"How Mitt Romney will pay heavily for his unreleased tax returns" - The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/07/mitt-romney-pay-heavily-for-unreleased-tax-returns"Mitt Romney has a problem.
It's not that public opinion polls show he narrowly but persistently trails President Obama, particularly in key swing states. It's not that he has higher personal unfavorabilities than favorabilites. It's not that a mere 30% of voters think he's more likable than his opponent. And it's not that he just returned from a gaffe-filled overseas trip where he found a way to step on one foreign landmine after another, and got called out by London's Mayor, Boris Johnson, live in front of 60,000 Brits.
Ok, well, actually those are all his problems big problems, in fact. But, amazingly, Mitt Romney may have an even bigger one. After releasing two abridged years of tax returns, he has steadfastly insisted that he won't release any more. This is an issue that isn't going away and one that has the potential to haunt him every single day of the 2012 campaign.
On the surface, Romney's unwillingness to release his returns shouldn't necessarily be a major political issue. Four years ago, John McCain released two years of his returns and few Americans including those who worked for then candidate Barack Obama batted an eye. McCain's public image was shaped by his years in a Vietnamese POW camp. Even though he had accumulated so much wealth that, at one point, he couldn't remember how many houses he owned, his taxes were not a pressing question.
But Romney's vast $200m fortune and his proclaimed private-sector experience makes his refusal a far more serious problem: one that was highlighted this week by Senate majority leader Harry Reid's accusation that Romney didn't pay taxes for ten straight years. Many a political pundit and partisan Republican have jumped over Reid for his admittedly unsubstantiated allegations. Jon Stewart called him a terrible person; Reince Preibus, the chairman of the RNC, branded Reid a "dirty liar"."
snip
Mitt's problem is Obama's/our pleasure. Long may this drip...drip...drip....
Tx4obama
(36,974 posts)McCain filed financial disclosures all the years he was in public life.
http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2008/04/18/4433200-mccains-tax-returns?lite
And Romney has NOT even released one 'full' year of returns yet.
NRaleighLiberal
(60,015 posts)we live in strange times.
freshwest
(53,661 posts)They feel oppressed by having to pay taxes and see him as their champion for not paying and envy his ways of getting out of paying that nasty old government.
They conveniently dispose of the idea that we are all in this together or that we have any responsibility for keeping the nation running as falling into communism. The Koch family has played this well.
Just my two cents.
LosMortales
(8 posts)Getting Romney's tax returns may be a job for LulzSec or Anonymous. Romney will not give them up. To gain an existential understanding of the cult that produced Mitt "Cyborg" Romney, and to get your socks scared off, read The Assassination of Spiro Agnew, available at:
www.amazon.com/Assassination-Spiro-Agnew-novel-ebook/dp/B0083EGJXC
Its part Mexican, Mormon Assassin dramatizes the Mormon superiority complex manifesting as racism, sexism, jingoism and an anti-federal government temperament. His research in the new library reveals ominous similarities between Islam and Mormonism. The spiritual power behind the cult, which is not the Holy Ghost, acts out.
With a clarity of language and vision unsurpassed in contemporary American prose, Steven Janiszewski's Assassination of Spiro Agnew takes us into a U.S. mazed with madness and Mormonism and all things Utah, a U.S. that was then and still is. Do we need a novel, even as brilliant as this one, about a young man on a divine mission to assassinate the Vice President because he is too liberal? Yes, now more than ever. Readers, welcome to a masterpiece.
Tom Whalen
www.tomwhalen.com
Read The Assassination of Spiro Agnew.
Word has it that David Axelrod enjoyed its post-modern, metafictional style as much as he relished the Mormon experiential data.