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Showing posts from July, 2012

Mitt Romney, Class Warfare, and The Rosetta Stone of Taxes

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It isn't true that Romney "owes it" to voters to release more tax returns than he has and has said he would. In politics only two things rule: the law (a very forgiving standard) and your image. If Romney doesn't release more than two years of federal tax returns and he wins, ergo, he didn't owe anybody anything. And if he loses it will be difficult to impossible to assess the extent to which opaqueness contributed to defeat. But Romney has a bigger problem. Emphasis on the word "Big." Clearly, Romney has calculated that — at this moment in time, anyway — it is better to hold his ground than to give way. This may change, of course, which would present new challenges (is Romney, yet again, cowering to pressure in a very unpresidential way? Is this just another head-spinning flip-flop?). A host of conservative commentators and at least one  two elected officials have urged Romney to just do it. The most recent is the National Review, whose editorial

Romney & Uniform-Gate: He Can't Win For Losing

Lost in the Shocked Shocked outrage over the outsourced order for US Olympic opening ceremonies uniforms (Really? THIS is what animates bi-partisanship in Congress?) is the fact that these garments were made in China even though an American company got the order. Nobody thought to ask Calvin Klein where the clothing would be made, probably because it occurred to nobody that "Made in the USA" was more important than price. Or because virtually none of the clothing Americans wear is made in America, or has been for a long, long time. And this is why the attack on capitalism, as the Romney folks put it, will redound to Obama's benefit. Capitalism is not patriotism. Capitalism is not social engineering. Capitalism is not about national boundaries. Capitalism is about making money by providing goods and services for which there is a demand. If you are good at it, lots of people get jobs. If you are bad at it, lots of people lose their jobs and you (and perhaps lots of

The World That Could Have Been According To Andy Taylor

I used to live in Mayberry. For the dozen years we were there our Virginia hometown epitomized the feel of that fictional TV hamlet, a place where people stopped to talk, treated each other right and everything always just seemed to be okay. It was actually Reston, but we joked about the similarities. Like lots of kids in the 1960s, I also grew up in Mayberry, at the knee of a quiet hero. Andy Griffith 's sleepy southern town was an island in the storm. There was little strife or crime. There was a mayor (his boss) and successful businessmen who controlled commerce. But Griffith's Sheriff Andy Taylor was the glue which held it all together, the one person everyone relied upon and turned to. And they were correct to defer to him: Taylor invariably prevented idiocy and excess while promoting common sense, all the while speaking softly and carrying no stick. Taylor was a lawman who never carried a gun or raised his voice. He was a single father whose son's upbringing mea

SCOTUS Sings. Who's The Leaker (And Does It Matter)?

Felix Salmon makes a great observation about the deterioration of the Supreme Court: if they start leaking self-serving secrets under the cover of anonymity, aren't they lowering themselves to worst levels of the political branches? Isn't SCOTUS supposed to be above it all, oblivious to criticism or how the citizenry regards how they do what they do? Isn't that the point of lifetime appointments? It's interesting that some Justice (at least) is singing , so soon after the event. Both the ruling and the makeup of the majority in Sebelius was surprising, the latter far more so than the former since conservative Chief Justice Roberts looked for and found a way to uphold the Affordable Care Act. I don't think it's unprecedented, though I may be confusing retired Justices who've been source material for books about the Court. Either way, I'm struggling to figure out the motive since I take the reporting of CBS's Jan Crawford as accurate. Salmon wa