January 29th, 2012

Romney and the Olympics: another scandal?

by Mark Kleiman
Category: Corruption in Washington

Newt Gingrich’s handlers should be sued for political malpractice. The time to raise the Damon fraud story was earlier; now, insofar as it’s getting any press at all, it’s as one more Gingrich attack on Romney. So far, Romney hasn’t even bothered to respond to the charges, or if he has I can’t see a mention of it.

There’s another scandal lurking in the background. Many years ago, in a dentist’s office, I read one of the best-reported political corruption stories ever written. It was a Sports Illustrated expose of the funding of the Salt Lake City Olympics. Apparently there were swaps of private land for federally-owned land, on insanely favorable terms for the landowners. That’s on top of the nearly $1.5 billion in federal earmarks that directly paid for the Games.

This story might be worth reviving, since Romney has used his Olympics experience as evidence of his managerial skill and devotion to public service. It might also be interesting to look at how many of the rich people Romney managed to further enrich at taxpayer expense subsequently donated to his various political ventures.

Posted: Sunday, January 29th, 2012 at 7:39 pm
5 Comments »

January 28th, 2012

Romney’s 50% tax rate

by Michael O'Hare
Category: Republican Party, Wretched excess

Mitt Romney usefully points out that his tax rate is more like 50% than 15%, because the corporations from which he got his capital gains paid a corporate income tax of 35%, more or less.  Good point! Anyone whose income comes from the private sector  can add 35% to his actual tax rate, and should (of course, Mitt is still in a sweet spot comparatively).  But that’s not all; everyone who bought the stuff these companies sold paid income tax on the money they bought it with, so there’s another 20% or so, often sales tax to boot, and their salaries were paid mostly by companies that paid corporate income tax….My God, another 35%: we’re up to 105% average tax on American incomes; no wonder the country is going down the drain.

Of course, government and non-profit worker parasites like me, and folks who work for companies that are losing money, we get an incredible deal, because the Romney multiplier doesn’t apply.  And that’s the mechanism that’s driving America into socialist hell!

You read it here first, folks.  See you at the barricades.

 

Posted: Saturday, January 28th, 2012 at 9:35 pm
20 Comments »

January 28th, 2012

Romney and Damon

by Mark Kleiman
Category: Campaign 2012, Health and Medicine, Mitt Romney

I assume that anything a Republican candidate says is a lie until it’s proven to be true, but if there’s a rebuttal to the Gingrich/Adelson SuperPac ad about Mitt Romney’s involvement in a giant health care fraud I’d sure be interested in hearing it.

Here’s the Forbes story the ad seems to be based on. Democrats are likely to make a fuss about it, too.

If Gingrich had as much money to spend as Romney, he could make a race out of it, especially with the Palin/Cain Republican counter-Establishment now moving in his direction. In the meantime, he’s going to do Romney some damage on his way down. But why didn’t Newt make a fuss about this in the debate?

Posted: Saturday, January 28th, 2012 at 8:29 pm
10 Comments »

January 28th, 2012

Harvard fail

by Michael O'Hare
Category: Education policy, Politics and Leadership, Popular Culture, Sports

Back in the day, the president of Harvard stood up to an unaccountable, unAmerican, evil conspiracy.  I also count Joseph Welch, a Harvard Law alum, (and coincidentally, another Iowa boy) as one of my heroes in the same national battle.  Of course, the stakes then were limited: only the survival of American liberty and the constitution, and academic freedom were on the table.  Now Harvard has the chance to take a stand against another oppressive, unaccountable, force.  Like McCarthy, the NCAA is mistreating a powerless youth as is its conventional practice ,and with its pervasive and typical stupidity, but to do the right thing puts the prosperity of the big-time college sports industry, not to mention Harvard’s own teams’ legitimacy as determined by this secretive cabal, at risk.

It is a “well-known fact” that a university without a top-class, winning, intercollegiate sports program is doomed to academic mediocrity.  I am on a search committee at my own school, and we only had 370 applications for the position, (including a batch of star, top-class finalists).  This pathetic showing must be attributable to our football team’s losing season, right? (What great scholar, after all, would deign to be associated with a place like Chicago, or Cal Tech, or MIT?)  As Harvard has caved on this one, it would appear they either believe this nonsense, or they think college sports as ordained by the NCAA is a higher value than the ones Pusey defended. But they are wrong either way: if Nocera’s reporting is correct, things have changed a lot in Cambridge, and not for the better. [Disclosure: I have four degrees (don't ask) from Harvard and my daughter has another.  I'm not 'proud of Harvard', because I didn't make it or even change it much when I was there; I hope Harvard is proud of me.  I spent some of the best years of my life there as a student and on the faculty.  I wish Harvard well, and I think it's a wonderful institution, but I know it to have flaws and shortcomings, and it will have fewer if they are ventilated and confronted.]

Posted: Saturday, January 28th, 2012 at 12:19 pm
14 Comments »

January 28th, 2012

Pollution Accountability in China

by Matthew E. Kahn
Category: Uncategorized

Declining prices for pollution monitoring equipment are leveling the PM 2.5 playing field in China.   To quote Sy Syms,  ”an educated consumer is our best customer.”  An exciting research field in economics has documented the power of information and “report cards” in influencing individual choice and this in aggregate has public health consequences.  For the tough RBC crew, please read this paper on Los Angeles restaurant report cards and their impact on  public hygiene.    The narrow pursuit of self interest can yield progress!  In the LA case,  there is a synergy between government producing trusted information and private individual responses.  In the case of China, the government is not trusted to produce such information and the private sector has responded.  That’s adaptation!

Posted: Saturday, January 28th, 2012 at 8:41 am
2 Comments »

January 28th, 2012

Wingnuts against Gingrich: “country first”?

by Mark Kleiman
Category: Watching Conservatives

Rick Ungar must be a nicer person than I am. He attributes the Newt-bashing by “Elliot Abrams, Ann Coulter, Tom DeLay, Matt Drudge, R. Emmett Tyrell, Jr., the editorial staff of the National Review and the many ultra-conservative writers” to their patriotic terror at the prospect of a Gingrich Presidency. Rick thanks this rogue’s gallery for “putting country country first.”

Sorry. I’m not buying. All of Rick’s new heroes backed Bush/Cheney to the very end. All support the efforts of the current Republican leadership in Congress to tank the economy and paralyze the government in order to make the President look bad so the GOP can reclaim power.

Rick is right on his other point: these folks do retail “a shred of sanity.” They can read the polls, and know that the Grinch would be such a disastrous candidate there’s no real need to worry about his becoming a disastrous President. As paid servants of the plutocracy, they’re all rallying behind Mitt Romney as the one candidate committed to lower taxes on very rich people who might beat Barack Obama in November.

“Willing to do the right thing for the protection of their country”? Not so much.

Posted: Saturday, January 28th, 2012 at 6:19 am
3 Comments »

January 27th, 2012

How pleasant it is when friends come from afar!

by Mark Kleiman
Category: Uncategorized, Watching Conservatives

I regard reading most Red blogs (with such key exceptions as some of the Volokh Conspirators or Megan McArdle or Reihan Salam) as unpleasant but necessary work, like cleaning septic fields. Most of the Red bloggers I used to admire and learn from switched teams during the Reign of Error.

But right now I’m enjoying the chore, and finding much to agree with. When Riehl World View describes Romney as having “gone from unlikeable to detestable,” I can only nod, and admire the fine turn of phrase. And when he threatens that he and his fellow wing-nuts will take their ball and go home if Romney is nominated, I can only smile. On the other hand, could there be a more accurate description of Newt Gingrich than Peggy Noonan’s “angry little attack muffin”?

Footnote The headline is from an old translation of the Confucian Analects, Book I, section 1. It might seem to refer only to the pleasure of a visit from a friend who lives far away. But my teacher Paul Desjardins taught that it meant also the pleasure of finding agreement across intellectual distance. I don’t agree with Mr. Riehl on much, but it’s good to know that he can recognize a scoundrel when he sees one, and that he acknowledges – from across the partisan divide – Barack Obama’s personal, moral superiority to Gov. Ken-Doll.

Posted: Friday, January 27th, 2012 at 6:24 pm
Tags: , , , , ,
10 Comments »

January 27th, 2012

Legacy

by Mark Kleiman
Category: Lying in politics, Watching Conservatives

So Gingrich and Romney are fighting over which one is the true heir of Ronald Reagan. (And Sarah Palin thinks the Romneyites and the media are being mean to poor widdle Newtie.) Seems to me that depends on which aspect of the Reagan legacy you’re counting.

If you liked the idea of running a cocaine-dealing operation out of the White House basement, then Romney the CEO should be the better bet. But if what you really admire is selling weapons to Iran to finance an illegal war in Nicaragua, that’s the kind of hare-brained scheme that comes naturally to Gingrich but would never occur to Romney.

But the real essence of Reagan, it seems to me, was his post-modernism. Remember the woman who bought an orange with Food Stamps and a bottle of vodka with the change? Utterly impossible, of course. But that didn’t matter to Reagan; it was a good line, and he read it well, and its truth-value was utterly irrelevant.

In that regard, Romney wins the Reagan Look-Alike Contest hands-down. Gingrich tells his share of whoppers, but you get the sense (at least I do) that he knows he’s lying, and feels slightly bad about it. Romney, like Reagan, seems to regard politics as a truth-free zone, where you can say “I approve this message” one day and claim you never heard it the next, without even blushing.

Posted: Friday, January 27th, 2012 at 5:44 pm
Tags: , , , , , ,
11 Comments »

January 27th, 2012

Kwicherbitchin Dep’t

by Mark Kleiman
Category: Uncategorized

I don’t know why everyone’s so exercised about Google’s targeted Web ads.

Seems to me the system has excellent taste. Three times in the last two days it’s offered me When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment, one of the best books ever written about crime, the product of an author whose billiance is surpassed only by his wit and whose wit is matched only by his modesty.

What’s not to like?

Posted: Friday, January 27th, 2012 at 5:30 pm
11 Comments »

January 27th, 2012

“Voter fraud” fraud

by Mark Kleiman
Category: Vote Casting and Counting, Vote fraud

The Republican Attorney General of South Carolina has a super-secret list of 950 dead people who supposedly voted there. Six of those names were actually turned over to the elections commission. The score: zero for six. No evidence whatever of any kind of fraud.

I only wish the con artists who have been using “voter fraud” as an excuse for preventing Democrats from voting, and their accomplices and useful idiots in the Red Blogosphere, were capable of shame.

Posted: Friday, January 27th, 2012 at 2:24 pm
1 Comment »

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