Thursday, January 19, 2012

Headlines - Thursday January 19

 
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Wonkette: Santorum Calls Romney 'Just a Paler Shade of What We Have'
 
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It's good to be da' king. Thank goodness the Feds are going after something valued at $62 million rather than the billions and trillions associated with the Wall Street crash of 2008. Distractions appear to be the preferred choice rather than the more serious problems. It hasn't gone unnoticed that the small houses are the ones who get hit rather than the household names that the country knows from the bailouts.
A press conference will be held Wednesday to announce charges against seven investment professionals who participated in an insider trading scheme that allegedly netted more than $61.8 million in illegal profits based on trades of a single stock. Some arrests have already taken place. Todd Newman, who once headed technology trading for Diamondback Capital Management was arrested in Boston this morning. Newman was placed on a leave of absence in 2010 and subsequently let go by that firm.
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In an example of just how terribly corrupt Republican party officials are, the official, certified results of the Iowa caucus are finally in and Rick Santorum actually won by 23 votes.  The Iowa GOP has decided to call it a tie instead.
 
In other words, the call in Iowa then made Mitt all but inevitable now.  It'll be interesting to see how the Republicans react to this on the road.  If Mitt wins Saturday, it's over.  But would he have done worse if Santorum had been rightfully declared the winner in Iowa?  The Iowa GOP is saying that several precincts lost their votes so there's no way to know if Santorum's 23 vote lead is really true:
Results from eight precincts are missing — any of which could hold an advantage for Mitt Romney — and will never be recovered and certified, Republican Party of Iowa officials told The Des Moines Register on Wednesday.

We'll never know.  Republicans aren't terribly interested in facts, just results.  Remember that the next time they play the ACORN/UNION THUGS/BLACK PANTHERS card and say Democrats are cheaters.

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Example #9 billion how the media are failing us 

Drudge:

Marianne Gingrich has said she could end her ex-husband's career with a single interview.

Earlier this week, she sat before ABCNEWS cameras, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

She spoke to ABCNEWS reporter Brian Ross for two hours, and her explosive revelations are set to rock the trail.

But now a "civil war" has erupted inside of the network, an insider claims, on exactly when the confession will air!

ABCNEWS suits determined it would be "unethical" to run the Marianne Gingrich interview so close to the South Carolina Primary, a curious decision, one insider argued, since the network has aggressively been reporting on other candidates.

A decision was tentatively made to air the interview next Monday, after all votes have been counted.

Got that? The ethical thing for a news organization to do is sit on information about a candidate, because god forbid voters go to the poll informed. It's mind-numbing that there was even a debate about this within ABC News. Of course you air the god damned thing. The only reason not to is you are afraid of being called biased. There is no other job for a news organization that to provide news and allow readers to inform themselves, yet here we have ABC "debating" whether or not they should do that job. This is almost as bad as the NY Times debating whether they should correct lies and dispute falsehoods.

WTF do these people think their job is? Why do they get up and go to work? What is going on in their heads?

"You just wait, you sanctimonious bastard!" thought Marianne.  "One of these days I'm going to crush your nuts on national TV!"

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Gawker is reporting on explosive speculation from the Miami Herald that has apparently been a decade-long rumor in the DC press corps, even though it's not seen much print.

The rumor, in brief, is as follows: In the summer of 1997, the Hill's Sandy Hume—the then-28-year-old son of Fox News' Brit Hume—broke a blockbuster story about four GOP congressman who plotted, and failed, to overthrow Newt Gingrich as Speaker. One of those men was Bill Paxon, a New York Republican who was married to fellow Congresswoman Susan Molinari. Another of the plotters, Majority Leader Dick Armey, scuttled the coup when he learned that Paxon, and not he, would replace Gingrich. Armey later disavowed the whole attempt and claimed not to have been involved.

A few months later, in February 1998, Paxon launched an attempt to unseat Armey from his leadership position. Just days later, Sandy Hume killed himself with a gunshot to the head. Just days after that, Paxon suddenly and inexplicably resigned and never returned to public life. Almost immediately, rumors began flying that Hume and Paxon had been having an affair, and that Armey had threatened to out them. Hence the suicide and the sudden resignation.

Further down in the Gawker piece is what's new in the Herald story: "But Caputo adds a new wrinkle to the tale: 'Some' blame Gingrich, and not just Armey, he says, for the threat to go public with information about Hume and Paxon's alleged relationship."

Wow. Definitely hit both links for more.

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According to a new report from ABC News, Mitt Romney's admission that he is paying an effective tax rate of 15 percent or less is only half the story. The other half is the off-shoring of significant portions of Romney's wealth in tax havens, and analysis of securities filing reveals at least some of what's being hidden.

[...] tax experts tell ABC News there are other reasons Romney may not want the public viewing his returns. As one of the wealthiest candidates to run for president in recent times, Romney has used a variety of techniques to help minimize the taxes on his estimated $250 million fortune. In addition to paying the lower tax rate on his investment income, Romney has as much as $8 million invested in at least 12 funds listed on a Cayman Islands registry. Another investment, which Romney reports as being worth between $5 million and $25 million, shows up on securities records as having been domiciled in the Caymans.

Official documents reviewed by ABC News show that Bain Capital, the private equity partnership Romney once ran, has set up some 138 secretive offshore funds in the Caymans. [...]

Tax experts agree that Romney remains subject to American taxes. But they say the offshore accounts have provided him — and Bain — with other potential financial benefits, such as higher management fees and greater foreign interest, all at the expense of the U.S. Treasury. Rebecca J. Wilkins, a tax policy expert with Citizens for Tax Justice, said the federal government loses an estimated $100 billion a year because of tax havens.

Mitt Romney's financial dealings may be shady and morally deplorable, but it's unlikely any of it is explicitly illegal. Unlike the average American, Romney and others with vast wealth can afford to hire experts in the field of tax-dodging that will reduce your liability to the lowest possible level while still remaining within legal limits.

With that said, Romney's financial trainwreck, from Bain's vulture capitalism to the off-shoring of wealth, will seriously hamper his efforts to present himself as the right man to fix the economy. Because aside from representing everything that is wrong with the structure of our economy, everyone reading this has also probably had a boss at some point in their life who looked just like him.

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As predicted, the Keystone XL pipeline has now been officially rejected by the Obama Administration after the Republicans chose to hasten the timeline for approval with a rider inserted into legislation that extended payroll tax-cuts and unemployment benefits for 2 months.

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Hey guys, have you met The Purity Bear? He's a plush toy who appears to tempted teens and warns them without moving his mouth that going inside a girl's house will inevitably lead to sex having, and sex having before marriage is literally the worst decision you could possibly make.

In spite of the fact that this could easily be parody, this video is a very real effort to promote the very real Day of Purity. On that Pure of Days, everyone focuses on their genitals for awhile, and somehow that makes them better people. Pure people.

This Purity Bear video also teaches us an important lesson about women, namely that they're usually the ones responsible for tricking men into getting turned on, and they're always demanding sex from poor, defenseless, virtuous, chaste dudes. It happened in Twilight when Bella spent like 3 books humping Edward's leg before he agreed to put out, it happened to Sir Galahad, the Chaste in that castle full of horny virgins, and it's happening here, right on this now besotted doorstep. For shame, woman. For shame, women.

Visibly absent from this scenario was the Artie The Angry Trouser Python, who appears to men and tells them to never turn down a handjob.

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Survey: Republicans Trust Fox News And Nothing Else

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Well this is downright screwy:

Rival presidential candidate Rick Santorum's Iowa coalitions director, Jamie Johnson, sent out an email saying that children's lives would be harmed if the nation had a female president. [...]

"The question then comes, 'Is it God's highest desire, that is, his biblically expressed will, … to have a woman rule the institutions of the family, the church, and the state?'" Johnson's email said.

And men have been totally awesome ruling the world for the last several thousand years. We're real pips. Wouldn't want a series of women leaders mucking up our record of success.

I guess they've been watching this.

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