GOP Halts Voter Sign-Up in 5 States

Because of a shady consulting firm now under investigation in Florida, Republicans have stopped registering voters in five swing states. This is almost too good to be true - Rachel Maddow called it "the reverse of an October surprise" because it is such a gift to the Democrats.



Rachel Maddow made the point that usually each party would remain in a state until the deadlines, which you can see from the graphic below are a week away in some cases. So this is premature, uh, pull out . . . ahem . . . for the Repubs.





NBC News: RNC Cuts Ties with Firm Over Voter Fraud

Out of 304 Republican voter registration forms recently dropped off by a Strategic Allied employee at a small "satellite office" of the Palm Beach elections office, 106 were flagged as potentially fraudulent-- including "a lot" with "similar looking" signatures and others with apparently phony addresses, Susan Bucher, the Palm Beach elections supervisor, said in an interview.

Among the suspect home addresses were those that matched a gas station in Miami, a medical building in Boca Raton and a Land Rover automotive dealership in Palm Beach County, she told NBC News. Bucher said she called in the political director for the Palm Beach Republican Party and the GOP official agreed that the registration forms were a problem. She then took the forms to the Palm Beach County State's Attorney's office on Monday and requested the investigation.

In a statement issued Tuesday night, Mike Grissom, executive director of the Florida Republican Party, said: "When we learned today about the instances of potential voter registration fraud that occurred in Palm Beach County, we immediately informed the Republican National Committee that we were terminating the contract with the voter registration vendor we hired at their request because there is no place for voter registration fraud in Florida."

From the first video below, the discussion between Chuck Todd and Michael Isikoff:  

Chuck Todd: Mike, you can't help but sit there, Republican Party has been pushing this line, Acorn, all of this, and the only evidence this year comes from their side.  

Michael Isikoff: Exactly. I should say I spoke last night to Nathan Sproul, he says he is the victim. He says he has strict quality control measures. . . . He is furious at the Florida Republican Party for suggesting his firm was involved in voter fraud. You could see lawsuits here which would make it even messier.

Retro Romney in Retroactive Mode

Hmmm, just what can we believe about Romney? Not much. He changes from year to year, day to day. Even if you believe him today, just wait a few hours.

The Voting Nightmare in Pennsylvania

This story keeps getting worse. I'm losing sleep over it because the whole thing is diabolical and shouldn't be happening in the United States.

The Voter ID Law was upheld yesterday by a Republican judge who saw no harm in disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of voters. The next thing to do is appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court which is deadlocked 3-3, Dem against Republicans. Time is of the essence, but there just seems to be no answer.

CNN Political Ticker Report:

Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania Judge Robert Simpson issued an order on Wednesday saying there was no constitutional reason to stop the law from taking effect. In his opinion, however, he wrote that he had "sympathy" for the witnesses.

The coalition, however, seeks to appeal the law in the State Supreme Court, requesting that the court hear the case on an expedited basis because the election is less than three months away.

The ACLU of Pennsylvania, the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia, the Advancement Project and the law firm of Arnold & Porter filed the appeal jointly.

"The fight in this case could go on after the election. Judge Simpson's ruling was on the request for a preliminary injunction. There could still be a hearing for a final injunction," said the ACLU of Pennsylvania in a statement.

On the same day as that ruling - no coincide - the State of Penn decided to drop a plan to allow online absentee voter registration.

Talking Points Memo

A spokesman for the Department of State said county elections officials told the agency that implementing the new online initiatives as well as voter ID requirements was too much to handle less than three months before the election.

*sigh* I've lived half a century and I just can't believe this is happening in every presidential election.

"You Better Stop, Hey, What's that Sound?
Everybody Look What's Going Down."

Romney's Bain Gave Italy the Business

I wrote earlier today about the economic dangers in the Eurozone, and the negativity of Italy's Prime Minister Mario Monti, who told Der Spiegel that Europe is going through a "psychological dissolution." Wow - that's a strong statement. But some of their problems stem back to the 1990s, when the Italian government was selling off assets to raise money to enter the Eurozone. One of those investors was Mitt Romney's Bain Capital.

Bloomberg has the story about Bain buying up Italy's telephone directory, then selling it back to them a few years later at a huge profit. This is a good insight into the way Romney did business - and yes, he was involved through his offices in Boston at the same time that he supposedly wasn't the CEO while working on the Utah Olympics.

Oh, and the profits? Most were hidden in the tax-shelter country of Luxembourg.

This past history in Europe is not as easily etch-a-sketched as Mitt's Olympic excesses or his absent tax returns in the U.S.

Bloomberg: Romney Persona Non Grata in Italy

Bain Capital, under Romney as chief executive officer, made about $1 billion in a leveraged buyout 12 years ago that remains controversial in Italy to this day. Bain was part of a group that bought a telephone-directory company from the Italian government and then sold it about two years later, at the peak of the technology bubble, for about 25 times what it paid.

. . . Romney himself probably earned more than $50 million, and possibly as much as $60 million from the Italian directory sale of Seat Pagine Gialle SpA, according to a person familiar with the matter. The deal turned into one of the biggest windfalls of his tenure.

. . . When Bain sold the directory business in 2000, Romney, while still holding the title of CEO, was in charge of preparations for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Romney has contended that he gave up management control of Bain in February 1999 to run the games.

“Mitt Romney and Bain played the role of successful financial speculators at the peril of the Italian government and the small stock-market investors who were burned by the sharp decline in Seat (PG) shares,” said Giovanni Pons, a journalist for la Repubblica and co-author of “L’Affare Telecom” (2002), which recounts details of the Bain deal.

. . . Bain moved profits through a series of subsidiaries in Luxembourg, a country that makes it easy to get cash out without paying taxes, according to corporate filings. Corporate records in Luxembourg show Bain carried out technical steps for a tax- free repatriation of profits to the U.S.

Obama Ad Tackles Romney's Offshore Accounts

This new ad is awesome! How many ordinary Americans know someone with offshore accounts? I would wager about One Percent of us do. ;) And in case you aren't familiar with the Cayman Islands, I've thrown in a video about them. "Service is excellent."

Romney Exposed by Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair has a bombshell investigative article on Mitt Romney's holdings in the Caymen Islands and elsewhere, as well as some explanation of how Bain Capital preyed on companies in order to raid their pension funds, which they would then roll into other sketchy investments.

Even though the reporters say several times that Bain isn't doing anything exactly illegal, I found the article quite disturbing. It's a must read!

Vanity Fair: Where the Money Lives

Something is fishy about all this - no pun intended. And I might add I normally wouldn't care, and most people in our country wouldn't care at all since we expect rich people to lie about their assets and hide them in shelters, but Mitt Romney is running for President! We have to hold him to some kind of standard. Remember how Hillary Clinton was dragged through the mud just for earning money on a legitimate investment? That was nothing compared to this.

The two paragraphs below were eye-opening. When is a "blind trust" not so blind?

Page One:

. . . there is a Bermuda-based entity called Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., which has been described in securities filings as “a Bermuda corporation wholly owned by W. Mitt Romney.” It could be that Sankaty is an old vehicle with little importance, but Romney appears to have treated it rather carefully. He set it up in 1997, then transferred it to his wife’s newly created blind trust on January 1, 2003, the day before he was inaugurated as Massachusetts’s governor. The director and president of this entity is R. Bradford Malt, the trustee of the blind trust and Romney’s personal lawyer. Romney failed to list this entity on several financial disclosures, even though such a closely held entity would not qualify as an “excepted investment fund” that would not need to be on his disclosure forms. He finally included it on his 2010 tax return. Even after examining that return, we have no idea what is in this company, but it could be valuable, meaning that it is possible Romney’s wealth is even greater than previous estimates.

Page Two:

. . . All the assets on Mitt’s financial disclosures are in blind trusts or retirement accounts held by him and Ann. Blind trusts are designed to avoid conflicts of interest for those in public office by having politicians’ assets managed by independent trustees. The Romneys’ blind trust was created when Mitt was elected governor of Massachusetts. Curiously, the Romneys appointed Bradford Malt as their trustee. It’s certainly true that under Malt the trusts don’t appear to be as blind as they might be: for instance, in 2010 the Romneys invested $10 million in the start-up of the Solamere Founders Fund, co-founded by their eldest son, Tagg, and Spencer Zwick, Romney’s onetime top campaign fund-raiser; Solamere is now in the Ann Romney blind trust. Malt has said he invested in Solamere without consulting Mitt or Ann and explained he liked Solamere because of its diversified approach and because he knew the founders and had confidence in them