Romney’s tax saga continues

So Mitt Romney has released his 2011 tax returns and a ‘summary statement’ about his taxes from 20 previous years. It was interesting that he released them on Friday afternoon, the ‘Friday news dump’ time, which is the traditional period for releasing news that you don’t want people to pay much attention to. I think this practice arose from the times when people got much of their news from the broadcast TV networks and few people watched them on weekends when they were often pre-empted by sports events. [Read more…]

Paul Ryan, Superman

With all the attention focused on Mitt Romney’s verbal stumbles on the campaign, less attention has been paid to his running mate Paul Ryan’s activities. He too has had his share of awkward incidents. But while Paul Krugman has rightly been excoriating Ryan’s budget, calling him ‘an unserious man’ and his budget a ‘con game’, other commentators have focused more on Ryan’s odd penchant for embellishing his physical prowess to unrealistic levels. [Read more…]

The disgusting scapegoating of the ‘lucky duckies’

The released secret recording of Mitt Romney’s remarks to a small group of wealthy supporters provides a revealing look at the mindset of such people. They really do think of themselves as a morally superior class and that those who are poor or struggling as worthless. Matt Taibbi argues that having such delusions is the only way that they can justify to themselves the current state of affairs in which they are engaged in “massive fraud and theft” to benefit themselves at the expense of the rest of us. [Read more…]

The Obama administration considers constitutional rights to be dangerous

I have written in the past about the odious piece of legislation known as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would enable the administration to indefinitely detain without trial people whom the government on its own decides is providing “substantial support” to groups “engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners”. (See here, here, and here.) [Read more…]