Maybe Obama has been doing something during his time in Washington

Jamie Doward, The Guardian:

Radical plans to force the UK’s tax havens to reveal the names behind hidden companies, account holders and trusts have been drawn up by the Treasury.
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A leaked document reveals that the UK plans to impose its own version of the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (Fatca) on the crown dependencies of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man, as well as its overseas territories, such as the Cayman Islands.

Fatca, which will come into force in the middle of next year, requires foreign banks to report American account holders to the US Inland Revenue Service. The draft UK equivalent, seen by the magazine International Tax Review, will require British tax havens to make similar disclosures about UK account holders to UK tax authorities.

So Romney loses an election, loses his tax havens. I bet the latter hurts a lot worse.

“Romney campaign a win for Mormons”

“Romney campaign a win for Mormons” is how Rachel Zoll‘s AP article was headlined.

The thesis is that some fundamentalist cranks no longer label the LDS a “cult” and are now acknowledging “the church’s dedication to family, charity and community service” which, uncharitably translated, means subordination of women, welfare for members, and funding anti-gay ballot propositions. Per Zoll, the best news of all: since Romney lost, people will stop paying attention to the LDS.

Yes, the article is that obtuse and that obsequious.

I think that what the election outcome will do is brand Mormons as losers, which is the greatest sin of all that a conservative can commit, and that once the enforced solidarity seeps away with the loss, the knives will come out.

So, may I wish conservative Mormon candidates many more such wins.

Why I regret not reading Scoobie Davis more frequently

Via Scoobie Davis, this gem from Rick Perlstein:

And that, at last, may be the explanation for Mitt Romney’s apparently bottomless penchant for lying in public. If the 2012 GOP nominee lied louder than most—and even more astoundingly than he has during his prior campaigns—it’s just because he felt like he had more to prove to his core following. Lying is an initiation into the conservative elite. In this respect, as in so many others, it’s like multilayer marketing: the ones at the top reap the reward—and then they preen, pleased with themselves for mastering the game. Closing the sale, after all, is mainly a question of riding out the lie: showing that you have the skill and the stones to just brazen it out, and the savvy to ratchet up the stakes higher and higher. Sneering at, or ignoring, your earnest high-minded mandarin gatekeepers—“we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” as one Romney aide put it—is another part of closing the deal. For years now, the story in the mainstream political press has been Romney’s difficulty in convincing conservatives, finally, that he is truly one of them. For these elites, his lying—so dismaying to the opinion-makers at the New York Times, who act like this is something new—is how he has pulled it off once and for all. And at the grassroots, his fluidity with their preferred fables helps them forget why they never trusted the guy in the first place.

Don’t miss the part about an oilfield in the placenta.

And if I’d read Scoobie, I would have seen the latest Jack Chick, which ties together Catholicism, Islam, Communism, Nazism, Free Masonry, and Satanism into one neat bundle. Did you know that 1 million Southern Baptists have joined their body to the Whore of Windsor and become Masons?

The LDS LSD

I don’t know Mormon theology well enough to know how accurate this is. But it’s an interesting presentation and very specific in providing a basis for its statements:

Anyone able to comment on the theology?

The Republican Platform

I think this fairly accurately captures the Romney argument for why he should be elected. No, not kidding.

A Romney presidency would generate memes, not jobs

First there was Women in Binders.

Now, via Greg Mitchell (and whoever it was who linked him), there’s Horses and Bayonets.

See, Romney isn’t completely useless.

Just thought s/he’d want to know

Billy Graham has always called Mormonism a cult. But he decided, for political reasons, to endorse Romney. So, he had the website of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association scrubbed of that article. Other articles remained which made it clear that that had been his verdict on the LDS.

Now, dear reader, you probably know that. But there are still millions of Americans who don’t know about this bit of hypocrisy writ large. And they might be voting on the basis that if it came out of Billy Graham’s mouth, it must be ok. They probably want to know about the mouth on the other side of Billy Graham’s face.

So this post is to lend the mighty power of Mercury Rising to telling that little bit of truth.

For what it’s worth, I call Mormonism “post-Christian,” since they say Jesus was the Son of God, but he failed. Is it a cult? A multi-level marketing scheme? Or just another religion? All those are matters of judgment. But the hypocrisy of Billy Graham and so many other fundamentalists and evangelicals in embracing what they have for so many years denounced– that’s just a fact.
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Updated here: it seems that in Christianity Today, the major evangelical mag, religious leaders have weighed in, mostly in favor of hypocrisy. Lord, help the Christian Church.

Retire the words “fact” and “truth.” They are obsolete.

FAIR had a good take on the Romney-Benghazi-”act of terror” thing here. The so-called “fact-checkers” like Annenberg’s Brooks Jackson and Politifact‘s “main imperative … is to maintain an appearance of impartiality by making it seem like both sides are about equally dishonest.”

In other words, the policy of fact check factories is to lie.

In fact, the fact checkers (including Candy Crowley) tried to say that Romney got it half right because the Administration initially believed that the attack had been related to a protest against a film about Islam. But the NYT own reporting at the time “stressed that the attackers themselves stated they were retaliating for the anti-Muslim video.” The Times has now re-confirmed that the attackers gave as their cause of belligerence the anti-Muslim video.

BTW, if you would like to see just how deep into dishonesty the right has gotten with this, there’s always Breitbart.com, which continues to claim that Obama was not talking about Benghazi in calling the assault on the consulate an act of terror despite the fact that his remarks were for f–k’s sake titled “Remarks by the President on the Deaths of U.S. Embassy Staff in Libya.” They even link it!

None so blind as they who claim to see.

(This is the CNN interview they excerpt from without linking). In it, David Axelrod schools Candy Crowley on what the president said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack. When she interrupted Romney in the debate, she was presumably trying to save him from saying something irretrievably stupid).

Multiple choice Mitt gets every option wrong on his tax plan

Romney has proposed a 20% rate cut and limiting deductions to $17,000 or $25,000 or $50,000, depending how generous he’s being with imaginary money that day. So, would such a tax reform be revenue neutral, or even raise revenue?

Tax Policy Center:

Eliminating all itemized deductions would yield about $2 trillion of additional revenue over ten years if we cut all rates by 20 percent and eliminate the AMT. Capping deductions would generate less additional revenue, and the higher the cap, the smaller the gain. Limiting deductions to $17,000 would increase revenues by nearly $1.7 trillion over ten years. A $25,000 cap would yield roughly $1.3 trillion and a $50,000 cap would raise only about $760 billion.
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Without more specifics, we can’t say how much revenue such limits would actually raise. But these new estimates suggest that Romney will need to do much more than capping itemized deductions to pay for the roughly $5 trillion in rate cuts and other tax benefits he has proposed.

So, even at its best, Romney is talking about cutting revenue by about $300B per year. Like, say, cut Medicare benefits by nearly half. That would do it.

The real Women in the Binder story

Apparently Mitt lied.

What a surprise.