.

“I’m not sure people fully appreciate the huge differential between taxation of earned and unearned income and now they are going to understand it,” one Democratic tax lobbyist said. “I’m not sure people are going to think that’s fair.”

Tax lobbyists said the bright light is particularly rough for private equity firms, who are also expected to come under fire this year as Congress looks for new revenue raisers.

The GOP presidential candidate’s bumbling response to attacks on his former firm Bain Capital and more recent mishandling of releasing his tax returns—which show he paid the government less than 14 percent in taxes on $21.7 million in income last year because it came from investments rather than a salary— has been downright awful for the industry.

The increased scrutiny has caused concern among hedge funds and private equity execs as the issues continue to be front-and-center in the GOP primary.

And under attack, Romney hasn’t helped their cause.

In one debate, Romney complained that it was “strange, on a stage like this with Republicans, having to describe how private equity and venture capital work.”

His awkward responses haven’t been lost on the industry he once represented.

“I think there was obviously some hope that he would be a more effective messenger, provide a more coherent response. That has clearly not been the case at least over the last couple of weeks,” one private equity industry executive said.

Instead, the messaging has been left to the industry’s trade association, the Private Equity Growth Council. Titans of the industry have largely kept mum — in some cases probably to their benefit as another multi-millionaire is hardly a sympathetic face. The ramp up, which was already in the works, is starting earlier despite Bain Capital, the firm Romney started no longer being a member.

Private equity firms have long fought proposed hikes to the tax rates for firms that go public and proposals that would increase the taxes on carried interest, the percentage that private equity firms or other partnerships receive following profitable deals.

“The objective of the Council going forward is to aggressively educate key audiences about the important contribution private equity makes to our economy and defend the industry against mischaracterizations and attacks, “PEGC’s Ken Spain said. “As the 2012 campaign continues to ramp up so will our efforts.”

PEGC has been helped by the backlash among conservatives against Gingrich and then-presidential candidate Rick Perry when they tried to bash Romney as a so-called vulture capitalist.

Despite the heat, tax lobbyists aren’t predicting a major legislative push against the industry before the end of the year.

“The reality is this isn’t going to move the needle one way, or another,” Ken Kies of Federal Policy Group. “[Tax reform] is not going to get done earlier than the election.”

Still, Democrats aren’t planning to let the issue go. President Barack Obama is expected to make income inequality and differences in the tax code a central theme of his campaign. Case in point: Debbie Bosanek, secretary for billionaire investor Warren Buffett, sat with first lady Michelle Obama during the president’s State of the Union address Tuesday night.

Bosanek has been the go-to face for Obama’s push for tax reform that includes raising the taxes on people making more than $1 million a year to at least 30 percent.

“Now, you can call this class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes?” Obama said to Congress. “Most Americans would call that common sense.”

Romney tried to pivot in the NBC Florida debate Monday saying, “The real question is not so much my taxes, but the taxes of the American people. That’s why I put forward a plan to eliminate the tax on savings for middle-income Americans.”

He continued: “But I paid all the taxes that are legally required and not a dollar more. … I don’t think you want someone as the candidate for president who pays more taxes than he owes.”

Awesome Yosemite

2012-01-26T07:53:00.000-05:00

Yosemite HD from Project Yosemite on Vimeo.

John McCain Goes Off Message, Predicts 'Major Scandal' Related To Unlimited Political Giving

2012-01-25T14:19:00.000-05:00

Jon Ward | Huffington post.com

WASHINGTON -- Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was supposed to do a conference call with reporters Wednesday hitting Newt Gingrich on behalf of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign.

Image via Wikipedia

Things didn't exactly go as planned.

McCain did talk about the announced topic, how the number of earmarks in Congress increased when Gingrich was House Speaker from 1994 to 1998. But his attacks on Gingrich (R-Ga.) were vague and listless.

"I can't remember any specifics," McCain said at one point.
But when a reporter asked McCain about the increasingly "negative tone" of the Republican primary, that got the "maverick" off in a direction he was interested in going: campaign finance.

"I dislike it, and the fact is that we all decry negative ads and negative tones but it does move voters and as long as it moves voters it's going to happen," McCain said.

"As you know, I think the outside super PACs and others is so disgraceful that I'm ashamed of the United States Supreme Court in their decision on United," McCain said, referring to the 2010 Citizens United decision that allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money in political elections.

The decision by the nation's highest court gutted rules put in place by legislation sponsored by McCain and then Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) in 2002.
McCain went further.

"I predict to you there will be a major scandal associated with the Supreme Court decision on Citizens versus United. There is too much money washing around," he said.

The problem, as a reporter on the call pointed out, is that McCain and Romney are at odds on the issue of campaign finance. Romney has decried the role of super PACs, calling them a "disaster."

But Romney's issue is not with the unrestricted giving. He has said he remains in favor of no limits on campaign expenditures. The only change he has said he would make is to do away with super PACs and let donors give unlimited funds directly to candidates and campaigns.

"We already have unlimited contributions," Romney said last month in an interview with Real Clear Politics. "The question is: Is the campaign going to be responsible for them or is the campaign going to not have control of its own message?"

McCain shrugged off the disagreement, arguing that jobs, the economy and national security are the key issues that voters care about.

He tried to turn the campaign finance discussion in a direction that was aimed at Gingrich, going after Sheldon Adelson, a Las Vegas casino magnate who is the largest donor to a super PAC supporting Gingrich.

"I note with some interest that a casino owner has given $5 million and his wife has now given $5 million, so you have one family throwing in $10 million into a primary race. I don't think that's what our Founding Fathers had in mind," McCain said.

And with that, Romney communications director Gail Gitcho promptly ended the call.

"Senator McCain thank you very much for taking the time today," she said. "I appreciate your comments and we'll talk to everybody tomorrow."

Let Me Start...

2012-01-24T10:07:00.000-05:00

The Hardball Blog
Tue Jan 24, 2012 9:19 AM EST

Romney's taxes. No wonder Mitt Romney didn't want to release his tax returns. He made $45 million over the past two years, pays an effective tax rate just under 14%, and has a Swiss bank account and accounts in the Cayman Islands. Talk about lousy optics. Mitt's the one percent of the one percent. Is he the right guy for the times?

Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr

The NBC Debate last night saw Romney trying to attack Newt Gingrich. But Gingrich played the role of frontrunner and brushed off the attacks. And Romney stumbled when asked what he did to further the conservative movement in this country.

Hey Newt -- who are you calling elite? Frank Bruni writes in the New York Times that - by any measure - Newt Gingrich is a member of the hated elite, the same group he loves to demonize.

By the way, the wife of billionaire casino mogul Sheldon
Adelson has given Newt $5 million. Who are the Adelsons, and what do they want if Newt wins the White House?

President Obama delivers his State of the Union tonight. We'll look at the state of his presidency, and the state of the economy. Are things really getting better? And what would President Obama do with a second term in office? We'll hear from White House Press Secretary Jay Carney tonight.

State Of The Union: Obama’s Best Chance To Frame The 2012 Elections

2012-01-24T10:02:00.000-05:00

BRIAN BEUTLER & SAHIL KAPUR | TPM

JANUARY 24, 2012

Image via Wikipedia

President Obama has addressed the country before a joint session of Congress several times since he was sworn in three years ago. But none have had as much political relevance and agenda-setting potential as his State of the Union address will have Tuesday night.

His aides have been as tight-lipped as you might expect about the particulars. But broadly the administration has signaled that the President will build on themes he’s helped draw into the national conversation over the past year, most recently in a speech he gave in Osawatomie, KS — inequality, economic fairness, and the decades long stagnation of the middle class. He’s expected to make a spirited case for addressing those problems — by building out new protections for consumers and workers, and by undoing existing policies that rig the game for the wealthiest Americans — all while drawing a stark contrast with Republicans ahead of an election in which the White House and both chambers of Congress are up for grabs.

“We can go in two directions — one is toward less opportunity and less fairness,” Obama said in a video previewing his SOTU speech. “Or we can fight for where I think we need to go: building an economy that works for everyone, not just the wealthy few. On Tuesday night I’m going to talk about how we’ll get there.”

It will be the first opportunity Obama’s had to frame the election on his own terms before a large national audience, and will likely be the best opportunity he’ll have for months to come. He has said the speech will be “a bookend to what I said in Kansas last month,” in which he stressed a populist, progressive economic message.

The Osawatomie speech inspired a strong backlash from Republican leaders in Washington — in part because they understood that an election framed on the President’s terms would be difficult to win. The question for Obama tonight is now how strongly he follows through in the speech itself, and then how he keep trying to turn rhetoric to reality as he presses a gridlocked Congress to move ahead with real reforms.

The address will be “a great opportunity for the President to continue to move away from Washington thinking — about right versus left — and to move back to what Main Street wants, which is protecting and advancing the middle class and economic security,” says Tom Perriello, a former Democratic Congressman and recently appointed head of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, an influential progressive advocacy group. “The question is whether Congress is going to take this as a call to action or resort to politics as usual.”

It would be a lot to ask of even a well-functioning Congress to pass the sorts of major economic reforms that would be required to end a decades-long systemic economic problem. And as House GOP Leader Eric Cantor acknowledged Monday, the sorts of issues that underlie that problem will not be resolved until after the election.

But Obama will have a real opportunity to lead Democrats into the brewing legislative battle over full-year extensions of the payroll tax cut, unemployment insurance and Medicare “doc fix.” Insiders expect Obama to capitalize on the Democrats’ December victory over Republicans — who were forced to buckle on a package of two month extensions — and warn GOP members not to hold the measures hostage to unrelated policy disagreements, or partisan pay-fors.

GOP leaders say they might try to force the administration to reverse its decision on the Keystone XL oil pipeline as the necessary price for renewing the payroll tax cut and other provisions. Obama could use the State of the Union Address to end that effort in its infancy.

But the broader policy impact will be minimal — at least until the election.

Campaign politics are likely to permeate every major aspect of legislative business this year, and both parties are acutely aware that, beyond the payroll tax package, little else of major importance will be accomplished between now and November. That’s not unusual for an election year, but it’s particularly key to understanding politics this year. The 2012 elections aren’t just shaping up as a referendum on Obama’s first term, but as a referendum on the generational fight between the parties over the social safety net, and which vision should steer the nation moving forward.

January 23 News: America’s Oil Production Grew Faster Than Any Country in Last Three Years

2012-01-23T09:47:00.000-05:00

By Stephen Lacey on Jan 23, 2012

Oil Fields Gushing in the US

Federal forecasters are expected to confirm on Monday what the energy industry already knows: Oil production is surging in the U.S.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration is likely to raise by a substantial amount its existing estimate that U.S. oil production will grow by 550,000 barrels per day by 2020, to just over six million barrels daily.
The forecast will include new production data from developing oil fields, including the Bakken shale area in North Dakota, which could hold as much of 4.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil. North Dakota’s output of oil and related liquids topped 500,000 barrels per day in November, meaning that the state pumped more oil than Ecuador. In fact, U.S. oil production grew faster than in any other country over the last three years and will continue to surge as drillers move away from natural gas due to a growing gas glut, experts say. The glut has sent natural-gas prices to a 10-year low.
The three oil giants will post billions more in profits than they did in the fourth quarter of 2010, thanks to higher oil prices.

Thinkprogress.org

Rare

2012-01-22T21:33:00.000-05:00

RARE from Joel Sartore on Vimeo.

Scott Brown: What About All The Rich Schoolteachers?

2012-01-22T15:06:00.000-05:00

BENJY SARLIN |TPM JANUARY 21, 2012, 1:30 PM

Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) made the case in Lowell, MA on Friday that letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire would create a burden for well-off teachers, firefighters, and police officers.

From the Lowell Sun, which held an editorial board meeting with the Senator:

Brown also took on President Barack Obama for proposing tax hikes on families who earn more than $250,000 per year, saying that would hurt “teachers, firefighters, policemen, folks who work two jobs.”
Asked which public servants earn that much money, Brown said it is common for police officers to earn well over $100,000 annually when overtime is factored into their pay.
“You throw in a teacher who’s working, plus a summer job, it adds up pretty quickly,” he said. “There’s quite a few of them.”

On the technical merits, it’s possible there are at least some Massachusetts families who fit Brown’s description — a couple hundred turnpike cops were found to be making $100k+ salaries in 2009 thanks to prodigious overtime numbers, for example, and in theory some of them have a spouse in a similar position. A few high-ranking Boston cops were found to have used overtime to bring in incomes of over $200,000 in 2010.
But even if they and their spouses combine to cross the $250,000 threshold, only their income beyond that level is taxed at the higher marginal rate, meaning compared to the conventionally wealthy they’re likely only paying a sliver of their overall income at the maximum tax level.

It doesn’t sound like there’s an epidemic of high-income public servants based on the available data for the area. According to Salary.com, which tracks average pay across various professions, 90% of Boston police patrol officers made a base salary below $75,307 last year and 90% of Lowell patrol officers made a base salary below $70,857. 90% of firefighters in Boston make under $68,793, and below $64,729 in Lowell. The average teacher in Lowell makes about $80,841 a year, according to the Massachusetts Department of Education, higher than the statewide average of $68,781.

National stats don’t show a glut of high-income public servants, either. According to a 2010 Williams College study of the richest 1%, just 0.8% of them held jobs in the “Government, teachers, social services” category. Those numbers were based on 2005 tax returns, but it’s unlikely their share has gotten much higher — states have slashed jobs and benefits for teachers and police officers around the country since the 2008 financial collapse, especially as stimulus dollars have run out. According to the last jobs report, government employment is down by 280,000 positions over the last year.

TPM reached out to a spokesman for Scott Brown to clarify if they have an estimate of the number of affected households.

Correction: An earlier version inaccurately indicated Brown’s quotes were made to patrons at a Lowell restaurant. They came out of an editorial board meeting with the Lowell Sun. TPM regrets the error.

Benjy Sarlin is a reporter for Talking Points Memo and co-writes the campaign blog, TPM2012. He previously reported for The Daily Beast/Newsweek as their Washington Correspondent and covered local politics for the New York Sun.

How Mitt Romney's Tax Rate Stacks Up

2012-01-22T14:40:00.000-05:00

Comparing the Candidate To The Rest of Us

Now that Mitt Romney's confirmed what we've long suspected about his effective federal tax rate -- "It's probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything" -- we have a fact worth contextualizing. Though it could easily be less, assume Romney effectively pays 15 percent in taxes on all his income to the federal government. How does he stack up to the rest of us, most of whom are regular wage earners? When you account for the fact that most people also pay payroll taxes, and don't enjoy enormous deductions, credits or other benefits, you see that Romney's making out about as well as a taxpayer who makes $50,000 a year. Not bad for a man whose net worth is estimated to be in the neighborhood of a quarter billion dollars.
- TPM |Brian Beutler

America's Top 10 Polluters

2012-01-22T13:05:00.001-05:00

The EPA releases a database of greenhouse gas sources. Is there a global warmer in your backyard?—Kate Sheppard and Samantha Oltman

It just got a whole lot easier for Americans to find out which power plants and industrial sites are releasing the most planet-baking emissions. The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday released its greenhouse gas database, and included some cool tools for tracking polluters.

The database includes the largest sources—the 6,700 power plants and heavy industries that are responsible for 80 percent of all emissions in the United States. It covers their emissions for 2010, the first year they were required to report to the EPA. The inventory, which we've written about before, is really just an exercise in taking stock and disclosing emissions. It doesn't include any requirements to reduce those emissions. But it could be a first step in that direction.

For one, the database makes it clear who is releasing the emissions, and how much. Citizens can see who the big polluters are in their area. Local papers can report on it. Maybe it will even spark some healthy competition between facilities to reduce their cut back—like The Biggest Loser, for power plants. Or it could be used to shame companies whose emissions keep going up. This is basically what happened with an earlier database, called the Toxics Release Inventory. In the 1980s, it was created to track nasty emissions, which companies began cutting even before mandatory reductions were phased in. After all, no one wants to be called out publicly for farting at the party, so to speak.

Check out Mother Jones’ full story-

How an Ex-Wall-Street Power Player Embraced the Occupy Movement

2012-01-20T13:15:00.001-05:00

Image by Canadian Veggie via Flickr

—By Josh Harkinson| Thu Jan. 19, 2012

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

As president of the Pacific Exchange in the late 1990s, Warren Langley oversaw the West Coast's biggest financial center, a trading floor where some 17 million shares of stock changed hands daily. Though he served at the pleasure of traders and investment banks such as Morgan Stanley, he is no longer interested in pleasing them. Yesterday, he stood on a hillside in San Francisco's Financial District in front Morgan Stanley's and Goldman Sachs' regional headquarters to declare his support for Occupy Wall Street West, a coalition of 50 groups planning a slew of anti-bank protests Friday.

"From the inside, I watched Goldman Sachs, the big banks, the hedge funds bet our money and then get bailed out when they lost," said Langley, surrounded by protesters holding images of a devious-looking Mr. Moneybags (Monopoly) character. "I saw corporations and the 1 percent buy our congressmen and senators and then pay no taxes, get subsidies, and move jobs overseas. This is our last chance to level the playing field and let you and our kids and grandkids have the opportunities that I started with."
Langley, 69, began working in finance in the 1980s, rising to become CEO of Hull Trading Company, a $500 million proprietary trading firm active in stock options and derivatives. The job often involved pressuring the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to loosen financial regulations. "I was just trying to push the boundaries of things that would help me make profits," he confesses. "I didn't perceive the risk to the economy, and I think that is the part that really changed for me."

By way of example, Langley recalls how he convinced the SEC to approve a mid-1990s partnership between Hull and a large commercial bank. Technically, the Glass-Steagall Act prohibited commercial banks from engaging in the sort of speculative trading done by firms like Hull, but the SEC—urged on by industry lobbyists—granted more and more exceptions to the rule.
In 1999, Congress repealed Glass-Steagall, paving the way for the 2008 financial crisis. "It was pretty risky to let proprietary trading affect the bank side, which was just loaning money to people," Langley says. "That lesson was learned in 1929, which is why Glass-Steagall was put in place. And then we saw in the 1990s they unpeeled all that."

Though now retired, Langley oversaw the Pacific Exchange until 1999. The New York Stock Exchange purchased it in 2006, part of a wave of consolidation that swept the financial sector from the early '90s and resulted in institutions that were "too big to fail." (Check out our banking-consolidation chart.) Meanwhile, the rise of hedge funds, private equity, and complex derivatives were making Wall Street far tougher to regulate.

Langely considers himself "pretty much a fiscal conservative," but after the crisis, he was taken aback that lawmakers didn't do more to repair the system. The Volcker Rule, part of the Dodd-Frank law that was intended to reinstate Glass-Steagall, was too watered down by lobbyists, he says. Wall Street needs a single powerful regulator, instead an alphabet soup of agencies. And he is concerned that financial firms are still so large and interconnected that the failure of any one of them could create another economy-destroying chain reaction. "The biggest obstacle is lobbying by the big investment banks," he says. "On both sides of the aisle. I mean, Chuck Schumer is one of the biggest protectors of Wall Street in Congress, and he's a Democrat. And then there's the general Republican philosophy about free-market capitalism: 'We shouldn't have rules.' Well, that doesn't work."

In early October, Langley was Skyping with a friend, Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's fame, who'd flown down from Vermont to scoop free ice cream for the Zuccotti Park occupiers. Intrigued, Langley stopped by Occupy San Francisco encampment at Justin Herman Plaza and found himself impressed by the protesters' critiques of income inequality and the corporate domination of politics. He has since donated money to the encampment. In October, he joined protesters on a march and Union Square rally, where he got up and spoke to the crowd about income inequality.

Langley says his friends in finance "like the game when it is tilted in their favor" but that they "understand that it's not particularly fair and they have a hard time defending it." Still, many of them dismiss the Occupy movement as directionless; one tauntingly offered to donate $250,000 to Occupy Wall Street "if they just tell me their plan." Langley counseled patience, telling him that a movement, unlike a corporation, "doesn't necessarily start with a plan."

Occupy Wall Street West certainly has a detailed plan for Friday. Some 30 separate protests will include a "Food Bank of America" at a Bank of America branch, an attempt to take over an unspecified foreclosed building, and a squid fry in front of Goldman Sachs—in reference to Matt Taibbi's Goldman squid metaphor. An Occupy the Courts demonstration at a federal courthouse will correspond with 100 similar actions around the nation to mark the second anniversary of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which opened the floodgates to corporate spending on federal elections.

Langley plans to join a separate march on Bank of America, which was headquartered in San Francisco before moving in 1998 to Charlotte, North C. "I don't think that these people do anything evil or illegal for the most part," he says. "It's just that the rules have been set up for them. The game's been rigged."

CHART: Santorum Calls For Tiny (Huge!) Tax Cuts For The Poor (Rich) | TPMDC

2012-01-19T17:17:00.000-05:00

CHART: Santorum Calls For Tiny (Huge!) Tax Cuts For The Poor (Rich) | TPMDC

What If Voters Just Don’t Like Mitt Romney?

2012-01-19T11:48:00.000-05:00

BENJY SARLIN & KYLE LEIGHTON JANUARY 19, 2012, 5:35 AM

Mitt Romney may be on the verge of securing the nomination, but his campaign is still struggling with a pretty basic problem as it looks towards the general election: people just don’t like him very much.
Romney’s never been the kind of candidate to draw legions of screaming fans, but new polling over the last week show a troubling trend for him — his personal favorability numbers are taking a hit. On Tuesday Public Policy Polling (D) showed Romney with a favorability split well into the negative, with 35 percent of general election voters seeing him positively and 53 unfavorably. On Wednesday, the Pew Research center released similar numbers: a 33 - 47 split nationally.

While Republican voters are starting to come around to his candidacy, the rest of the country doesn’t seem too pleased with what they see. Romney’s lost six points on favorability among independent voters since Pew’s last poll in November, leading to a 13 point gap on the metric, 33 - 45. The TPM Poll Average of Romney’s national favorability now shows a 5.8 deficit, and his unfavorability has risen ten points during the last two and half months in our numbers.

The big question is whether the lukewarm reaction to Romney is a serious problem moving forward. It could be that the frontrunner is playing into Democrats’ hands and finally solidifying his out-of-touch millionaire caricature with he public. Or his personal unpopularity could be a minor speed bump.

There are several factors that should encourage Romney supporters. For one thing, there’s a sour mood towards politicians in general these days, so it’s possible no national candidate’s ceiling is higher than a even split. Romney is certainly in better shape than all of his opponents: according to TPM’s Polling Average, Newt Gingrich’s national favorability is a putrid 26-58. Being Mr. Popularity isn’t always a killer advantage either: John McCain enjoyed strong personal favorability ratings throughout 2008 only to get blown out come November. By contrast, Romney often ties and sometimes narrowly leads Obama in head-to-head polls, suggesting his personal likability may not be too big a factor in voters’ ultimate decision.
“Compared to his competitors he’s certainly in a better position. He’s probably no worse off than his Democratic target,” Gary Langer, pollster for ABC, told TPM. “He’s not golden, but it’s a very difficult time the cycle to be golden.”

But Romney’s relatively strong standing amongst his GOP rivals works both ways. His stock may be inflated by the fact he’s been competing among an exceptionally weak field up until now. One worrying aspect of Romney’s recent plunge is that it comes just as the race shifts towards topics more relevant to the general election, like his Bain Capital career and his personal taxes. Nor has Romney, who has been a gaffe machine lately on the trail, shown much resilience against these types of attacks.
Romney has also made heavy use of his prodigious fundraising abilities to dominate the airwaves — the former governor essentially knocked out a surging former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in Iowa through millions in TV ads from his campaign and a pro-Romney super PAC. But he won’t enjoy the same advantages against President Obama’s re-election campaign, which — despite lobbing plenty of attacks at Romney in the press — have yet to get into an expensive ad war with Romney. Like the March Madness MVP whose slow first step proves fatal when he hits the NBA, it’s possible Romney’s game just doesn’t translate to the big leagues.

University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato told TPM that he’s still “of two minds” about whether Romney’s favorability issues signal serious trouble.
"On the one hand, it’s early and most normal voters, as opposed to people like us, have only the foggiest notions about Romney,” he said. “But there is no question that Romney’s image is chilly and his team will have to work hard to warm him up. He is ‘the other’ to many people — someone not like the average person. He’s rich, aloof, a model-handsome Mormon with almost too perfect a family, who has never struggled — unless you count political losses."

Mitt Romney's Tax Record

2012-01-19T09:49:00.001-05:00

Will Romney's taxes become his campaign's greatest vulnerability?
Chris Matthews takes a look on Hardball

NO SOPA

2012-01-17T22:32:00.000-05:00

Martin Luther King Jr.’s message still relevant

2012-01-16T11:12:00.001-05:00

Ruth Moon | Rapid City Journal

Lorenzo Kelly lived through the 1940s and 1950s when segregation was the order of the day.

He remembers having to use a separate library and bathroom from white people. He had to sit in the back of the bus, and watch white people play on the park grass in downtown Winter Park, Fla., before his family moved to Evanston, Ill., when he was 12.

Kelly, 68, has personally experienced the things Martin Luther King Jr. fought against in protests and has seen the U.S. stride toward

Image via Wikipedia

equality with the election of President Barack Obama in 2008. Kelly told a Rapid City audience in 2009 Obama's inauguration "marks a new day."
Kelly also believes Rapid City and the rest of the U.S. still have a long road ahead to finally achieving King's goal of equality.

Before a Sunday church service in early 1994, three teens painted swastikas on the steel doors of Faith Temple Church, the church Kelly still pastors on Kansas City Street in downtown Rapid City. The crime was soon tracked to three self-identified neo-Nazis: two 14-year-olds from Spearfish and one 13-year-old from Rapid City, according to Journal reports.

Jeffrey Viken, then an attorney in Rapid City, was appointed to represent one of the teenagers. Viken said that case was the worst hate crime he has dealt with in his 34 years in Rapid City. He handled this case in an unexpected way.
"What he did - I will never forget this," Kelly said.

"Viken called and made an appointment for him to bring his client, this teenager, to see me and to experience talking to this black man and understanding what my feelings were for what this kid did. My respect for this man (Viken) just leaped."

Viken and Kelly have stayed friends through the years because of that moment, Kelly said. And because of that moment, Kelly invited Viken, now a U.S. district judge in South Dakota, to give an address at a Martin Luther King Jr. remembrance celebration at noon today.
Viken said he decided introducing the teenager and Kelly would be the best way to show the boy how his actions affected others.

"Frequently, the greatest wisdom spoken in juvenile delinquency and criminal cases are not words that come from the bench," Viken said. "They're words spoken in wisdom by members of the community or family or victims of crimes. That was certainly the case for this young man."

Because the three teens were charged in juvenile court, their records are sealed. They were charged with destruction of private property and harassment under South Dakota's hate/bias law, according to a Journal report. Viken thought the boy he represented was sentenced to community service.

Civil rights activist and pastor Martin Luther King, Jr. was born Jan. 15, 1929. In 1955 and 1956, he led a 382-day protest boycotting segregated buses. King's effort led to the 1963 March on Washington where he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.

"I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," King said in his famous speech on Aug. 28, 1963.
King received the Nobel Peace Prize when he was 35 and was assassinated April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tenn., where he was preparing to lead another protest march.

Though Rapid City is far north of the southern centers where segregation and racism seethed in the 1950s and 60s, Kelly said residents could still take a message from King's words.

People still refer to Faith Temple Church as "the black church," Kelly said, even though black people comprise just a portion of the congregation. He said pastors from other churches also commonly refer black people to him for help, he thinks because he is also black.

"Just labeling it is racist -- ‘oh, they have a black pastor,'" he said. "See people instead of seeing color."
Kelly has pastored Faith Temple Church for three decades. He graduated in 1978 from Moody Bible Institute. He's learned through the years that King's message is relevant for everyone, he said.

"It's a horrible feeling to be declared less than human or not equal or told that something is wrong with you because of how you look," he said. "To have a champion rise up to finally say this is wrong and that we're all God's children, no matter what color we are or where we come from - this man was a champion not only for black people but for all people."

Republican Sponsor Of Bill to Require Drug Testing Fails One Himself

2012-01-16T10:43:00.000-05:00

by Judd Legum from ThinkProgress

A Georgia Republican who wants all welfare recipients subject to drug tests failed one himself after he ran a red light on Friday morning. The Atlanta Journal Constiution has the story on State Rep. Kip Smith (R):

Smith, whose given name is John Andrew Smith, first told the officer he had not consumed any alcoholic beverages.
“I asked him again, and he stated he had consumed a single beer at Hal’s. I noticed also that Mr. Smith’s eyes were watery, and I asked him to exit the vehicle, which he did,” Kramer said in the report.

Smith told the officer he’d had the beer 45 minutes earlier, and the officer asked him to blow into a hand-held “intoximeter”. The officer said the lawmaker refused, stating he would prefer to go to a clinic or the hospital to get tested.
The officer said Smith finally agreed to blow into the device. The report stated that Smith blew a .091., which is above the legal limit of .08.

Smith is a sponsor of Georgia House Bill 464, which would “require random drug testing” for citizens on public assistance. In response to Smith’s legislation, State Rep. Scott Holcomb introduced a bill last month that would require all state lawmakers to be subject to random drug testing.

Random drug tests for recipients of public assistance are very likely to be found unconstitutional.

Bits and Pieces

2012-01-12T14:24:00.000-05:00

From The Nation’s Ben Adler
Santorum claimed at Sunday’s NBC debate that his Saturday town hall meeting in Hollis drew 1,200 people, which is a vast overestimate, especially since about one in five attendees were members of the media. A show of hands demonstrated that half the crowd came from out of state. In addition to political tourists, there were a significant number of protesters. Visitors from Massachusetts and Occupy New Hampshire activists frequently pad Republican crowds. On Sunday, the future Republican victor in New Hampshire, Mitt Romney, used a gymnasium at Exeter High School that is half the size of the larger one at the same school that Obama filled in 2008.

TPMDC Eric Kleefeld
Wisconsin Democrats have announced they will submit the petition signatures in their effort to recall Gov. Scott Walker next Tuesday, January 17 -- with a massive drop-off of boxes at the state's election administration agency, the Government Accountability Board:

Julie Wells, the Janesville grandmother and factory worker who triggered the recall, will be joined by volunteers from Wisconsin's 72 counties, who will load scores of boxes from a truck dubbed the "Forward Flyer" into GAB offices.
Also present and available to the media will be representatives from the recall efforts against four Republican senators.

FDA Takes a Baby Step on Factory Farm Antibiotics

2012-01-12T13:04:00.000-05:00

—By Tom Philpott | Wed Jan. 4, 2012

For a few months now, President Obama's FDA has been showing zero appetite for standing up to the meat industry on factory-farm livestock use. In two key decisions (here and here), the agency declined to impose real restrictions on farm drug use, promoting a "voluntary" approach instead.

But today, the FDA abruptly canned the lapdog shtick and growled like a real watchdog: It banned certain uses of the cephalosporin family of antibiotics. The FDA declared in a press release:

Cephalosporins are commonly used in humans to treat pneumonia as well as to treat skin and soft tissue infections. In addition, they are used in the treatment of pelvic inflammatory disease, diabetic foot infections, and urinary tract infections. If cephalosporins are not effective in treating these diseases, doctors may have to use drugs that are not as effective or that have greater side effects.

Citing concern that routine use on factory farms will push pathogens to develop resistance to these antibiotics, the FDA has banned certain uses of them. Now before I show just how limited this move is in the grand scheme, I have to stress its historical significance. For 34 years, the agency has been wringing its hands over the dangers of farm antibiotic abuse, all the while doing precisely nothing about it (save for appointing committees and issuing polite requests for "judicious" use).

Now it's actually regulating. The Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farms, which advocates a ban on routine antibiotic use, praised the move Wednesday as an "important first step" in addressing the problem.

But make no mistake: This is just a first step, and nothing more. It turns out that cephalosporins make up a tiny—and shrinking—percentage of the antibiotics used in factory farms.

Graphic: Center for a Livable Future

Note that these operations used 91,113 pounds of cephalosporins—an amount that literally rounds to zero compared to the whopping total of 28.8 million pounds they burn through. By comparison, they consumed more than 10 million pounds of tetracycline, also an extremely important drug for humans.

Now check out the FDA's 2010 numbers (the latest that have been released) on livestock antibiotic use. The following chart compares 2009 and 2010 FDA data.

Note that the industry's already-modest use of cephalosporin plunged 41 percent between 2009 and 2010. Meanwhile, overall antibiotic use held steady (rising 1 percent), tetracycline use jumped 21 percent, and consumption of penicillin—another important medicine you may have heard of—soared 43 percent to 1.9 million pounds.

Precisely why the industry is ramping up use of these two particular drugs is something I'll be investigating. At first glance, what I'm getting from these numbers is that the FDA has courageously restricted the use of a drug the industry barely uses and is already phasing out, and it is cravenly looking the other way as the industry increasingly leans on other antibiotics as a crutch to prop up a reckless production system. Indeed, as Wired's excellent Maryn McKenna points out, penicillin and tetracycline are in the very antibiotic families the FDA recently decided not to regulate.

We'll know whether the agency is changing its ways if, in the coming year, it follows Wednesday's ban with ones on drugs the industry is actually abusing. If not, then what we just heard from the FDA isn't much more than the growl of a toothless watchdog.

Tom Philpott is the food and ag blogger for Mother Jones.

Rick Santorum's Big Coal Buddies

2012-01-12T12:30:00.000-05:00

The "local" company Santorum brags about helping was a coal mining giant that gave him tens of thousands of dollars during and after his time in Congress.

—By Kate Sheppard and Adam Serwer | Wed Jan. 11, 2012

Image via Wikipedia

Rick Santorum likes to brag about how he helped a poor local company fight big, bad government regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. "My grandfather was a coal miner," Santorum said at a debate in New Hampshire this week. "So I contacted a local coal company from my area. I said, look, I want to join you in that fight. I want to work together with you."

But Consol Energy, the company for which Santorum was a "consultant," wasn't some bare-bones local outfit—it's one of the largest coal mining companies in the United States, and its largest shareholder is the German utility RWE. And Santorum wasn't doing volunteer work: He was paid quite handsomely for his services, to the tune of $142,500 from 2010 to August 2011. He only ended his role with Consol when he launched his presidential bid last spring.

Santorum's relationship with the coal company began long before his consulting gig; Santorum and Consol had a mutually profitable association during Santorum's tenure in the Senate, too. Consol donated more than $73,800 to Santorum during his time as a legislator while simultaneously spending more than $1 million lobbying Congress on pollution limits, mine reclamation, worker health benefits, and tax policy, according to lobbying disclosure forms filed with the US Senate Office of Public Records.

In the most recent congressional debate over a climate bill—the one for which Santorum "volunteered" his services—Consol spent $10.24 million on lobbying, a major increase over its lobbying expenditures in previous years. Much of that money was spent to defeat legislation to cap greenhouse gas emissions.
Greenhouse gas regulation wasn't the only area where Santorum's legislative agenda mirrored Consol's top lobbying priorities. In 2006, Santorum authored a provision for a tax bill that would have created a tax credit for "synfuel," which included coal bed methane, as Greenwire reported at the time. Synthfuel is made by drilling into coal seams to extract methane, a form of natural gas, and Consol is a "leading producer" of the product.

Another priority for Consol was passing the 2005 Energy Policy Act, a bill criticized for its numerous handouts to the coal, oil, and gas industries. Santorum voted for the bill and was an enthusiastic supporter. He was particularly fond of the millions of dollars the bill allotted for so-called "clean coal" technology—another major priority for Consol's lobbyists.

Consol also lobbied the Senate on the Environmental Protection Agency's mercury emission standards during Santorum's time in Congress. In 2003, the Bush administration released new Clean Air Act rules that failed to adequately cut toxic emissions from coal-fired power plants and other major industrial sources (a court threw out the rules for having too many loopholes). When the Senate tried to pass a resolution blocking the faulty rules from taking effect, Santorum sided with the administration and with Consol. During his time in the Senate, Santorum also lobbied Bush's EPA to ease rules for sulfur dioxide—the emission that causes acid rain—for plants that burn waste coal.

"He certainly racked up one of the most anti-environmental records in Congress in his time there," says Navin Nayak, the senior vice president for campaigns at the League of Conservation Voters. Nayak's group scores lawmakers annually on their voting record, and Santorum earned a lifetime score of just 10 percent—among the lowest in the Senate. "He was consistently on the side of polluters."

It's not entirely clear what Santorum did during his tenure as a Consol consultant, which started in 2007 after he was defeated for reelection. A spokesperson for the company told the New York Times he was hired "to provide strategic counsel on a variety of public policy-related issues." Although he was never registered as a lobbyist, former legislators can still be adept at maximizing their clients' influence without actually having to officially register as lobbyists under the law.

"The definition [of lobbyist] was designed to give a reasonable enough definition so that people who lobby would have to register," says Bill Allison, Editorial Director at the Sunlight Foundation. "What happens is canny operators like Newt Gingrich and like Rick Santorum are able to avoid the lines drawn that would force you to register…Obviously these folks are trying to influence the federal government."

His legislative experience is exactly why the company says it approached him about a consulting gig. "Given his long and well-documented efforts aimed at providing American consumers with affordable energy, CONSOL Energy engaged Senator Santorum to provide strategic counsel on a variety of public policy-related issues," Consol spokeswoman Lynn Seay told Mother Jones in an email. She did not elaborate explain which specific issues the former senator focused on.

Santorum's connections to Consol were profitable for his former aides as well. Former Santorum staffers Tommy Johnson and Kevin Roy also went on to become lobbyists for Consol after their boss lost his Senate seat. Johnson was an in-house lobbyist at the company and Roy worked on Consol's behalf at Ikon Public Affairs, a lobby shop that Consol paid $40,000 to promote its interests in Washington in 2009.

Santorum, whose description of Consol during the New Hampshire debate made it sound like a corner store owned by your grandparents, clearly saw his primary role at Consol Energy as influencing the legislative process. "I engaged in that battle," he said Saturday. "And I'm very proud to have engaged in that battle."

Kate Sheppard is a staff reporter Mother Jones' Washington bureau.

When Romney Came To Town

2012-01-11T18:59:00.002-05:00

New release of full version. Definitely worth it to view, so check it out through this link.

Gaze Into the Exploding Universe of Dark Money

2012-01-11T12:43:00.000-05:00

We've charted the red giants and blue dwarfs spending millions to influence the 2012 election.

—By Dave Gilson and Asawin Suebsaeng

If Citizens United was the Big Bang of a new era of money in politics, here's the parallel universe it formed: rapidly expanding super-PACs and nebulous 501(c) groups exerting their gravitational pull on federal elections. A group's size in the chart below is based upon all known fundraising or spending since 2010…so keep an eye out for dark matter. Come back for regular updates.

Visit the Dark Money Universe

Mitt Romney's Bain Capital Tenure Comes Under Scrutiny As GOP Candidate Touts Experience

2012-01-10T09:34:00.000-05:00

The Huffington Post Luke Johnson First Posted: 1/9/12 02:03 PM ET Updated: 1/9/12 02:03 PM ET

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has staked his presidential campaign on his time at the private equity firm Bain Capital, arguing that the private-sector experience shows he can fix the ailing economy and even create jobs.

"In the business I had, we invested in over 100 different businesses and net-net, taking out the ones where we lost jobs and those that we added, those businesses have now added over 100,000 jobs," said Romney on Saturday at the ABC debate. "I'm a good enough numbers guy to make sure I got both sides of that."
The Romney campaign says that the figure comes from three successful businesses that Bain served as a consultant on--Staples (89,000 jobs), The Sports Authority (15,000 jobs) and Domino's (7,900 jobs). The AP wrote that the figure only includes successes at Bain that open Romney to hypocrisy for attacking President Barack Obama's record on jobs:

By that sort of charitable math, President Barack Obama could be credited with creating over 1 million jobs even though employment overall is down about 2 million since he came to office. But Romney accuses Obama of destroying jobs while using a different standard to judge his own performance--cherry-picked examples that leave everything else out.

However, not included in the figure were other acquisitions that lost jobs, which also created large returns for the company's investors.
After Bain became majority shareholder in Kansas City-based Worldwide Grinding Systems, 750 people lost their jobs, workers were denied health benefits and severance pay and pensions were cut, reported Reuters. The firm eventually needed a $44 million federal bailout to cover pension losses.
The acquisition, however, was lucrative for Bain's investors--the firm invested $24.5 million and got a $58.4 million return, according to Los Angeles Times estimates.
Romney's firm also laid off about 150 workers from the Holson Burnes Group in South Carolina, while earning $22 million from its initial investment, a return of over 20 percent.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of 77 businesses invested by Bain under Romney's tenure showed that the firm made excellent returns -- 50 to 80 percent annually -- for its investors, with ten deals providing 70 percent of returns. Twenty-two percent of businesses Bain took over filed for bankruptcy or shut down, and all of the money invested was lost on eight percent of the company's acquisitions, the paper found.
Romney's family has an estimated wealth of 190 to 250 million dollars, according to financial disclosure reports. Upon leaving the firm in 1999, he negotiated a retirement agreement paying him a share of the company's profits since -- income that is likely taxed at the lower capital gains rate, though it's impossible to know, because Romney refuses to release his tax returns.

Romney's Republican rivals, who generally believe in the same free market economics as Romney, are attacking him over his tenure at Bain. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said that calling him a "predator" was above board. A Gingrich-aligned super PAC, Winning Our Future, has purchased rights to a documentary on Bain called "When Mitt Romney Came To Town."
"Gov. Romney enjoys firing people, I enjoy creating jobs," said former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman.
"I have no doubt that Mitt Romney was worried about pink slips -- whether he'd have enough of them to hand out," quipped Texas Gov. Rick Perry, referring to Romney's recent comment that he worried about losing his job.

Romney defended himself against the attacks over the weekend. "I'm not surprised to have the New York Times try to put free enterprise on trial," he said. "It's a little surprising from my colleagues on this stage."
At the ABC debate, he said the layoffs were part of the free market. "We understand that, in the free economy, in the private sector, that -- that sometimes investments don't work and you're not successful," he said. "It always pains you if you have to be in a situation of downsizing a business in order to try and make it more successful, turn it around and try and grow it again."

Romney, however, had a different message Monday. "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me," he said, trying to explain why he favors individuals being allowed to pick their own health insurance. "If someone doesn't give me the good service I need, I want to say, you know, 'I'm going to get somebody else to provide that service to me.'"

Video: Republicans Say the Silliest Things

2012-01-08T15:18:00.000-05:00

Apparently, from this video, Oklahoma State Rep. Sally Kern (R) admits she doesn't work as hard as men. Be that as it may. Where I take issue is Rep. Kern assuming all women follow this work ethic. While she may be suggesting the state would do better having elected a man instead, I believe anyone other than Sally Kern would have been the better choice. There's always the next election, Oklahoma!
-bikrdog

Mitt Romney: Don’t Run For Office If You Need The Salary

2012-01-08T14:31:00.001-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

BENJY SARLIN JANUARY 8, 2012, 10:12 AM

Mitt Romney recounted some advice from his father, former presidential candiate George Romney, in Sunday’s NBC/Facebook debate about running for office: make sure you’re set for cash already.

“I happened to see my dad run for governor when he was 54 years old,” Romney said. “He had good advice to me. He said never get involved in politics if you have to win election to pay a mortgage. If you find yourself in a position when you can serve, you ought to have a responsibility to do so if you think you can make a difference, and don’t get involved in politics when your kids are still young because it may turn their heads.”

Romney later turned the mortgage line on one of his former opponents, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA), who he ran against unsuccessfully in 1994.
“I was happy that he had to take a mortgage out on his house to ultimately defeat me,” Romney said. He added that he never expected to win the election. “I happened to have been wise enough to realize I did not have a ghost of a chance of beating him…I told my partners in my firm, I’ll be six months, don’t take my chair,” he said.

Spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom told TPM that Romney’s fatherly advice was limited to the candidate himself.
“This was personal advice from a father to son,” he said. “People may make their own choices.”

Spokesmen for Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich appeared to take him at his word, declining to comment on Romney’s quote. But others were less generous: Rick Perry advisor Nelson Warfield slammed the anecdote as a symptom of Romney’s wealthy upbringing.

“Mitt Romney had another $10,000 bet moment,” he told TPM. “Suggesting only the wealthy can ran for office is something out of a Green Acres scenario of running for president.”

Rodell Mollineau, president of Democratic Super PAC American Bridge, also condemned the comments.
“I’d say that Romney has forgotten what it’s be part of the working class or middle class, but he never was,” Mollineau said, adding his quote showed he “has no idea what average Americans are going through on a daily basis.”

TPM2012 |

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