The Commentariat -- July 23, 2012

My column in today's New York Times eXaminer is seriously unimportant. But it is a good example of why reporters should know what they're writing about. The NYTX front page is here.

Arms Control, American-Style. Jack Healy of the New York Times: "Unhindered by federal background checks or government oversight, the 24-year-old man accused of killing a dozen people inside a Colorado movie theater was able to build what the police called a 6,000-round arsenal legally and easily over the Internet, exploiting what critics call a virtual absence of any laws regulating ammunition sales." ...

... First, Ignore the Problem. Donovan Slack of Politico: "White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday that the Obama administration has no plans to push new gun control measures in the wake of the deadly shooting rampage at a Colorado movie theater. Carney said that includes a reauthorization of the Clinton-era assault-weapon ban that lapsed during the George W. Bush administration." ...

... I posted a link to Jill Lepore's excellent New Yorker piece on the history of gun control at the time of its publication in April, but if you missed it, here it is again. ...

... Helen Lewis of the New Statesman posts this 2009 video of forensic psychiatrist presenter Charlie Brooker, who features a forensic psychiatrist advising how to report a mass murder, "assuming your aim is to prevent further ones:

Don't start the story with sirens blaring.
Don't have photographs of the killer.Don't make this 24/7 coverage.
Do everything you can not to make the body count the lead story.
Not to make the killer some kind of anti-hero.
Do localise this story to the affected community and as boring as possible in every other market.

     ... CW Oops! Thanks to reader David D. for suggesting the correction above. The psychiatrist, David D. says, is "Park Dietz (whom, if I recall correctly, defense attorneys call Dr. Death because he has been so successful in testifying against the insanity defense in capital murder cases)." Lewis posts shots of the front pages of British dailies; none took Brooker's advice.

New York Times Editors: Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is implicated in the LIBOR scandal & should recuse himself from participating in any inquiries. CW: thank you for saying so. Obama should fire that twerp today. ...

"Too Big to Regulate." Prof. Gar Alperovitz in a New York Times op-ed: the only way to control the big banks is to nationalize them -- an idea first proposed by the conservative Chicago school of economics during the Great Depression. ...

... Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times interviews Neil Barofsky, the former TARP inspector general. Bottom line: regulators are corrupt, Treasury officials are corrupt. They purposely don't do their jobs so they can get good jobs at the banks they supposedly oversee. This is not a surprise, of course, but Barofsky's confirmation, as Morgenson writes, is "depressing." ...

... Yves Smith lists "Six Reasons the Obama Administration Will Hate Neil Barofsky's Book." ...

... ** Barofsky himself sounds off at Bloomberg News. He lets both Geithner & Holder have it. P.S. taxpayers gets stuck again & the banks walk off with more of your cash. ...

More from Heather Stewart of the Guardian on the super-rich & their super tax avoidance: "A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary £13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth offshore -- as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together -- according to research commissioned by the campaign group Tax Justice Network. James Henry, former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has compiled the most detailed estimates yet of the size of the offshore economy in a new report, The Price of Offshore Revisited...."

Economist Nouriel Roubini, in Slate, outlines five reasons the U.S. "isn't even close to a robust recovery.... For several reasons, growth will slow further in the second half of 2012 and be even lower in 2013 -- close to stall speed."

Paul Krugman: "Climate change denial is a major industry, lavishly financed by Exxon, the Koch brothers and others with a financial stake in the continued burning of fossil fuels.... Large-scale damage from climate change is no longer a disaster waiting to happen. It’s happening now." ...

AND Krugman shoots down David Brooks -- again. After posting a graph that shows the U.S. as the most violent among advanced countries but also dramatically demonstrates that violence is in steep decline here, Krugman writes, "I find all these laments about declining values among non-elite Americans hard to take seriously. If things like single parenthood were as bad as they say, how can social pathologies have declined so much?"

Felix Salmon of Reuters: "There's still room for the [U.S.] Postal Service to reorient itself and become a successful 21st-century utility -- but there's no way that's going to happen if ... Congress prevents it from entering new businesses.... The Post Office is broken, in large part thanks to unhelpful meddling by Congress."

President George W. Bush in a Washington Post op-ed: "Laura and I, along with the Bush Institute and partners from the public and private sectors, started Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon to save women from breast and cervical cancer, two of the leading causes of cancer death in Africa. Like PEPFAR [the AIDS relief program], the success of Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon depends on a broad alliance of private companies, nonprofit organizations and governments."

Jeremy Peters of the New York Times: "National Journal said it would ban the use of quotations that had been massaged or manipulated by its sources, joining a growing chorus of news organizations that are objecting to a practice that has become increasingly common in political journalism."

The Charlatan Experience. Nitwits on parade -- sometimes burn their feet. Carol Pogash of the New York Times talks to some of the people who attended motivational charlatan Tony Robbins' multi-million-dollar hoax -- I mean seminar -- and burned their feet on a fire walk. But, hey, they admit it was their own fault for not being sufficiently motivated.

Presidential Race

Julie Pace & Steven Peoples of the AP: "The acrimonious presidential campaign eases back into action Monday after a weekend pause.... Romney made a low-key return to political activity Sunday night in northern California, where he courted Republican donors at three campaign fundraisers.... From Colorado, Obama flew to San Francisco to start a previously scheduled three-day trip that includes a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Reno, Nev., campaign fundraisers in California, Oregon and Washington state, and a speech to the National Urban League convention in New Orleans. But the campaign cancelled a rally planned for Portland, Ore."

Jeffrey Jones of Gallup: At an average 46.8 percent, President Obama's approval rating this quarter is still significantly below the 50 percent that nearly guarantees re-election -- but "Obama appears in much better shape now than the two recently elected presidents who were denied a second term -- Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush -- both of whom averaged below 40% approval their 14^th quarters in office."

Tom Edsall of the New York Times on Obama's voter-suppression strategy -- discourage white working-class men from voting by exploiting their suspicions of Romney.

Jacob Weisberg of Slate: "Romney is accusing Obama of practicing 'Chicago-style politics.' Apparently, he has no idea what that means."

The Travels of Willard. On the eve of Romney's overseas trip, Jason Horowitz of the Washington Post recounts Romney's earlier international exploits. CW: instead of going to England, Israel & Poland, Romney should travel to the Caymans & Bahamas & such to visit his money.

"Lazy Mendacity." Jonathan Bernstein in Salon: why do Romney & other Republicans repeatedly tell lies that are so easily disproved? "My guess is that it has to do with the growth of the partisan press, and especially the role of the Republican-aligned media – Fox News and conservative blogs and talk radio. ...

... Glenn Kessler on Romney's "didn't build that" ad: "Obama certainly could take from lessons from [Elizabeth] Warren or [Franklin] Roosevelt on how to frame this argument in a way that is less susceptible for quote-snipping. And Romney certainly could answer Obama's argument by engaging in a serious discussion.... But instead, by focusing on one ill-phrased sentence, Romney and his campaign have decided to pretend that Obama is talking about something different -- and then further extrapolated it so that it becomes ridiculous." Read Kessler's whole post; it's interesting.

Lisa Miller of the Washington Post: "I wonder how the presumptive Republican nominee reconciles his great, secret stores of wealth with the principles of his Mormon faith.... Romney, it seems, has missed the spirit of his faith -- or, as evidenced by his offshore stash, is selectively interpreting it. Joseph Smith, the founding prophet of Mormonism, taught that there is no shame in money earned through industry.... But Smith, like Jesus, had a profound loathing of income inequality. The earliest LDS communities, in fact, embarked on an experiment they called The United Order, in which they shared all goods, property and profits, according to their needs."

Right Wing World

David Edwards of Raw Story: "Tea party-backed Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) says that the right to own high-capacity ammunitions magazines like the 100-round drum that was used to kill at least a dozen people in Colorado last week is a 'basic freedom' that is protected by the U.S. Constitution." Includes video. ...

... CW: Johnson argues that semi-automatic weapons "are used in hunting." I don't doubt it. But if hunters are so fucking lazy they can't be bothered to pull the trigger more than once & so fucking incompetent they can't hit their prey with a single shot -- and the aid of a sight & all the other hunting folderol they use to get the best of Bambi, they should find some other "sport" in which to showcase their incompetence. Jerks.

Local News

The institution of the California Republican Party, I would argue, has effectively collapsed. It doesn't do any of the things that a political party should do. It doesn't register voters. It doesn't recruit candidates. It doesn't raise money. The Republican Party in the state institutionally has become a small ideological club that is basically in the business of hunting out heretics. -- Steve Schmidt, Republican consultant ...

... Adam Nagourney of the New York Times on the Republican party in California: "... the state party -- once a symbol of Republican hope and geographical reach and which gave the nation Ronald Reagan (and Richard M. Nixon) -- is caught in a cycle of relentless decline, and appears in danger of shrinking to the rank of a minor party.... Registered Republicans now account for just 30 percent of the California electorate, and are on a path that analysts predict could drop them to No. 3 in six years, behind Democrats, who currently make up 43 percent, and independent voters, with 21 percent."

News Ledes

... New York Times: "Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space, died on Monday at her home in San Diego. She was 61."

President Obama speaks to the Veterans of Foreign Wars:

New York Times: "His hair a frizz of neon orange, his hands shackled, James E. Holmes sat wordlessly through his first court appearance on Monday, a starkly different figure from the once-promising student recalled by acquaintances or the black-clad gunman accused of striding into a crowded movie theater and fatally shooting 12 people."

Reuters: "U.S. prosecutors and European regulators are close to arresting individual traders and charging them with colluding to manipulate global benchmark interest rates, according to people familiar with a sweeping investigation into the rigging scandal."

New York Times: "In a coordinated display intended to show they remain a viable force, Iraqi insurgents launched at least 29 separate attacks on Monday morning that killed at least 70 people, setting off car bombs, storming a military base and ambushing checkpoints, Iraqi authorities said."

New York Times: "With street battles still flaring in Syria's two main cities, the Syrian government said on Monday that its forces would never use chemical weapons in its domestic conflict, describing them as outside the bounds of the kind of guerrilla warfare they are fighting." ...

... AP: "A new rebel group boasting some 1,000 fighters launched an operation Sunday to capture Syria's largest city, Aleppo, while government troops using helicopter gunships and heavy artillery rolled back opposition gains in the capital Damascus. The spread of fighting into a second major metropolis displayed the rebels' growing confidence even though they still can't hold ground against the government's heavy weapons, pushing Syria's civil war toward a new phase of destructive urban combat."

CNN: "Penn State University will be hit with fines in excess of $30 million as part of 'significant, unprecedented penalties'" expected to be announced Monday by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, a source familiar with the case told CNN on Sunday." ...

     ... ** NBC Sports News Update: "The NCAA handed down severe punishments to Penn State on Monday in the wake of a sex abuse scandal, including a $60 million fine, a four-year bowl ban and the vacating of all football wins from 1998-2011. Also, the football program's scholarship allowance have been reduced from 25 to 15 per year for four years."

New York Times: "The powerful men accused of responsibility for [atrocities in Afghanistan] -- some said to be directly at their orders, others carried out by men in their chain of command -- are named in the pages of a monumental 800-page report on human rights abuses in Afghanistan from the Soviet era in the '80s to the fall of the Taliban in 2001, according to researchers and officials who helped compile the study over the past six years."

AP: "Jury selection is to begin Monday in Drew Peterson's long-delayed murder trial, where prosecutors want the former suburban Chicago police officer's wives -- one he's charged with slaying and another who has disappeared -- to effectively testify from their graves through friends and relatives about his threatening to kill them."

The Commentariat -- July 22, 2012

My column in the New York Times eXaminer is titled "The Meaning of Tragedy." The NYTX front page is here.

Jordy Yager & Mike Lillis of The Hill: "A handful of Democrats are pressing for tougher gun laws in the wake of the Colorado movie theater shootings that left 12 people dead." ...

... "Blood on Their Hands." New York Daily News Editors: "Through their inaction and their silence, Obama and Romney have fallen into line with all those who enabled Holmes to take hold of that AR-15 and will enable others to do so in the future unless America's political leaders develop the courage to fight to save lives."

... The Onion: "Americans across the nation confirmed today that, unfortunately, due to their extreme familiarity with the type of tragedy that occurred in a Colorado movie theater last night, they sadly know exactly how the events following the horrific shooting of 12 people will unfold. While admitting they 'absolutely hate' the fact they have this knowledge, the nation's 300 million citizens told reporters they can pinpoint down to the hour when the first candlelight vigil will be held, roughly how many people will attend, how many times the county sheriff will address the media in the coming weeks, and when the town-wide memorial service will be held."

James Asher of McClatchy News: "... reporters from The New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg and others are agreeing to give government sources the right to clear and alter quotes as a prerequisite to granting an interview. To be clear, it is the bureau's policy that we do not alter accurate quotes from any source. And to the fullest extent possible, we do not make deals that we will clear quotes as a condition of interviews."

New York Times Editors: "A health care system owned and managed by Alaska's native people has achieved astonishing results in improving the health of its enrollees while cutting the costs of treating them."

Pam Martens of AlterNet: "As the U.S. grapples with intractable wealth disparity and the related ills of unemployment and recession, we need to understand that [the LIBOR scandal] was not merely a few rascals rigging some esoteric index in London. This was an institutionalized wealth transfer system on an almost unimaginable scale." CW: what's important about Martens' piece -- which I found a bit difficult to follow -- is not how they did it but to whom they did it.

Matt Taibbi writes favorably about "a plan to allow local governments to take on the problem of neighborhoods blighted by toxic home loans and foreclosures through the use of eminent domain." CW: when Joe Nocera wrote a column backing the plan, I was immediately skeptical. Taibbi raises the same questions I had, but ultimately decides that since Barack Obama is no FDR, the plan at hand might be the best solution available.

Jeremy Roebuck of the Philadelphia Inquirer: "The iconic statue of late Pennsylvania State University head football coach Joe Paterno will be removed from its spot outside of the campus' football stadium, university president Rodney Erickson said in a statement Sunday." AP story here. ...

... CW: Erickson showed no sensitivity whatsoever to the advice of Maureen Dowd, who writes in today's Times, "... I’d leave it up. But I'd put up another darkly alluring statue behind Paterno, whispering in his ear: Mephistopheles."

Andrew Goldman of the New York Times interviews Terry Gross. Short & funny. Includes penis joke.

Presidential Race

Who's "Un-American" Now? Michael Tomasky of the Daily Beast: "... the patriotism party nominated a man who has for a quarter-century practiced a brand of capitalism that respects no known flag or borders. He ran a company that created some jobs but sent others overseas, he finagled himself a way to get paid a lot of money for doing (by his own admission) no work for a few years, and he appears to have retained a battery of lawyers to help ensure that he pays a far lower tax rate than the working people he's trying to whip into a state of fear about Obama. And there's only one reason people have Swiss bank accounts, and it's to avoid making their otherwise mandated contributions to the national treasury." ...

... Why Those Offshore Accounts of Mitt's Matter. John McKinnon of the Wall Street Journal: "The Tax Justice Network's report estimates that unreported offshore wealth held in tax havens has reached at least $21 trillion, and possibly as much as $32 trillion. [CW: as far as I can tell, the estimate represents wealth from all countries, not just the U.S.] That wealth means that the problem of inequality in wealth and income is actually worse than suspected, the group says. It also means that many countries are losing out on tax revenue that could go a long way toward alleviating their national fiscal problems, the report's authors suggest. The largest previous estimate of the problem -- also by Tax Justice Network, in 2005 -- was about $11.5 trillion, the report says."

Matea Gold & Melanie Mason of the Los Angeles Times: "President Obama's sharp turn to the offensive against GOP challenger Mitt Romney last month came at a steep cost: nearly $58 million."

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs: Although the Romney campaign denies it, it appears it is buying Twitter followers. At any rate, the graph of followers for his feed "looks like a hockey stick," with a huge uptick over the past few days. "If you look at all these [new] followers, they seem to have major trouble with spelling simple English words, have names that sometimes seem to be random assortments of syllables, and have no (or very few) followers themselves. At the current rate, he's adding about 10,000 followers every hour." Some fairly hilarious commentary @ #MoreFakeMitt

Right Wing World

Godless Thugs! Brian Tashman of Right Wing Watch: "Fred Jackson, the American Family Association's news director, while discussing the Colorado movie theater shooting today said that liberal Christian churches and liberal media helped contribute to violent incidents by supposedly deemphasizing the fear of God and the Bible."

News Ledes

Washington Post: 'Herbert Vogel, a retired New York postal worker who, with his wife, Dorothy, created one of the world's most unlikely -- and most significant -- collections of modern art, then bequeathed much of it to the National Gallery of Art, died July 22 at a nursing home in New York City. He was 89." CW: a remarkable story.

CBS News: "CBS News has learned that the NCAA will announce what a high-ranking association source called 'unprecedented' penalties against both the Penn State University football team and the school.... NCAA President Mark Emmert will make the announcement Monday morning at 9 a.m. at the organization's headquarters in Indianapolis."

Denver Post: "Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper [D] Sunday expressed skepticism that tougher gun laws would have stopped suspected gunman James Eagan Holmes from unleashing 'terrorist' acts against 70 people in an Aurora movie-theater."

AP: "A federal law enforcement official says the semi-automatic assault rifle used in the deadly Colorado movie theater shooting jammed during the attack." ...

... AP: "The shooting suspect accused in a deadly rampage inside a Colorado theater planned the attack with 'calculation and deliberation,' police said Saturday, receiving deliveries by mail that authorities believe armed him for battle and were used to rig his apartment with dozens of bombs. Meanwhile, new details about 24-year-old James Holmes emerged, including summer jobs the suspect held in Southern California as a camp counselor and as an intern at a prominent research institute." ...

... AP: "... President Barack Obama will travel Sunday to Colorado to comfort distraught families of those gunned down in a minute and a half of real-life horror at a midnight movie showing."

Washington Post: "Heavy clashes rocked Aleppo, Syria's largest city and commercial capital, for a second day on Saturday as thousands streamed across the border into neighboring Lebanon to escape widespread fighting in the country." ...

... Guardian: "An activist group claims that more than 2,750 people have been killed in Syria so far this month, bringing the death toll since the conflict began to more than 19,000."

The Commentariat -- July 21, 2012

The President's Weekly Address:

     ... The transcript is here.

** E. J. Dionne: "Anyone who dares to say that an event such as the massacre at a Colorado movie theater early Friday demands that we rethink our approach to the regulation of firearms is accused of 'exploiting' the deaths of innocent people.... The gun lobby goes straight to the exploitation argument -- which is, of course, a big lie.... We never allow an assertion of this kind to stop conversation on other issues. Nobody who points to the inadequacy of our flood-control policies or mistakes by the Army Corps of Engineers is accused of 'exploiting' the victims of a deluge.... The worshipers of weapons also lay heavy stress on the psychological disabilities of the killer in a particular incident.... Crazy people, they say, will do crazy things, and there is nothing we can do about this." ...

... "We've Seen This Movie Before." Film critic Roger Ebert, in a New York Times op-ed: "Should [James Holmes] -- whose nature was apparently so obvious to his mother that, when a ABC News reporter called, she said 'You have the right person' -- have been able to buy guns, ammunition and explosives? The gun lobby will say yes.... That James Holmes is insane, few may doubt. Our gun laws are also insane, but many refuse to make the connection. The United States is one of few developed nations that accepts the notion of firearms in public hands. In theory, the citizenry needs to defend itself. Not a single person at the Aurora, Colo., theater shot back, but the theory will still be defended." ...

... A very affecting piece by Garance Franke-Ruta of The Atlantic on "the template of our grief" provides the "script treatment" for Ebert's "movie." ...

... Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker: "The reality is simple: every country struggles with madmen and ideologues with guns, and every country -- Canada, Norway, Britain -- has had a gun massacre once, or twice. Then people act to stop them, and they do -- as over the past few years has happened in Australia. Only in America are gun massacres of this kind routine, expectable, and certain to continue." ...

... Gail Collins: "... presidential candidates look at this issue and see the same thing other elected officials do: a rich, fierce, loopy lobby on one side, and, on the other, people with petitions, slogging along. Everybody, including the gun control advocates, knows that nothing will change unless the people decide to do the leading. Eventually, the American voters come around. Just ask the suffragists." ...

... Zach Beauchamp of Think Progress: "One of the principal weapons used by James Eagan Holmes in the horrific Dark Knight Rises shooting would have been subject to a series of sharp restrictions under the now-expired federal Assault Weapons ban. The AR-15 rifle carried by Holmes, a civilian semi-automatic version of the military M-16, would have been defined as a 'semiautomatic assault weapon' under the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. If the law was still in force, semiautomatic assault weapons would have been outright banned." ...

... CW: This story is so eerie I thought it worth linking, even though I don't usually go for the maudlin stuff. AFP: "Jessica Ghawi had escaped a mall shooting in Toronto weeks ago when an 'odd feeling' led her outside, and then blogged about how fortunate she was. But in an ironic and tragic twist of fate, Ghawi died in Friday's Colorado theater shooting spree, one of 12 fatalities in the mass killing."

Joe Nocera: "... every week bring news of another financial scandal." Nocera runs down the latest four biggies. CW: he missed a 5th one: the municipal-bond bid-rigging scandal for which a B of A executive was indicted yesterday (see Friday's Ledes.

Keep the Government's Hands off My Tax Loopholes. Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times: "On Capitol Hill, lawmakers casually point to closing loopholes as the answer to much that ails the country. But ... it will be [difficult] to lower the budget deficit through painless changes in the tax code.... One man's loophole can be another's vital constituent interest.... The three largest [loopholes] are as popular as they are expensive: the mortgage interest deduction has cost about $75 billion a year recently, the employer deduction for health care has cost $120 billion a year, and the charitable-giving deduction has cost $38 billion a year...."

Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (I) sticks it to Gov. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) in a Washington Post op-ed: "... the central principle behind the unlimited contributions to super PACs that will dominate this election cycle is simple: Money is speech.... Yet many who hold this freedom as an article of faith are all too willing to limit an equally precious form of speech: voting.... Machinations [in Florida] make a mockery of the democracy we put on display every Election Day. When we hear of corrupt voting practices in foreign countries, where the ideal of democracy is nothing more than lip service, we feel good about ourselves.It's time to look right under our noses. It's happening here at home.

Katharine Seelye of the New York Times: "Elizabeth Warren has been so prodigious in raising money for her Senate campaign in Massachusetts that she is on track to become the top fund-raiser for the Senate this year, as well as one of the top Congressional fund-raisers of all time."

Presidential Race

Maybe it's time that the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they're going to do about it.... Romney passed a ban on assault weapons back when he was governor and now he says he's against it. Of course, he's done that on almost everything. Obama, when he was elected, said I want to reinstate the ban on assault weapons and he's never done it. -- Michael Bloomberg, New York City Mayor ...

... Kevin Robillard of Politico: "New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of the nation’s highest-profile supporters of gun control, said Friday that 'soothing words are nice' but demanded that the presidential candidates 'stand up and tell us what they're going to do about' preventing mass shootings." ...

... Mackenzie Weinger of Politico publishes Mitt Romney's evolving stance on gun control legislation. Now he likes AK-47s for all law-abiding citizens.

** It Was about the Money. Beth Healy & Michael Kranish of the Boston Globe: "Interviews with a half-dozen of Romney's former partners and associates, as well as public records, show that he was not merely an absentee owner during [the 1999-2002] period.... He drove the complex negotiations over his own large severance package.... Indeed, by remaining CEO and sole shareholder, Romney held on to his leverage in the talks that resulted in his generous 10-year retirement package, according to former associates.... The full tally of Romney's 10-year compensation deal is not known because he has refused to release tax returns for the relevant period, which ended in 2009. In addition, his financial disclosures are sporadic and incomplete...."

Steve Benen produces his 26th installment of "Mitt's Mendacity." Run down the list. It's mind-blowing. It's as if he cannot say one true thing.

Wonders Never Cease. Glenn Kessler, the so-called Washington Post fact-checker, has at long last had a change of heart: "Romney has failed to provide sufficient evidence that he had 'no role whatsoever' at Bain. Over the past few days, we have repeatedly asked Bain Capital whether the firm could provide a statement that a review of Bain board meetings had shown that Romney did not attend any such meeting, either in person or by phone. We are still waiting for a response.... Going forward, unless new evidence emerges..., we may withhold the awarding of Pinocchios when the claim rests mostly on the question of when Romney stopped managing Bain Capital."

Greg Sargent links to a great Spanish-language ad (translation to English is included on the linked page) by SEIU & Priorities USA tying Romney's refusal to release his tax returns to his tough "papers-please" immigration stance. Sargent notes that the line, "He wants us to show our papers. But he won't show us his," came first from Vice President Biden.

The Other .01 Percent Thinks Al Green Is a Threat to Democracy. CW: Oops! Forgot to link this one. Paul Krugman: Gary Silverman of the Financial Times learned "why the Romney counter-attack on the 'America the Beautiful' ad featured Obama singing Al Green, and pretty well too": Suzy Welch, wife of multi-millionaire Jack "'Welch suggested that Mr Obama's personal style and choice of musical material define him as a member of a "different America."'"

** Dana Milbank: "On Thursday, two days after [Romney surrogate John] Sununu's attack, Romney himself said that Obama lacks 'an understanding of what it is that makes America such a unique nation.' Sununu and Romney are legitimizing people such as Cliff Kincaid" who convened a meeting at the National Press Club to discuss Obama's "real father," a "communist pornographer," "pedophile" & "possible Soviet spy" who "was Obama's sex teacher."

The Little Man Who Won't Be There. Jonathan Martin of Politico: "Former President George W. Bush will not attend the Republican convention next month in Tampa." (A classic Friday News dump.) ...

... BTW, the bit at the end of Politico's late-nite jokes -- recent presidents talking about the presidency -- is hilarious.

... Take the test and find out. Thanks to Akhilleus for the link.

Right Wing World

Steve Myers of Poynter: "The Daily Caller is promoting its weekly gun giveaway in an ad placed next to a story related to the Colorado theater shooting. The headline for the story reads, 'Tea party leader tells media to stop 'false and reckless reporting' after Batman shooting'; to the right is an ad that says, 'Who should Romney select for VP? Click to enter The Daily Caller gun giveaway.'" ...

... BUT, in fairness, the MSM does it, too. Jim Romanesco: "A Denver Post tweet mentions a 'badly placed ad on our site' that has been disabled. Here’s what they were referring to:"

AND. I never look at the ads, but just as I was shutting down Gail Collins' column, which I used in my NYTX column (not up on NYTX yet), I saw this:

... Become a Gunsmith??? That's a New York Times ad next to a column advocating for gun control? Excellent product placement!

News Ledes

New York Times: "Alexander Cockburn, the acerbic left-wing journalist and author who though born in Scotland thrived in the political and cultural battlegrounds of the United States, died on Saturday in Bad Salzhausen, Germany, where he had been receiving medical treatment, his family said. He was 71. The cause was cancer, said Jeffrey St. Clair, a friend and colleague. Mr. St. Clair announced Mr. Cockburn's death on CounterPunch, the Web site that the two men edited." St. Clair's remembrance is on the front page of CounterPunch online.

Guardian: "Rupert Murdoch has stepped down as a director of News International, in a move that will fuel speculation the media mogul is preparing to sell off his UK newspapers. In an email sent on Saturday, staff at The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun were told that Murdoch remained 'fully committed' as chairman despite relinquishing positions on a number of UK boards, including NI Group."

AP: "An Air Force instructor implicated in a sweeping sex scandal at one of the nation's busiest military training bases was convicted in military court Friday of raping one female recruit and sexually assaulting several others. Staff Sgt. Luis Walker, the first Lackland Air Force Base instructor to stand trial in the scandal, was found guilty by a jury of seven military personnel on all 28 counts he faced, including rape, aggravated sexual contact and multiple counts of aggravated sexual assault." ...

     ... Reuters Update: "A drill instructor accused of raping and sexually assaulting 10 female trainees at Lackland Air Force Base was sentenced on Saturday to 20 years in prison, the stiffest jail term handed down yet in the biggest sex scandal to hit the U.S. military since the 1990s."

Guardian: "Police investigating the shooting spree at a screening of the new Batman film in Colorado are preparing to send in a robot to detonate what they called a sophisticated booby-trap in the apartment of the suspected gunman." The Denver Post front page has links to related stories. ...

     ... New York Times Update: "Law enforcement officials said Saturday that they had successfully disabled the most dangerous explosives and incendiary devices at the apartment of James Holmes, the man accused of killing 12 people at a movie theater [in Aurora, Colorado]."