Daily Kos

A week ago, it was RNC Chair Reince Preibus saying that the 63 percent of voters who want to properly vet Mitt Romney's finances are "ridiculous."

Today, Romney called those very same 63 percent of voters "small minded."

The fascination with taxes I've paid I find to be very small-minded [...]

Romney is running for president of the United States, not his country club. Rather than whine like a toddler, he needs to man up and deliver to the American people the documentation they demand in order to make an informed hiring decision. If he didn't want to suffer a proper vetting, he shouldn't have run. No one would've missed him. (And I really mean, no one.)

Insulting the voters isn't helping his case.

But then again, his entire campaign is now focused on his party's 37 percent fringe, so perhaps he thinks it is.

So some pundits say we should just trust Mitt. We know that he really did pay at least 13 percent in taxes every year, because he said so. Forget about the fact that 13 percent is a puny tax rate for a guy making $20 million a year, I can't think of a single reason why we should trust him.

Just today, USA Today reports this about Mitt Romney's running mate:

While being vetted by Mitt Romney's campaign, GOP vice presidential hopeful Rep. Paul Ryan amended two years of his financial disclosure statements to add an income-producing trust worth between $1 million and $5 million that he had previously neglected to report.

Ooops. He "forgot" to disclose more than a million dollars. Trust him, it was just a little mistake. Trivial. Like when Mitt Romney omitted a $3 million Swiss bank account from his own disclosure forms. His campaign said it was a "trivial" error and that they were making "some minor technical amendments" to correct the snafu.

So I don't think any of us are going to be taking Mitt Romney at his word anytime soon. Show us, don't tell us. If it's important enough to claim it, then it's important enough to prove it. We're waiting.

Dana Milbank:

Forgive me, but I’m not prepared to join this walk down Great Umbrage Street just yet. Yes, it’s ugly out there. But is this worse than four years ago, when Obama was accused by the GOP vice presidential nominee of “palling around with terrorists”? Or eight years ago, when Democratic nominee John Kerry was accused of falsifying his Vietnam War record?

What’s different this time is that the Democrats are employing the same harsh tactics that have been used against them for so long, with so much success. They have ceased their traditional response of assuming the fetal position when attacked, and Obama’s campaign is giving as good as it gets — and then some.

Bullies don't like it when their targets punch back, which is why the GOP is apoplectic right now. I mean, their reaction to Biden's "chains" thing is comically hysterical. And Mitt Romney is genuinely unhinged.

I'm not sure why Republicans think that crying and whining about the big bad meanie Democrats is such a political winner. It never worked when Democrats tried it (just ask John Kerry).

Of course, the media punditry getting the vapors was nowhere to be found when Romney systematically mowed down his primary opposition. Or, for that matter, for decades of GOP smear campaigning. It wasn't the media who called out Lee Atwater for his "naked cruelty" against Michael Dukakis in 1988. It was Lee Atwater himself.

But let them kvetch on their fainting couches. We finally have Democrats who have learned from a long line of Republican no-holds-barred strategists—from Atwater to Karl Rove. And if there's one thing that bullies hate most, it's being on the receiving end of their own tactics.

• Today's comic is What strange and disorienting alternative universe has Louis entered? by Ruben Bolling:
  
  
• Good:
  

  Conservative activist James O'Keefe and his associate Hanna Giles will face a lawsuit from a former ACORN employee featured prominently in their 2009 undercover sting video, after a federal judge refused to throw out the case.

  According to Courthouse News, U.S. District Judge M. James Lorenz decided last week that a breach of privacy claim from Juan Carlos Vera, a one-time employee of ACORN's office in National City, Calif., had merit.

• Not good:
  

  A Taliban spokesman says fighters for the group shot down a NATO helicopter in the country's south. The international coalition says 11 people were killed in the crash, including seven international service members, but did not identify the cause.

  Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi says the helicopter was shot down in Kandahar province Thursday morning.

• So that's what Mussolini was smoking.
• Think United Airlines will try to make up for this with a free bag of peanuts?
  

  Should you let your child fly alone?

  Parents may wonder after a couple alleged this week that their 10-year-old daughter flying to summer camp was stranded at one of the world's busiest airports after United Airlines failed to keep track of her.

  The girl ultimately made it to camp safely. But the incident highlights some of the risks of children flying alone, including the a little-known industry practice of hiring outside companies to escort kids from gate to gate.

• How many points for C-H-E-A-T-I-N-G?
  

  A cheating scandal has caused a stir at the National Scrabble Championship where players were competing for a $10,000 prize.

  A young, unidentified male player was booted from the competition after he was caught hiding blank tiles, the coveted tiles that can stand-in for any letter in the word game.

  "One of the better young Scrabble players in the country was observed taking two blank tiles, which are the most valuable in Scrabble, and tried to hide them so he could play them at some point in the game," National Scrabble Association executive director John Williams Jr. told ABCNews.com today.

• Assembly required?
  

  Best known for its budget flat-pack furniture, Scandinavian retailer Ikea is planning to launch a chain of budget hotels in Europe.

  The property division of Inter Ikea — the company that owns the Ikea intellectual property rights — is planning hotels in 100 locations across Europe. The first two hotels are expected to open in Germany in 2014. Other locations earmarked for hotels include Belgium, the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, Britain and Poland.

  "We're aiming to spread all over Europe," said Harald Muller, a Brussels-based business development manager of Inter Ikea's property division.

  Although the chain won't use Ikea's name or furniture, it will engrain the Ikea philosophy of "good quality at a reasonable price," he said.

  No word yet on whether the Bibles next to the bed will be in Swedish hieroglyphics.
• Everything about Mitt Romney is awful. Even his laugh:
  

  I'm sure that at times Romney laughs with genuine mirth, but you know the laugh I'm talking about. It's the one he delivers when he gets asked a question he doesn't want to answer, or is confronted with a demand to explain a flip-flop or a lie. It's the phoniest laugh in the world, the one New York Times reporter Ashley Parker wrote 'sounds like someone stating the sounds of laughter, a staccato Ha. Ha. Ha.' Everything Mitt Romney is as a candidate is distilled within that laugh -- his insincerity, his ambition, his awkwardness, and above all his fear. When Mitt laughs that way, he is not amused. He is terrified. Because he knows that what he's saying is utter baloney, and he knows that we know it.

• Is it wrong to want to have whatever illness is treated with chocolate? Nah.

All right, now this is just getting silly:

Romney’s answer won’t satisfy everyone. (More on that below.) But, in asserting that for the last decade he has never paid less than a 13 percent tax rate, Romney is calling Democrats’ bluff and forcing them now to call him a liar if they argue that he paid any less. In short: The burden of proof has now shifted from Romney to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Democratic party more broadly.

I'm not sure how Mitt Romney pulling a number out of his (censored) and saying that settles the argument counts as "calling the Democrat's bluff." I'm also intrigued by the notion that by claiming he paid, golly gee, at least the pitifully low figure of 13 percent as taxes somehow now makes Mitt Romney look like the good guy. Thirteen percent counting what? For how many years? On how many millions of dollars, and how can the rest of us get in on such a sweet, sweet tax rate?

Narrowly, however, I'm intrigued by this whole burden of proof argument. Mitt Romney has, I might gently point out, not "proved" a damn thing. He has asserted something, without evidence. He has asserted it without evidence because he is explicitly withholding the evidence, and the evidence being withheld—tax returns—is something that other politicians are regularly expected to provide. Even Mitt's own father recognized the inherent dishonesty of not doing such a thing, so I really don't think the Democrats are in a real bind if they think that Mitt Romney asserting something without evidence is not, in fact, the automatic end of the story. I know of no literary mystery that ends with the suspect saying "I did not do that," upon which all the policemen and detectives go on their merry way, considering the case closed. I realize that this is an argument about a rich person's money, and as the MF Global Goldman Sachs and countless other cases have demonstrated in the last few years, the entire planet is supposed to bend down on one knee when a rich person makes an assertion about the provenance of their money or what might they might have accidentally done with yours, but still. Really?

Mitt Romney has so much money in his retirement account alone that outside observers struggle to come up with any way someone could even do such a thing without extraordinary luck or considerably more ordinary dishonesty. Here's a guy with bank accounts in all the usual places used by wealthy people to hide their money where Uncle Sam won't know about it or can't do anything about it. We've already caught him lying through his teeth, repeatedly, about when he supposedly even "left" the company that made him so very wealthy. Being so Broderesque as to say "well, but he says everything else is on the up and up, so I guess now his opponents are the bad guys if they question him" is too "balanced" by half.

For the record, yes, a great many people have been calling Mitt Romney a liar for some time now. I don't know whether he's lying about the 13 percent figure, but he's lied so brazenly about so many other things—even the obsessively faux-neutral Politifact has documentation enough of that—that I do not think Just Because Mitt Said So really ought to be used as the argument-ender that he wants it to be. I am sorry if that makes me a bad person, but I am very, very tired of taking the very rich man's word for it when he says he's not lying about his goddamn money. He wants to become the leader of the nation, and that, of necessity, requires a level of scrutiny that he needs to just suck up and deal with already.

Nobody but Harry Reid can vouch for things asserted by Harry Reid, but it is distinctly not the Democrats' fault if they hold him to the same level of accountability that has been considered standard fare for every other politician but Mitt Romney.

A little over an hour ago, Mitt Romney claimed he'd paid at least 13 percent in taxes every year over the last decade—but didn't offer any documentation to back up his claim. The Obama campaign's response:

Mitt Romney today said that he did indeed ‘go back and look’ at his tax returns and that he never paid less than 13% in taxes in any year over the past decade. Since there is substantial reason to doubt his claims, we have a simple message for him: prove it. Even though he’s invested millions in foreign tax havens, offshore shell corporations, and a Swiss bank account, he’s still asking the American people to trust him. However, given Mitt Romney's secrecy about his returns, coupled with the revelations in just the one return we have seen to date and the inconsistencies between this one return and his other financial disclosures, he has forfeited the right to have us take him just at his word.

As the GOP's hero Ronald Reagan use to say, "trust, but verify." Actually, I'm not so sure about the "trust" part. And definitely not until Mitt gives us something with which to verify his claim.

11:03 AM PT: I should have noted that the statement was emailed by the campaign and was from Lis Smith, a spokeswoman for Obama for America.

It's actually even worse than saying he voted for it before he voted against it. Here's what Paul Ryan said:

First of all, those are in the baseline, he put those cuts in. Second of all, we voted to repeal Obamacare repeatedly, including those cuts. I voted that way before the budget, I voted that way after the budget.

But in the budget he didn't vote that way. He spins further:

It gets a little wonky but it was already in the baseline. We would never have done it in the first place. We voted to repeal the whole bill.

Ryan is trying to claim that he's not responsible for the Medicare "cuts" (they are actually savings, extending the life of the Medicare trust fund), because he voted against them before he voted for them before he voted against them again. Obviously, he's against Obamacare, but nobody forced him to include the Medicare savings in his budget plan. He's claiming he had no choice about whether or not to include those savings in his budget plan, but if that were true, he wouldn't have had any choice about anything in his budget.

Bottom line: Like his boss, Ryan is playing a political game, taking whatever position makes him look good at the moment. When it was politically useful to have $716 billion in Medicare savings in his budget plan, he included them. Now that its become politically useful to be against them, he's switched his position. And the only thing he's consistent about is taking the position that he thinks is in his own personal political interest.

Pre-convention 2008, 14 percent of voters were undecided. This year, that number is even smaller.

A series of recent polls in six swing states showed that only 5 percent of voters were undecided and only about 1 in 10 likely voters who had chosen a candidate said they were open to switching.

At this point four years ago, more than 1 in 4 voters nationwide said they might change their minds.

So of course Mitt Romney picked Rep. Paul Ryan and is acting unhinged! Republicans have given up on winning moderates and independents, and their right-wing base demands unhinged.

While he was in London, Mitt Romney told ABC News that he couldn't remember if he'd ever paid less than 13.9 percent in taxes. He promised to go back and look, and today he finally gave an answer: yes, he has paid less than 13.9 percent—13 percent, to be precise. But he still won't release his tax returns to substantiate his claim.

The fascination with taxes I've paid I find to be very small-minded compared to the broad issues we face. But I did go back and look at my taxes and over the past ten years, I never paid less than 13 percent. I think the most recent year is 13.6 or something like that. So I've paid taxes every single year. Harry Reid's charge is totally false. I'm sure waiting for Harry to put up whoever told him. I don't believe it for a minute by the way. But every year I've paid at least 13 percent and if you add in addition the amount that goes to charity, why the amount goes well above 20 percent.

Okay, Mitt. We've heard your claim. Now, where's the proof?

Republicans are going back to their favorite page in the 2004 playbook: trying to turn the opponent's strengths into weaknesses. In Sen. John Kerry's case, that meant attacking his military career. Now, they're going after President Barack Obama's national security strengths. In other words, they're trying to turn the killing of Osama bin Laden into a weakness.

The "Special Operations Opsec Education Fund," naturally a 501(c)(4) that doesn't have to disclose the names of its donors, has produced a video assailing national security leaks. By the Obama administration. When the group includes these guys:

Rustmann, who had supervised Plame during her early years at the CIA, argued on Fox that disclosing Plame’s name was not a significant breach of national security. He discussed details of her training, her career and her cover.

“It isn't a big deal,” he said about the illegal disclosure of the covert officer’s name. “It was a light, nonofficial cover.”

Scott Taylor, chairman of OPSEC, is a former Navy SEAL. An unsuccessful Republican candidate for Congress in Virginia in 2010, he sat down with NBC News last summer for a documentary titled “Secrets of Seal Team Six.” The film said the military had urged former SEALs not to talk.

Also in the group is a former spokesman for the director of national intelligence under George W. Bush. Yet he's claiming to be outraged about leaks now. But of course none of this is about leaks. It's about, as always, turning an opponent's strength into a weakness and generally making him look like a dick:

In an effort to portray Mr. Obama as a braggart taking credit for the accomplishments of special forces and intelligence operatives, the video omits some of his remarks in announcing Bin Laden’s killing. In that late-night televised address, Mr. Obama credited 10 years of “tireless and heroic work of our military and our counterterrorism professionals,” but that is edited out.

As the video at top shows, that's quite a lot of thanks to edit out. But it's what the Karl Rove playbook says to do, and the Republican operatives and former Republican candidates in "Opsec" are intent on following the playbook to the letter.

Paul Ryan definitely didn't build that:

You know what? I spent four formative years here in Ohio. I'm a product of the Ohio public university system. (Applause.) I'm a graduate of Miami of Ohio. (Applause.)

Paul Ryan, praising public education? Maybe the congressman really is a secret Obama plot.

It's a new day, so Mitt Romney has flipped again on his running mate's plan to end Medicare.

REPORTER: Your senior campaign advisor said Sunday if the Ryan budget would have come to your desk you would have signed it. In a January debate you called it a proposal that was absolutely right on. So I guess, why now are you distancing yourself from at least the Medicare portion of the Ryan budget?

ROMNEY: Actually Paul Ryan and my plan for Medicare I think is the same—if not identical it's probably close to identical.

As of Tuesday morning, Mitt had taken at least six different positions on Ryan's voucher plan. As of late local news time last night in Green Bay, Wisconsin, he's totally on board. What today's going to bring, who knows.

The only thing that's certain is that a Romney/Ryan White House would spell Medicare's doom.