Iowa Republican Breaks the Crazy Meter

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A whackjob conspiracy theory for the ages:

A Republican state Senate candidate in Iowa has decided to bow out of the race and become a U.S. senator of an alternative form of government.

In a letter released Friday, Randi Shannon informs supporters of her new position as “U.S. Senator in the Republic of the United States of America.” You see, according to Shannon, the U.S. government has been acting unlawfully as the “‘official government,’ which clearly it is not!”

In a letter that thanked “my fellow Ron Paul for President Supporters, My Fellow Members of Liberty, My Friends who home school as did I, the many Pro-Life Members who have been so supportive of my candidacy over these past few months,” Ms. Shannon explains that the Original Republic for The United States of America, formed in 1787, was “abandoned” during the Civil War. Then in 1871 the 41st Congress replaced it by the UNITED STATES CORPORATION, the name of which apparently must always be typed in ALL CAPS. Perhaps this confuses the black helicopter pilots.

Anyway, a group dedicate to restoring the constitutional government of the Republic for the united States of America — and it’s “for,” not “of,” and they always lowercase “united,” which must Mean Something — organized in 2010, and this group has reconstituted the legitimate government:

On July 21, 2010 “We the People” of the de jure government proclaimed worldwide and made our “Declaration of Sovereignty for the Republic for the united States of America” to The Hague (a.k.a. the International Court of Justice), the Universal Postal Union (UPU) and the United Nations (UN). On September 23, 2010, the first session of congress was convened by the united free Republics of the re-inhabited united States of America. The seating of the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of the Republic government were successfully established. This was completed by more than the required two-thirds majority vote of “We the People” on the land of the independent Republics. Delegates from more than 42 free Republics (States) attended, and officers for all three branches of our government have been officially sworn into office, lawfully electing interim President James Timothy Turner and interim Vice President Charles Eugene Wright, along with other established cabinet members with a presiding majority vote of 94% approval. Thus, the Republic government is officially re-inhabited and staffed for the first time since 1868 by the will of “We the People”.

How they did this without “We the People” even knowing about it is not explained.

The de facto UNITED STATES CORPORATION was unlawfully established by the forty-first congress in 1871 by deceptive means and without proper consent from “We the People”. The American people were placed under involuntary servitude by a “Legal” system of laws that have continually violated the “Constitution for the united States of America”, “Bill of Rights” and the “Declaration of Independence”. The corporate constitution was changed from the original form, wherein Amendments were unlawfully added and removed without the people’s consent. Since 1871, the abuses of this corporation upon both the international community as well as the American people are inestimable and unconscionable. De facto Congress has repeatedly violated their Oaths of Office, fiduciary responsibilities, and in many cases, committed treasonous acts against “We the People” of the united States of America and the world.

We humbly come forward apologizing for the numerous atrocities we have unknowingly allowed the U.S. CORPORATION to carry out upon the international community. It is our mission to establish the American image of truth, honesty, integrity and honor around the world. Our plan is to rebuild our economy and support other economies around the world, fulfilling humanitarian needs. We will allow our military to withdraw from unnecessary conflicts around the world and promote world peace and prosperity. We intend to follow God the Creator’s command to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and care for the sick, irrespective of creed, religion or race. There is no law against these things.

We are calling on the support of all Nations around the world to help us end the tyranny that has been perpetrated by the unlawful actions of the UNITED STATES corporate government. We shall achieve this goal PEACEFULLY AND LAWFULLY, with boldness, integrity and truth, so help us God.

Not enough tinfoil in the world. Although what I really want to know is if the official FLAG of the united States — “united” must never be capitalized, remember, unless it is in ALL CAPS — has a gold fringe on it or not. Inquiring minds, etc.

BTW, the 1871 act that set up the UNITED STATES CORPORATION was the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871, which established DC as federal territory. Seriously. The act (read here, scroll down a bit to start) established the District of Columbia as a “body corporate for municipal purposes.” I regret I don’t have time this morning to read the act all the way through, but as far as I got I see that it spends a lot of time outlining the form of government for the District of Columbia. I didn’t get to the part where the federal government was re-organized.

Maybe one of you can find the part about the UNITED STATES CORPORATION, although you may need to wrap yourself in duct tape and recite the Magna Carta backwards to do so. Otherwise it might be invisible.

Michelle Malkin Thinks People Who Work for a Paycheck Are Scum

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Hey, she said it.

… in the interview, Malkin slammed President Obama’s supporters. “Romney types, of course, are the ones who sign the front of the paycheck, and the Obama types are the one who have spent their entire lives signing the back of them,” she said.

If you watch the video at Steve M’s, it is striking to me that MM and the other Fox “friends” are not even responding to what President Obama actually said.

Willard Whines Back

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So Mittens is going for the Clinton Defense, proclaiming firmly that he did not have sex with had no contact whatsoever with Bain Capital after 1999.

Lifted from the Maddow Blog, here are links to documents that say otherwise:

In Primary Debate, Romney Suggested He Was At Bain Until 2002

Executive Branch Personnel PUBLIC FINANCIAL DISCLOSURE REPORT (pdf)

Bain Capital Fund VI, L.P. Schedule 13D – May 2, 2000

Bain Capital Fund VI, L.P. Schedule 13D – February 11, 2001

Romney stayed longer at Bain

Massachusetts State Ethics Commission Statement of Financial Interests for Calendar Year 2002 (pdf)

Mitt Romney’s Own 2002 Testimony Undermines Bain Departure Claim

Sully: “How does Romney attend board meetings of Bain acquisitions, sign six filings on Bain acquisitions, get a six figure salary as an executive, list himself as sole owner and CEO with the SEC in these years, and insist he was not ‘involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way’?”

I say Bill Clinton was a lot more persuasive. You’ve got to be a natural-born charmer to get away with this kind of blatant lying, and Mittens ain’t that. Josh Marshall’s impression is that Mittens’s defense makes him look weak.

Even more remarkably, he picked yesterday to announce that he won’t be releasing any more tax returns after all. Nyah nyah nyah.

And even more weird, the Romney campaign says that the Obama campaign is unraveling. They are also “reckless and wild” and “scared to death.” Yeah, like Bugs Bunny was scared to death of Elmer Fudd.

David Weigel looks on in wonder at the degree to which the Romney camapaign is flat-out contradicting the documented record and even some of Mittens’s past statements about Bain Capital.

This is a truly bizarre scandal. At base, we’re seeing a candidate get shamed because he took a (paid) leave of absence in order to successfully turn around the Olympics. But the way he described that decision in his 2006 book Turnaround made it clear — he kept up some Bain Capital ties. “When I talked to my partners at Bain Capital,” he wrote, “I opined that it wouldn’t make sense for me to come back to the company at the end of my tenture at SLOC as I had following my [1994] campaign.” They disagreed and came to a different arrangement — not as much control as he’d retained in 1994, but not zero influence.

If only the campaign had explained this clearly. The reason that Romney’s having trouble escaping this language trap is that it was built and baited by hasty “war room” responses.

But even that explanation could be a lie, because it appears he intended to go back to Bain after the Salt Lake City Olympics but changed his mind in 2001.

As I said yesterday, if Mittens had chosen to defend Bain business practices rather than try to lie his way out of this, it possibly wouldn’t have hurt his campaign that much. But there’s so much blood in the water now even the candy-ass Dem sharks are smelling it.

A Lie Too Far

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I can’t say I’m shocked to learn that Penn State coach Joe Paterno and other university officials knew about Jerry Sandusky’s little “problem” for 14 years and chose to overlook it. Men, especially powerful men, have gotten passes for sexual predation since the dawn of time.

But there was a time when even powerful men were held accountable for losing money. The AP reports that JP Morgan Chase has now admitted losing $4.4 billion on one little trading “oopsie,” yet CEO Jamie Dimon still has his job. It seems that “too big to fail” applies to big-shot executives, too.

And then there’s this:

Mitt Romney testified to Massachusetts officials in 2002 that he maintained business ties during his Olympics work, undermining his argument that he had no connection to Bain Capital or related companies after 1999. Notably, his campaign has refused to deny whether or not he ever held meetings with Bain during his time in Salt Lake City.

Romney, who at the time was trying to convince the state Ballot Law Commission that he should be allowed to run for office in Massachusetts despite living in Utah the last three years, did not directly address his work with Bain Capital. But, in testimony obtained by the Huffington Post, Romney said that he returned home for “a number of social trips and business trips that brought me back to Massachusetts, board meetings, Thanksgiving and so forth.”

Romney noted that he remained an active member of the board at Staples, where Bain was an early investor and a company Romney frequently cites on the trail, and LifeLike, a toy company where Bain was heavily invested at the time.

If you go back to what Mittens was saying while he was an Olympics honcho, 1999-2002, it appears that he turned day-to-day operation of Bain over to others but was kept in the loop about what the company was up to and probably weighed in on major decisions. He retained his title and salary until 2002. It also appears he fully intended to come back to full-time management of Bain until late in 2001, when he decided to run for Massachusetts governor against acting governor Jane Swift. Steve Kornacki:

It was only in late 2001, when Swift’s governorship began to implode, that running in 2002 became a serious option for Romney. And it was only in 2002 that Romney actually struck a severance agreement with Bain. Before Swift’s demise, Romney’s only other possible post-Olympic political opportunity had involved Utah’s governorship, which was possibly going to open up in 2004. In the summer of ’01, Romney took some tentative steps to put his name in the mix for that race, but it was still several years away and there were real questions about how viable he’d be if he ran.

And, you know, this makes sense, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Except that Mittens wants to be inoculated from certain actions taken by Bain during that 1999-2002 period.

Romney didn’t start pushing the idea that he’d severed all ties with Bain in ’99 until late in the ’02 campaign, when Democrats played up Bain’s closure of a Kansas City steel plant, a move that cost 700 workers their jobs. Confronted with this potentially damaging attack, Romney pleaded ignorance, insisting he couldn’t have had anything to do with the closure because it came two years after he’d left. That’s the story he’s stuck with ever since – and especially this year, as national Democrats have taken up the GST story.

Now, it may be that he had no direct input into the GST closing. But in the long run, would it not have been better if he had come up with some plausible reason why closing the plant was a good decision? He could have said something like “I wasn’t in on that management decision but I defend the actions of my company because blah blah blah,” and tossed out some numbers and business-speak that no one really understands, and it might have shut everyone up about it. Instead, he told a disprovable lie.

Alex Pareene writes,

If you’re planning on running for president, here are a few quick things you should probably do:

Make sure your tax returns and finances are in order
Make sure you’re not blatantly lying about some major portion of your biography.

Mitt Romney seems to have decided to do neither, I guess because he thought no one would check?

Romney seems to be trying to bluff it out. He is thumping his chest and demanding an apology for things the Obama campaign said about him. If the things being said are demonstrably true, however … well, he is cordially invited to hold his breath until he gets that apology.

The list of disprovable lies Mittens has told about President Obama is ponderously long, and I don’t know if they’ve all been compiled in one place. Here is a list of lies from just one speech. But we all know Republicans have been allowed to get away with lying for some time. Maybe Mittens went a lie too far.

Drip Drip Drip …

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David Corn says Romney Invested Millions in Chinese Firm That Profited on US Outsourcing. This is especially significant since Mittens’s latest counter-attack against the President is that “President Obama’s policies have encouraged American jobs to move overseas,” and the reasoning behind that claim is that Obama hasn’t been tough enough on China.

I don’t think Mittens can win a game of “I’m rubber you’re glue” against President Obama, except among the rabid right base. Romney looks like a big ol’ pile of glue to me.

Steve M points to a new Romney ad that tries to make the President seem sinister and nasty.

The problem is that polls show that most Americans like Obama — more people like him than approve of how he’s doing his job. Voters in the middle who are wary of how he’s doing his job think he’s at least a decent well-meaning, guy; Team Romney seems to think it can overcome that impression, developed over three and a half years of a presidency and two years of campaigning before that, in a mere four months — the point being, apparently, to get swing voters to see Obama as the sinister thumb-breaking, thuggish Chicago pol/Hillary-hating sexist pig of wingnut/PUMA legend. It’s as if no one on Romney’s campaign can even imagine what it feels like to be merely disappointed by Obama rather than repulsed.

Is it just me, or is the Romney campaign playing defense? And rather badly? If Mittens himself were particularly charming he might get away with this, but he isn’t. The man’s got less charm than roach bait.

Update: Michael Tomasky on Mitt Romney the Race Baiter at the NAACP

Mittens Spills the Beans

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Mittens has said he expected to be booed when he said he would repeal Obamacare.

Mitt Romney said Wednesday that he “expected” the negative response to his address earlier in the morning at the NAACP convention in Houston, where he was booed after vowing to repeal President Obama’s signature healthcare law.

“We expected that,” the presumptive GOP presidential nominee told Fox Business Network’s Neil Cavuto in a interview set to air later in the day. “I am going to give the same message to the NAACP that I give across the country, which is that ObamaCare is killing jobs, and if jobs is the priority, we are going to have to replace it with something that actually holds down healthcare costs, as opposed to something that causes more spending for the government and more spending for American families.”

Never mind there is no evidence “Obamacare” is “killing jobs”; never mind there is evidence it already is slowing the rise in health care costs and will save the taxpayer’s money — would it have killed him to say “Affordable Care Act” instead of “Obamacare”? It’s one thing to say he disagrees with the President’s policies, but outright ridicule is just asking for it. And of course, Mittens was asking for it.

He said later of his audience at the NAACP, “If they want more free stuff from the government, tell them to vote for the other guy.” Yeah, them black folks just want the government to take care of them. Where have we heard that before?

Even George W. Bush wasn’t that blatantly racist.

Update: Mittens lied about when he left Bain. Next: New reports say sky is blue, grass green.

This Is Just Wrong

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Vampire squids, indeed —

The report cited a case of an 81-year-old Rhode Island woman who fell behind on a $474 sewer bill. A corporation bought the home in a tax sale for $836.39. The woman was evicted from the home she had lived in for more than 40 years and the corporation resold the place for $85,000, the report said. …

… One elderly Montana woman, who lived alone and had no close family to help her, fell more than $5,000 behind on taxes, the report said. After she failed to respond to letters from the company that bought her home in a tax sale, she was evicted from her Missoula home. As a result, she lost about $150,000 in equity in the property, according to the report.

At the very least, I say the companies that foreclose should not be allowed to profit more than they are owed, and any additional funds from a sale should go to the homeowner.

Obama Draws Line in the Sand

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On tax cuts, Obama decides to fight, Ezra Klein writes. Yesterday, the President proposed

… a one-year extension of the Bush tax cuts for families making less than $250,000 and, through his press secretary Jay Carney, promising to veto any effort to “extend tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.” It’s a strategic decision that could have a tremendous effect on the economy — and thus on the president’s chances in the fall.

Ezra says this is politically riskier than it sounds, because it could set off a market panic during the height of the presidential campaign. His argument is based on data showing that markets and job growth slumped dramatically last year during the debt ceiling fight. I’m not sure I buy that argument, but I think it would hurt Obama worse politically if he didn’t fight the extension of the tax cuts.

A New York Times economics blogger says that cutting taxes on income above 250,000 would reduce the economy:

Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, estimates that allowing tax cuts for Americans who earn above $250,000 to expire at the end of 2012 would reduce gross domestic product growth in 2013 by $40 billion, or about 0.24 percentage points.

Allowing the “middle class” tax cuts to expire would shave an additional 1.06 percentage points off economic growth. That means letting all of the Bush tax cuts phase out would cut about 1.3 percentage points from growth.

Yeah, but Moody’s has little credibility with me. And Krugman says the reduction on top earners would mostly be felt by the top earners and have little or no impact on anyone else.

The important point politically is that the President is daring congressional Republicans to stand in the way of extending middle-class tax cuts because they are holding out for millionaire tax cuts. And Mittens, possibly for the first time in his life, has taken a firm stand. He is opposing the President —

Mitt Romney blasted President Obama’s push to repeal the Bush-era tax rates on incomes over $250,000 per year, saying it “will kill jobs.”

In an interview with WHKT-AM, a Virginia radio station, on Tuesday morning, the presumptive GOP nominee said the proposal would impose “a massive tax increase on job creators and on small business.”

He also called it “another kick in the gut to the middle class in America.”

Yeah, keep that up, Mittens. This is the guy who assures us there is “nothing hidden” in the tax returns he won’t release. This is the same guy who says he didn’t know anything about investments in the Caymans and Bermudas, including (one assumes) the Bermudas corporation he set up himself in 1997 and then transferred to his wife’s trust the day before he was inaugurated governor of Massachusetts.

So, one must ask, has Mittens himself ever looked at his own tax returns to see what’s in them?

At Vanity Fair, Dan Amira says everyone, including the President, is mis-reporting the president’s tax plan. The tax is on income, not individuals; it is on income over $250,000, not on individuals making more than $250.000. So if the tax cuts are continued on income below $250,000, the very rich would still get those cuts, too. And be sure to see the one chart that shows us what the tax cut fight is about.