It's Not Just Nate Silver Predicting Obama to Win Ohio and the Election

source: NYT 538 Blog

Nate Silver is getting pushback and lots of trash talk for sticking to his prediction that Obama will win the electoral college on Tuesday. Right now the prediction is that Obama has 85% chance of winning the electoral college if the election was held today. Actually, the election IS being held today, thanks to early voting, with thousands of new voters participating in every state. The vote may be slightly disrupted in the Northeast thanks to Hurricane Sandy, but plans are in place for mobile truck polling places in places like New Jersey and New York, which are blue states for Obama anyway. Ohio and Pennsylvania were not as affected by the storm, so any disruptions there are more likely to be overcrowded precincts and shenanigans from their Republican overlords in charge of the election.



And Obama is still set to win Ohio and Pennsylvania based on poll after poll. The only people who seem to doubt that are the pundits who are trying to make this into an "undecided" race when the numbers show something else entirely.

All the quotes from Nate, his detractors and other pundit hackery here:

Snark Amendment: Wagering War on Nate Silver
(Yes, the title is a pun not a misspelling)

There's a good reason for Silver's prediction. Look at the Polls:



All Obama needs is to win Ohio and then Romney can't possibly patch together enough votes to win. Yet media hacks like CNN's Wolf Blitzer, MSNBC's Chuck Todd, and several writers at Politico keep calling the race too close to call. They sound just like the wingnuts at Breitbart and Fox, so where is the journalistic integrity? If they won't report the facts then they are useless, and no better than Dick Morris or Karl Rove.

Particularly despicable is Chris Cillizza of Washington Post who moved Ohio to "Toss-Up" status the other day just because Mitt Romney needs the state to win. No real arithmatic involved, just pandering to the right, or perhaps nervousness about some Republican getting mad on the internet, LOL. Oooo, scary!

Washington Post

The Fix is moving Ohio from “lean Obama” to “tossup” in our presidential ratings amid a slew of polling that suggests that the race has tightened over the past month, even as the incumbent retains the slightest of edges.
. . . After reviewing all of the available public polling data as well as talking to operatives in both parties about the private polls they are privy to, we are convinced that Ohio is a 1-3 point race in President Obama’s favor at the moment.
That — coupled with the state’s electoral history and the absolute necessity for Romney to win the state if he wants to be president — leads us to move it back to the “tossup” category.

In response, numbers guy Sam Wang of Princeton wrote a piece called Perverse media incentive watch: Chris Cillizza

...Cillizza is hardly alone. A few days ago, Wolf Blitzer at CNN cited a single Ohio poll, done by his own organization, showing Obama up by 4%. He then proceeded to call this a "tie," revealing an amazing inability to interpret a simple number. Compounding this is the fact that dozens of polls have been conducted in Ohio. The odds of an Obama lead are extremely high. So why does he persist?
The news media have an incentive to fuzz up the picture: ratings and profit. A message that the cake is fully baked does not automatically bring back the viewers. Without the artificial suspense, Cillizza and Blitzer are put in a position of having to say something substantive or interesting that gets beyond a horserace number. Think how much work that would be.
The same problem extends to the aggregation of polling data, which many sites do (FiveThirtyEight, Oct. 31). But think of all the headlines you have seen about "Romney ahead nationally," "Obama pulls ahead in Wisconsin," "it's a dead heat," and other permutations. Each of these headlines was based on a single poll. But aggregation would lead to fewer news stories - and less of the breathless horserace coverage we are used to.

Today Wang stuck to his guns, writing:

President Obama is peeling away. As you can see from the electoral vote (EV) estimator, he is the candidate with the momentum, not Romney. In terms of EV or the Meta-margin, he's made up just about half the ground he ceded to Romney after Debate #1. And the indicators are still headed straight up.
A few days ago, the word was that Team Romney was buying ads in Minnesota and Pennsylvania. If he wins either of those states I will eat a bug. Ohio...a really big bug. And yes, I will post a photo.
Today I'll address a common concern among the commentariat: will President Obama lose the popular vote? Steve Lombardo is on the case with some Excel curve fitting of a quality that cannot even identify the Debate #1 bounce. Hmmm, someone take his keys away.
Anyway, the short answer: I estimate Romney's chance of winning the popular vote at 6%, odds of 16-1 against.

Here is the Princeton breakdown of states and electoral votes. Looks like Sam Wang won't have to eat a bug.


Another projection by the University of Illinois, Urbana, Election Analytics gives a similar result as Wang and Nate Silver:


Still not convinced? How about four different oddsmakers on Predictwise.com:



So there it is.

David Rothschild writes on Yahoo's The Signal: All eyes on—where else?—Ohio

Since the final presidential debate, 15 polls have surveyed voter opinion in Ohio, the state that is more likely than any other to determine the election. President Barack Obama leads former Gov. Mitt Romney in 13 of them. The candidates tied in one, and Romney leads in one. Those last two polls were both conducted by Rasmussen, one of the more right-leaning polling institutions, as FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver has documented.

No one is saying Ohio is a walk for the president. The Huffington Post's Pollster and the RealClearPolitics average both have Obama leading with 51.2 percent among those who express a preference for either major candidate. There is still time for a shift toward Romney, and it's always possible that there is a systematic bias in the polls.

But I don't think it's likely. Historically, polls have been pretty accurate this close to the election. Based only on these surveys, the Signal gives Obama a 75 percent chance of victory in Ohio. When we factor in prediction markets, that figure ticks up a small amount, to 77 percent.

None of these analysts should be vilified for doing simple mathematical algorithms based on dating that other people provide to them. What is much more worrying is the press spinning numbers in a way they know to be DISHONEST just three days before a major election.

Republicans Freak Out in "A Tale of Two Emails"

Today, the Obama campaign sent out this email:

Huge news:
We finally closed the gap. We outraised Mitt Romney and the Republicans $114 million to $111 million in August. Unbelievable. After three straight months of getting beat -- and not by a small margin -- more than 1,170,000 supporters made a donation to close the gap.

I admit, I sent in a small donation yesterday while buying a few of cool birth certificate buttons ($5). :)  I love the way Obama is smiling - the birther joke is not on him!
And now he has even more to smile about, too.

Stay with me to the end of this post to discover why this is a "Tale of Two Emails."

First there are the polls which keep bouncing:

CNN Poll: Obama up six points over Romney - wp.me/p4HKM-14ds

— CNN Political Ticker (@PoliticalTicker) September 10, 2012

Sometimes the election is won or lost at the conventions and this looks like it could be one of those years.

— Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) September 9, 2012

Obama posts gains again in all three tracking polls. reut.rs/RKUihZ

— Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) September 8, 2012

Here are the full results of our Ohio poll which finds Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney 50-45: publicpolicypolling.com/main/2012/09/o…

— PublicPolicyPolling (@ppppolls) September 10, 2012

Here's a statistic that seems like it might be good news:

Romney up 10 in North Carolina as long as he gets 30% of the black vote: nccivitas.org/wp-content/upl…

— PublicPolicyPolling (@ppppolls) September 10, 2012

Except that according to the WSJ/NBC poll Romney has ZERO percentage of the black vote, and I assume that goes for North Carolina as well. I think NC is probably neck and neck right now, but then it is a traditionally red state and Obama doesn't need it to win. He really needs Ohio, and he seems to have that state in the bag as of now.

Due to falling polls, the Obama bounce, and fundraising that isn't helping Romney at all, the Republicans are forming a circular firing squad. Or maybe we should say they are forming a circle with Romney in the middle as the target. They have to blame someone for the failure of the Republican Convention, the double-disaster of Paul Ryan and Todd Akin, and the basic fact that people are rejecting the far-right scary Teapublican Platform.

Here's Joe Scarborough from MSNBC talking about Obama's speech at the DNC, via Huffington Post.

"We were 10 minutes into the president's speech last night... and I just sat there thinking, 'game, set, match, the Democrats have trounced the Republicans in these conventions,'"

Then via Examiner he called Mitt Romney a "flawed candidate."

Well, duh! I think we knew that back during the primaries. Cry me a river.

Here's Mark Helprin in a Time Magazine piece called "The Troubles" painting a dark and dire future for Mitt as the campaign crashes and burns. I love it when the Republicans finally use apocalypic four-horsman language to describe what their chosen candidate is doing to their own party, instead of directing it at Obama and Main Street.

Romney still has the debates, millions and millions of dollars in TV ads and weeks of campaigning to try to turn things around. But he faces the immediate threat of both quiet and loud we-told-you-so’s from Republicans who last year had the very worries they fear are being manifested now. Romney is an awkward, unlikable candidate....

 . . . he is in danger of living out the Haley Barbour dictum: in politics, bad gets worse. Super PACs might start shifting their money from the presidential race to save the House majority and look to pick up Senate seats. Romney’s own fundraising will take a hit. Stories about Romney pulling up stakes in Michigan and other ostensible battlegrounds will add to the death stench. And there will be an avalanche of suggestions and second-guessing from pundits and Republican operatives and politicians about Romney’s tactics, strategy and staff.

Excuse me while I have a good laugh, LOLOLOL. *snort*

And Halperin is correct ~ people inside the Romney camp are getting worked up - as in "freaking out" - about the poll numbers. Maybe it's that "death stench" floating in the air:

According to Business Insider:

In a new campaign memo circulated this morning, Romney's pollster Neil Newhouse warns people not to get "too worked up about the latest polling."

"While some voters will feel a bit of a sugar-high from the conventions, the basic structure of the race has not changed significantly," Newhouse writes. "The reality of the Obama economy will reassert itself as the ultimate downfall of the Obama Presidency, and Mitt Romney will win this race."

The author of that article, Grace Wyler, makes a good point:

"The bottom line is that people don't send "don't freak out" memos unless people are in fact freaking out."

Yes, compare that email memo to the happy tone of Obama's fundraising email, and you can see which camp is on top right now.

Laughing again. I wonder if this is the week when the first "insider"from the Romney campaign jumps ship to save his or her own career?

It might be a good week to keep a bowl of popcorn ready.

Harry Reid Responds to Republican "Henchmen" and "Cowards"

Harry Reid has responded to all the Republican accusations on the Sunday Talk Shows, as posted here: Journalism Derp and Question Fail

Give 'em Hell, Harry Reid!!!

From Politico

“They’re a bunch of cowards and they’re avoiding the issue,” said David Krone, Reid’s chief of staff, in an interview with POLITICO on Sunday night. “Lindsey Graham, Reince Priebus - they’re a bunch of henchmen for Romney and they’re all reading off the same talking points. They couldn’t hold a candle to Harry Reid.”

Krone added: “What Harry Reid said is the fact of what he was told. To turn it around, all their childish rants this weekend about calling Reid a ‘liar’ and all that, it just shows you how scared they are that Harry Reid was telling the truth.”

Via Talking Points Memo

Late Sunday morning, Reid’s spokesman Adam Jentleson responded via email to TPM.

“Republicans can try to cover up for Mitt Romney’s stonewalling all they want, but this issue is not going away until Romney decides to be straight with the American people and release his tax returns. It is sad that the most secretive candidate since Richard Nixon has forced his party to defend his decision to hide the truth about his tax returns. As Senator Reid has said, an extremely credible source informed him that Mitt Romney did not pay taxes for ten years. From the one year of returns Romney has released, we’ve seen that he uses secret offshore accounts in places like Switzerland and the Cayman Islands to avoid paying U.S. taxes. It’s clear Mitt Romney is hiding something, and the only way for him to clear this up is to be straight with the American people and release his tax returns.”

Some stories are so juicy that you wish they would never end. I almost hope Mitt Romney never releases his income taxes so that Harry Reid can keep the Republicans in an uproar about this, Sunday after Sunday, till the election, LOL.

Sunday Talk Shows ~ Journalism Derp and Question Fail

The Sunday talk shows were horrible this week, with even seasoned journalists lined up in bipartisan support with Republican pundits, trying to save Mitt Romney from the dastardly clutches of the evil Harry Reid, who dared ask the national candidate to do something every other politician or federal employee has to do and release his taxes.

Both Bob Schieffer and George Will said Reid is practicing McCarthyism. Hmmm, I don't remember them ever saying anything about Michele Bachmann and her witch hunts.

. . . isn't this kind of like Joe McCarthy back in the era when he said, "I have here in my hand the names of 400 people in the state department who are communist?" It turned out he didn't and he was saying the way to prove that they're not is for them to come forward here. I mean, asking somebody to come forward to, to just because there's been an unsubstantiated charge, that's a little thin to me.
~ Bob Schieffer on CBS Face the Nation

Look, in 1950, Joe McCarthy went to West Virginia, didn’t know what to tell to the Women’s Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, so he said I have in my hand a list of 205, we think that are — 205 communists in the State Department. Didn’t have a list. Harry Reid doesn’t have any evidence either. This is McCarthyism from the desert (ph).
~ Republican pundit, George Will on This Week

Nice to see you both got your talking points straight, fellas. Does Reince Priebus email them to you directly? And speaking of our favorite Republican leader (not), here is Priebus on ABC This Week calling Reid a "dirty liar" and saying he hasn't released his taxes either. Oh yeah?

RNC Chairman, Reince Priebus: And as far as Harry Reid is concerned, listen, I know you might want to go down that road, I’m not going to respond to a dirty liar who hasn’t filed a single page of tax returns himself. Complains about people with money but lives in the Ritz Carlton here down the street. So if that’s on the agenda, I’m not going to respond to that. This is just a made-up issue. And the fact that we’re going to spend any time talking about it is ridiculous.
George Stephanopolous: Mr. Chairman, you say you're not going to respond, but you just called him a 'dirty liar.' You stand by that, you think Harry Reid is a dirty liar?”
Priebus: I just said it.
ABC News This Week with George Stephanopolous

Most Democrats were probably screaming the obvious point at the TV, which Stephanopoulos ignored - it's easy to prove whether Reid has released his taxes as a member of the Senate. Why didn't George just say that? And you know what? Reid has released his taxes for many years.  Going back to 1995. Yet George Stephanopoulos didn't question that outrageous statement at all, even after cuckoo Ann Coulter repeated the lie, and she was babbling like an idiot.

Must be a good gig to get on these shows and lie your brains out week after week with no "journalist" to call you on it. Coulter also tried to deflect the criticism back on Obama and even on Bill Clinton for some unknown reason, but all of it still begs the question of why Coulter  is so afraid for Romney to release his taxes. She might as well have been talking to herself for all the questioning anyone gave her. She even implied that people are asking for Romney's taxes because he is a Mormon, which is absurd because Harry Reid is also a Mormon, LOL. Derp de Derp.

He absolutely should not release any more tax returns. He has released two years. Bill Clinton wouldn’t release his medical records. You know, people kind of wondered about that. We know after the JFK presidency, you could have an issue with a drug addict president, but he just dug in his heels. We have two years on Romney. You know perfectly well, the media, this is Obama’s modus operandi, and unfortunately Romney isn’t divorced. Hopefully, his vice presidential candidate won’t be divorced. It’s always dirty politics. You remember when Romney was — or Obama was running against McCain and Sarah Palin. What did we get? False rumors of a McCain affair. We had investigations into the Palin marriage, claims they were getting divorced. They have nothing on this Mormon, and they want his tax records. If they releases 10 years, they’ll demand 20 years.
~ Ann Coulter on This Week

Everyone expects Coulter to sound like a partisan wingnut, but what about a so-called "Senior White House Reporter," in this case Jonathan Karl of ABC News? What's his excuse for protecting Romney? And how does this guy "know" that Mitt Romney paid any taxes at all? He doesn't know!

It's one of the most outrageous charges that I've ever seen actually made on the Senate Floor. . . . When Harry Reid takes to the floor of the Senate and makes this outrageous charge that has absolutely no evidence. . . I mean Mitt Romney paid $3 million in the one tax return we've seen. He's paid taxes, so it's a completely false charge.
But Reid loves this. The Democrats love this. Because no matter how he digs in, no matter how much he gets attacked, you know - here or by John Stewart - or anywhere else, it gets the story out there again and again.
And I tell you - Mitt Romney played right into this by telling Harry Reid to 'put up or shut up,' so it becomes this back-and-forth. Instead, he should have laughed it off, he should have made a joke about Harry Reid's imaginary friend, and moved on . . .
Jonathan Karl, ABC senior White House reporter, on This Week

Over on CNN, Senator Lindsey Graham, R-SC, also called Reid a liar, and "journalist" Candy Crowley was just too busy and in a hurry to ask any follow-up questions. *snort* What a joke! These alleged "interviews" are like little commericials for the Mitt Romney campaign.

Senator Lindsey Graham: I think he's lying about his statement about knowing something about Romney's . . .
Candy Crowley of CNN: That's pretty stiff. You think the leader of the Senate is lying?
Lindsey Graham: I really do - I think he's created an issue here, I think he's making things up. And at a time when the country is just about to fall apart.
. . . I just can't believe that the Senate Majority Leader would take the floor twice, make accusations that are absolutely unfounded in my view, and quite frankly making things up. . . .
Candy Crowley: Senator Lindsey Graham, I wish we had more time. I've got to run. Thank you so much.
From CNN's State of the Union with Candy Crowley

Of course, CNN as usual had "two sides" so everything could cancel out evenly, and at least Robert Gibbs got in a few lines of truth:

We can put all of this to rest tomorrow. Mitt Romney can go to Kinko’s, he can photocopy his tax returns, they’re several hundred pages. He can hand them out to people like CNN, he can hand them out to reporters all over the country, and you know what? We wouldn’t talk about this tomorrow.
~ Robert Gibbs on CNN, quoted by Politico

Indeed! Come on Mitt - show us the taxes!!!

Romney's Returns - the Ugly Truth

The Romney camp is holding firm that he has "already released" all the tax returns he is going to release, meaning the single return from 2010. Considering the fact that everyone from George Will to Bill Kristol to Rahm Emanuel are calling Romney out on his taxes, it's almost unbelievable that they continue to stonewall.

Romney appeared on Fox and Friends this morning, sounding as if he is being nibbled to death by geese, LOL.

Via Think Progress

ROMNEY: The Obama people keep on wanting more and more and more. More things to pick through, more things for their opposition research to try make a mountain out of and to distort and to be dishonest about. We’re going to put out two years of tax returns.

Esquire has a great spin on why Romney is holding back:

Contempt for "the Help"

It is helpful always to remind yourself that, in the mind of Willard Romney, there are only two kinds of people — himself and his family, and The Help. Throughout his career, and especially throughout his brief political career, Romney has treated The Help with a kind of lordly disdain. . . .
. . . The Help has no right to go pawing through the family books, giggling at the obvious loopholes and tax dodges, running amok through all the tax shelters, and probably getting their chocolate-y fingerprints all over the pages of the Romney family ledger. And, certainly, those members of The Help in the employ of the president of the United States, who is also part of The Help, have no right to use the nearly comically ostentatious wealth of the Romney as some sort of scrimey political weapon. He does not have to answer to The Help. I mean, jeepers, he's running for office.
This isn't stubbornness. That's often an acquired trait. What this is, fundamentally, is contempt. Contempt for the process, and contempt for the people who make their living in that process, and contempt for the people whose lives depend on that process.

Good job by MSNBC's Luke Russert pushing Romney's surrogate, Gail Gitchco, to clear up the tax mess this morning. Epic fail on her part as "communications director." They just don't get it. Someone is eventually going to leak these tax returns, so it would be better if they just got it over with now. But when has the Romney camp ever been that bright? Never.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Mitt's Sunday Show Train Wreck

It reminds me of the song "Sunday Will Never Be the Same." Even pundits on the Right know that their candidate is a disaster, and for some reason the Romney camp still can't get all their excuses straight. It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion, and yet we can't look away. And I have to admit that I'm enjoying every minute of it, LOL.

I especially love the new "retroactively retired" meme started by Ed Gillespie. If you want to know what I mean, check out my post on Snark Amendment


. . . feel the embers die . . .




Romney Campaign Surrogate Ed Gillespie on CNN: "He took a leave of absence and in fact ended up not going back at all, and retired retroactively to February of 1999."



Republican George Will on ABC's This Week: Mitt Romney's losing it, and he's losing in a big way. If something is going to come out like this, get it out in a hurry. I do not know why, given that Mr. Romney knew the day that McCain lost in 2008 that he was going to run for President again, that he didn't get all of this out and tidy up some of his offshore accounts and all the rest. He's done nothing illegal, nothing unseemly, nothing improper, but lots that's impolitic. And he's now in the politics business.
. . . The Republicans have now nominated someone from the financial sector at a time when the financial sector has a bad odor. Hardly a day goes by - the LIBOR scandal, TARP . . . all of this conditions the atmosphere in which this is occurring.





Karl Rove Via Daily Caller 

“Two different attacks — one is he didn’t take a leave of absence to run the Olympics Committee and run Bain,” Rove said. “Total baloney — even The Washington Post said this was baloney. The fact of the matter is, look, when Steve Jobs was the CEO of Apple and took a leave of absence for medical reasons, nobody continued to say, ‘Well you are the guy who made the day-to-day decisions.’ Romney was busy running the Olympics and they were ready for this particular attack. I agree with Joe. They were not ready for the regular attack on the six companies that Obama raised [saying] these companies all outsource jobs. It took them a week to respond and say four of these companies didn’t outsource jobs, move a single job overseas. They created jobs at home and two companies were brought by Bain after Romney left.”

Rove added that, if the Obama campaign continues this line of attack, it could ultimately hurt the president.

“But the fact of the matter is, if the president makes the charge … [the] outrageous charge that Mitt Romney is guilty of felonious activity and committed a felony — that is it a big mistake. Remember who is up for grabs in this election: independent voters,” Rove said. “They were drawn to Obama in 2008 because he was going to change politics and would raise and elevate the discourse. This is gutter politics of the worst Chicago sort.”

Chicago mayor and Obama campaign surrogate Rahm Emanuel: Stephanie Cutter cited the law, and it's very clear. Either the filing with the SEC is accurate and his personal financial disclosure is not honest. Or that's honest and the SEC isn't. But both can't be accurate depicting a time when he said he was doing one thing or another.
George Stephanopoulos: He says it was just a formality during the time he was untangling his involvement with Bain.
Rahm Emanuel: George, he has made Bain Capital his calling-card for the Presidency. And when you look at it, it doesn't measure up to what he claims. And number two, on both of those filings, one is accurate and one isn't. And they both have consequences when one is not accurate. And that is what she (Cutter) stated.
And the other thing is, give it up about Stephanie. Don't worry about that. What are you going to do when the Chinese leader says something to you or Putin says something to you? Are you gonna whine as your way? You cannot do that? As Mitt Romney said once to his own colleagues, stop whining! I'd give him his own advice. Stop whining and if you want to claim Bain Capital as your calling card to the White House then defend what happened to Bain Capital. And what happened to those jobs that went overseas, those jobs that were actually cut and eliminated, and those companies that went into bankruptcy.
. . .
Stephanopoulos: The campaign has been pushing hard for Mitt Romney to release more of his tax returns. He says the public has everything they need to know to understand his finances, and we do know that Mitt Romney made a lot of money, we know he paid a relatively low tax rate. What more will the returns tell us that we don't know?
Rahm Emanuel: . . . Mitt Romnney's own father said you shouldn't release one year, and in my view he's released one year. . . . transparency and what that says. Okay, to the McCain campaign he released 23 years. And he's telling the American People, okay, I'm not going to give you what I gave John McCain's people in 2008. And when he gave them 23 years, McCain's people looked at it and said let's go with Sarah Palin. So whatever's in there is far worse than just the first year.
The Romney campaign isn't stupid. They've decided it's better to get attacked on lack of transparency, lack of accountability to the American people versus telling you what's in those taxes. They're not enjoying this.
Stephanopoulos: So what do you think is in there?
Rahm Emanuel: He can clear this up, just make it public. . . . he paid 14%, just about half of what a middle-class family pays. Second, we've learned in just one year about The Caymans, about the Bahamas, about Luxembourg, and about Switzerland, all about where his different accounts are. His tax filing looks more like the Olympic village than like a middle-class family. Third, the next four years the President of the United States is going to have tax reform. And you're going to have to debate it with Congress and shape it. And unless you have his taxes, and I've seen this in the Oval Office, George, there's going to be times when a President has to make trade-offs and choices, and will it be the middle class family trying to send their kid to college, or will it be to save the loophole in the Cayman Islands? . . .
He has fully used what is legal in the tax code, and that's the problem with the tax code.




From Face The Nation with Bob Schieffer on CBS

Obama spokesperson Stephanie Cutter said Romney's departure date matters, because his experience at Bain is "his sole rationale for being president."

"If you're signing an SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] document with your own signature that you're the president, C.E.O., chairman of the board and 100 percent owner of a company, in what world are you living in that you're not in charge?" Cutter said Sunday on "Face the Nation."

"If he wasn't the head of it, who was?" she asked.
Romney adviser Kevin Madden said what Romney has also said: that he left the company in 1999.

"The reason there is a document in 2002 that had his signature is, during that transition from 1999 to 2002 where there was transfer of ownership to the new partners of Bain, that there was a duty to sign those documents. But every single - even a bipartisan commission indicated Governor Romney left Bain in 1999," Madden told host Bob Schieffer. "This has been established, yet the Obama campaign, the president himself, continued to pursue these inaccurate statements, and I think it's to the detriment of the public right now."

"It doesn't make any difference that we're arguing the semantics of when Mitt Romney left Bain Capital," Cutter said. "He has put for his sole rationale being president his experience at Bain Capital, and that every decision he'll make as president should be seen through the lens of his experience with Bain Capital, and we're just getting a taste of that, whether it's investing in companies . . . and those investments happened before 1999 when Mitt Romney was, in his words, 'in charge' that became the pioneers in outsourcing, or whether it's investing in companies, loading them up with [debt] and pushing them into bankruptcy and yet you walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars but you're leaving workers without jobs, pensions, health care and companies decimated."

Cutter said Romney's responsibilities at Bain - and when those responsibilities began and ended - are legitimate discussions to have particularly, she said, because the presumptive GOP nominee "put it on the table.

"And the simple point is, if you're telling the SEC you're in charge but you're telling the American people that you bear no responsibility, one of those things is not true," she added.

Referring to Cutter's comment made to reporters last week in which she said an executive misrepresenting his role on SEC documents is a felony, Madden said her suggestion that Romney committed a felony is "troubling."

"First, I think it is very troubling that the president would direct this campaign to label someone like Governor Romney, who is a very good and honorable man, as a felon," Madden said.

Cutter said the Obama campaign is not going to apologize for the comment.

"Just a few months ago in the primary, Mitt Romney said to his opponents, who were crushing him at the time, 'Stop whining.' And that's a good message for the Romney campaign," Cutter said. "Instead of whining about what the Obama campaign is saying, just put the facts out there and let people decide, rather than trying to hide them.

"The tax returns is exactly just about that," Cutter said, pointing to Romney's refusal to release tax returns from before 2010. "If he didn't gain any tax advantages from having investments in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and a Swiss bank account, then show us. Show the American people. What are you hiding?"

Madden said Romney has gone "above and beyond" by releasing his 2010 returns and 2011 estimated taxes.

"Governor Romney has dutifully and according to the law filed all of his financial disclosure requirements. He's gone above the law," he said.

Cutter, however, said Romney's refusal to release his tax returns is an issue of transparency. "This discussion is about transparency and showing the American people what your perspective is and what judgments you're going to make as president," she said.

Chris Matthews Goes Rant-tastic on "Dunce Cap" Republicans

Well actually, he first said that the Democrats and Obama have been "pissant" on the economy, but when a Republican pundit retorted that people want to wait on the private sector to save them, it got his dander up and he lashed back, talking about the fact that Romney wants to continue the same "dunce cap economics" as George Bush, LOL.

(Note: This is not a complete transcript - I did it from the video below and quotes I saw on Twitter, so I will fix it later if it is incorrect)

Matthews:(Obama)...has got to be aggresive. Stop this nickel and dime...a couple of bucks for the teachers, a couple of bucks for the firefighters. I'm going to reduce the payroll tax. This is pissant! You can't get reelected with tactics. He needs a strategy, which is 'we're different than the Republicans. They're basically Free Marketers who sit around and wait for business to deliver this country from hell, and business has let us down.' He's gotta say it.

. . . Here's the idiot Republican argument. You just got a bigger tax cut than Bush gave them, by the way.
. . . You know where they're investing their money? They're investing it in campaigns against the President. They're running ads against the President by the billions of dollars....Who do you think is giving to the Republicans? It's the business guys....

Pundit: Three years after the recovery began--

Matthews: What recovery? There wasn't any Bush 'recovery.' . . . There's only an Obama recovery.

Pundit: You're saying the way to keep the economy going is by more government spending--

Matthews: Investment. Investment. Investment. Have you been to Europe lately? Have you been to Asia? Have you seen how they have trains that go 300 mph while . . . know what we have? We have Amtrak. . . . and beat-up road systems.
. . . Can I make a point here? I feel like I'm teaching first grade. . . . Business and the Republican Party are the same thing. Just like Labor and the Democrats . . .

Pundit: That's crazy.

Matthews: Business wants Republicans to win this election. . . . They're spending tons of money to have that happen. I don't know how you can deny the obvious?

Pundit: Where were they in 2008?

Matthews: They had a weak candidate they didn't believe in. Business supported Barack Obama? Yeah, right.

. . . the same dunce cap leadership that took us into Iraq is the same dunce cap thinking that took us into the financial crisis. . . Dunce-cap policy of deregulation...and tax cuts for the rich.

And from GottaLaff on Political Carnival:

Matthews: “This is the same dunce cap leadership as W! The same dunce cap leadership and policy as W! Deregulation, tax cuts… doing the same thing that got us there [a bad economy]! Romney thinks W was smart! Jesus!!“