The most generous social welfare programs are currently administered through the tax code. A list of itemized deductions on households’ income tax returns serves as the only indication of these benefits. Income tax deductions, exclusions, deferrals, and credits, known collectively as “tax expenditures,” amount to more than $1 trillion of federal spending (according to estimates by the Tax Policy Center), not including lower tax rates on capital gains and dividends to encourage investment.

Continue Reading...

A brighter picture is emerging, however. In June, Obama signed an executive order called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which operates like the failed DREAM Act would have. Obama ordered Homeland Security to lay off deportation proceedings against immigrants who came into the country as children and who have completed high school or served in the military. Immigrants who meet those qualifications can now request a reprieve to remain in the country.

Continue Reading...

January: Newt Gingrich

To anyone who’d just been teleported from the year 1999, the scene in Charleston, South Carolina on the night of January 21 had to be impossible to fathom: There was Newt Gingrich, the man who’d been marched off the political stage by his own party after a disastrous four-year run as House Speaker, declaring victory in a Republican presidential primary. And not just any primary: South Carolina, a historically pivotal early contest. And not just a victory – an absolute landslide.

Continue Reading...

From The Globe:

Arriving at his suite in the Westin Boston Waterfront ­hotel, Romney received regular updates from his staff. He made small talk about the Patriots and the Celtics and played with his grandchildren. He was about to concede around 11:15 p.m when Republican strategist Karl Rove made his now-infamous appearance on Fox News Channel, insisting that his own network was wrong in calling Ohio for the president.

The concession call was canceled, followed by an hour of uncertainty. Then, after Fox ­executives dismissed Rove’s concerns and stood by the network’s projection, Romney said: Call the president.

Continue Reading...

Just how bad was Mitt Romney's campaign? So bad that top Republican officials are now trying to "reverse engineer" his race to make sure no GOP candidate ever makes the same mistakes.

According to a behind-the-scenes story of the Romney campaign in today's Boston Globe -- by reporter Michael Kranish, who co-authored the biography "The Real Romney" -- Mitt's aides are still in disbelief over what hit them.

It describes a campaign that was deeply divided on whether to run on Romney's biography or on his business record. Ultimately, the paper reports, Romney sided with campaign manager Stuart Stevens rather than with the family members who wanted to stress his biography.

Among the revelations in the story:

* Romney's Ohio director had no idea what Obama's campaign was doing with all of its ground-game power. In a hilarious quote, Rich Beeson tells the paper: “Now I know what they were doing with all the staffs and ­offices. They were literally creating a one-to-one contact with voters.”

* Beeson wasn't the only mystified member of the team. The Globe reports that when Tagg Romney studied Obama's spending patterns, he "could not figure it out. Why had Obama spent so heavily during the primaries when he had no primary opponent? Only later did Tagg realize this was a key to Obama’s victory."

* Romney's campaign was caught flat-footed on social media. They wanted to build a Facebook app to locate voters who do not have landlines. They did not unveil it until three weeks before the campaign, and it was downloaded only 40,000 times. In contrast, Obama's had been released months earlier, and was downloaded some 1 million times. The project's coordinator tells the paper that the goal was: “Can we do 80 percent of what the Obama campaign is doing, in 20 percent of the time, at 10 percent of the cost?”

* Romney was still convinced he would win Ohio. Beeson, in late October, wrote a memo that "all but ridiculed the notion that the Republican presidential nominee, with his 'better ground game,' could lose." One problem, as the Globe notes: "But the claims proved wildly off the mark, a fact embarrassingly underscored when the high-tech voter turnout system that Romney himself called 'state of the art' crashed at the worst moment, on Election Day."

Continue Reading...

We don't really know, and it's likely we never will. Many of the groups that spent the most on the election aren't required to report their donors. But thanks to recent campaign finance filings, we can get a better idea.

We dug through Federal Election Commission and Internal Revenue Service records and found that Adelson and his wife, Miriam, spent at least $98 million this election cycle. The money went to at least 34 different candidates and groups, with contributions ranging from $2,000 for a Florida congressional candidate to $30 million for Restore Our Future, the super PAC that supported Mitt Romney.

Adelson also gave $20 million to Winning Our Future, a super PAC backing Newt Gingrich; $23 million to American Crossroads, a conservative super PAC; and $5 million each to the Congressional Leadership Fund and the YG Action Fund, both of which supported Republican candidates for Congress.

Continue Reading...

But the guy who robbed a bank in Virginia yesterday wasn't really Mitt -- it was just a man in a Mitt Romney mask.

A man wearing a Mitt Romney mask -- and a Florida State sweatshirt -- held up a Wells Fargo in Sterling, Va., on Thursday morning and got away with an unreported amount of cash, the Washington Post reports.

Even weirder: The same branch was robbed in 2010 by someone wearing a Hillary Clinton mask.

Continue Reading...

In fact, of the top 10 worst political lies Politifact nominated, four came straight from Romney. In addition to the Jeep lie, he was dinged for claiming Obama began his presidency "with an apology tour," that the president gutted the work requirement for welfare, and that he told business owners "you didn't build that" when in context he said they didn't build businesses alone.  Only two of the top lies came directly from Obama (exaggerating George Bush's responsibility for the deficit and claiming Romney called Arizona's draconian immigration laws a model for the nation). The rest came from campaign surrogates or television ads.  In what feels like standard Politifact false equivalence, Democrats and Republicans were responsible for five lies apiece.

Continue Reading...

Here’s is the ad that delivered the win to Romney:

Despite outrage from the media and the public, and a denial from Jeep’s parent company, the Romney campaign stood by the claim.

Continue Reading...

You can almost here the cries of “Too soon! Too soon!”

Following up on the campaign that wouldn't end, political scribblers Mark Halperin (no relation to this writer) and John Heilemann are going to ensure that the 2012 election lives forever in breezy prose. Following up on their bestselling, absurdly readable account of the 2008 race, “Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime,” Halperin and Heilemann will be unleashing “Double Down: Game Change 2012” on a defenseless public, the Hollywood Reporter reports. Penguin is the publisher and HBO has already optioned the book.

Continue Reading...

Romney also met Pacquiao before the fight to wish him luck. According the AP, Pacquiao's publicist Fred Sternburg says that Romney added: "Hello Manny. I ran for president. I lost."

The AP writes: "The Romneys arrived during the undercard, drawing little reaction from the crowd."

Here's video of Romney meeting Pacquiao before the fight:

Continue Reading...

Romney also visited with Pacquiao in his dressing room before the fight, wishing him well in the bout.

''Hello Manny. I ran for president. I lost,'' Romney told the fighter, according to Pacquiao publicist Fred Sternburg.

Pacquiao is a congressman in the Philippines, and has said previously he might run one day for the president of his country.

Romney and his wife, Ann, were guests of Nevada State Athletic Commission chairman Bill Brady at the fight at the MGM Grand hotel arena. Brady hosted a fundraiser for Romney during the presidential campaign.

The Romneys arrived during the undercard, drawing little reaction from the crowd.

Continue Reading...

Washed-up, draft-dodging '70s rocker Ted Nugent has never tried to obscure his extremism, and this week he offered an idea that is supposedly related to a budget deal. After exposing his impressive ignorance of the federal budget, especially “entitlements," Nugent offered up a modest proposal:

Let's also stop the insanity by suspending the right to vote of any American who is on welfare. Once they get off welfare and are self-sustaining, they get their right to vote restored. No American on welfare should have the right to vote for tax increases on those Americans who are working and paying taxes to support them. That's insane.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

This, however, won't help. At a conference of senior aides from both campaigns organized by the Harvard University Institute of Politics, Mitt Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades tried to execute the shift, but gave away the game in the process. He said he regrets letting Romney move so far to the right on immigration, not because it was bad policy, but because it ended up being a tactical mistake. Jeff Zeleny reports:

Continue Reading...

Dear President Obama,

Nothing you don’t know, but let me just say it: the world’s a weird place. In my younger years, I might have said “crazy,” but that was back when I thought being crazy was a cool thing and only regretted I wasn’t.

I mean, do you ever think about how you ended up where you are? And I'm not actually talking about the Oval Office, though that’s undoubtedly a weird enough story in its own right.

After all, you were a community organizer and a constitutional law professor and now, if you stop to think about it, here’s where you’ve ended up: you’re using robots to assassinate people you personally pick as targets.  You’ve overseen and escalated off-the-books robot air wars in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, and are evidently considering expanding them to Mali and maybe even Libya.  You’ve employed what will someday be defined as a weapon of mass destruction, launching history’s first genuine cyberwar against a country that isn’t threatening to attack us.  You’ve agreed to the surveillance of more Americans every which way from Sunday than have ever been listened in on or (given emailing, texting, and tweeting) read.  You came into office proclaiming a “sunshine” policy and yet your administration has classified more documents (92,064,862 in 2011) than any other in our history.  Despite signing a Whistleblower Enhancement Protection Act, you’ve used the Espionage Act on more government whistleblowers and leakers than all previous administrations combined, and yet your officials continue to leak secret material they see as advantageous to the White House without fear of prosecution.  Though you deep-sixed the Bush administration name for it -- “the Global War on Terror” (ridding the world of GWOT, one of the worst acronyms ever) -- you’ve accepted the idea that we are “at war” with terror and on a “global battlefield” which (see above) you’re actually expanding.  You’re still keeping uncharged, untried prisoners of not-quite-war in an offshore military prison camp of injustice that, on the day you came into office, you promised to close within a year.  You’re overseeing planning that, according to recent reports, will continue the Afghan War in some form until at least 2017 or possibly well beyond.  You preside over an administration that has encouraged the further militarization of the CIA (to which you appointed as director not a civilian but a four-star general you assumedly wanted to tuck safely away during campaign season).  You’ve overseen the further militarization of the State Department; you’ve encouraged a major expansion of the special operations forces and its secret presidential army, the Joint Special Operations Command, cocooned inside the U.S. military/  You’ve overseen the further post-9/11 expansion of an already staggering national security budget and the further growth of our labyrinthine “Intelligence Community” -- and though who remembers anymore, you even won what must have been the first prospective Nobel Prize for Peace more or less before you did a damn thing, and then thanked the Nobel Committee with a full-throated defense of the right of the U.S. to do what it pleased, militarily, on the planet! And if that isn’t a weird legacy-in-formation, what is?

Continue Reading...

But a definitive Washington Post piece today has more details from inside the Romney home in La Jolla, Calif.

According to the Post, Romney watches the news about the "fiscal cliff," wonders "what if?" and doesn't know what to do with himself.

Four weeks after losing a presidential election he was convinced he would win, Romney’s rapid retreat into seclusion has been marked by repressed emotions, second-guessing and, perhaps for the first time in the overachiever’s adult life, sustained boredom.

Other details from the story:

Continue Reading...

In the Wall Street Journal, William McGurn approached the idea that villifying half the country as lazy “takers” dependent on the largesse of the makers may not be a way to win over the masses. He wrote, “Maybe Americans who have reason to feel insecure about their futures don't find a government that promises to be there for them when they need it all that menacing.” But he then rejects the notion and calls for better propaganda. “Conservatives' top priority,” he writes, “should be promoting an alternative—that in a highly competitive, global economy, the only real economic security for ordinary Americans is the security of opportunity.”

Continue Reading...

O'Brien referenced today's clip of the comic on "Meet the Press's" Press Pass series, in which Sudeikis discussed the relationship between politics and comedy with co-star Fred Armisen, who played Barack Obama on SNL. Sudeikis called Romney disappointingly corny, saying, "That's us wishing he was aware of how corny he is. ... He is as bland as bland can be, at this point. He's like a butter sandwich. Unsalted butter. With the crusts cut off."

Watch the full discussion with David Gregory, below:

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...