Former NYC congressman and mayoral candidate Anthony “I’m not sure if that was my weiner” Weiner has joined Business Insider as a political columnist. The disgraced Weiner joins the disgraced Henry Blodgett, who has been banned from the securities industry for life.
But Weiner, unfortunately, hasn’t been banned from politics, and if you don’t think he still lusts after being mayor of New York, note that his new column is called Weiner!, just like the Broadway musical was called Fiorello!
President Obama has made an excellent choice to head the SEC — Mary Jo White.
She is a former federal prosecutor who was the first woman to head the U. S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, a really coveted and prestigious job. Outside of government, she has been a defense lawyer for white-collar criminals, so she knows how their schemes are structured and disguised.
Very smart, very tough, very dedicated.
The buzz is that Obama chose a woman, given that he’s been getting heat for so many male appointments, but to me the important thing is that he picked someone who is really sharp and capable. My first thought on seeing the news wasn’t “Oh, great, he picked a woman,” but “Oh, great, she’s going to kick some Wall Street ass.”
I’m wondering if Mitt has been set up over Bain to make the story not about jobs, but about honesty.
Mitt ran twice in Massachusetts, with the story of how he’d caused workers to lose their jobs and benefits used against him both times. Ted Kennedy used it effectively to defeat Mitt and keep his Senate seat. But it didn’t work as well for Shannon O’Brien, who lost to Mitt for governor.
So the sad stories about the folks whom Mitt callously fired weren’t a sure thing for the presidential race. Might work, might not. Voters understand about the “creative destruction” part of capitalism, that jobs and industries come and go. Mitt might have been especially ruthless about not giving folks notice and severance pay, but Americans realize that very few of us work at the buggy whip factory anymore.
But the Massachusetts history also offered another way to attack Mitt on Bain — Mitt’s insistence that he had left the company in February 1999 to run the Olympics and wasn’t involved in or responsible for anything that occurred after that date. At the time it was called a part-time leave of absence, consistent with two prior leaves he’d taken — one to fix Bain Capital’s parent company when it was near bankruptcy and another to run for Senate. It was assumed he’d return, as he had both other times. Would he really cut off any involvement with this company he owned and was still head of and let it possibly be run into the ground?
So going into the 2012 race, Mitt was stuck with his unequivocal claims about when he’d left Bain, dating back both to his Massachusetts run for governor and his 2008 run for president. But those claims are inconsistent with all kinds of documentary evidence, from SEC filings to candidate disclosures to contemporaneous newspaper articles.
I’m wondering if someone saw that the real way to catch Mitt was not to focus on his trail of lost jobs, but rather on his trail of lies. I’m wondering which political party that someone belongs to.
Someone is pushing hard on the Bain stuff, and I wonder if maybe it’s not a Dem. First, it was pushed by David Corn at Mother Jones, then expanded on by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo with more SEC documents, and then picked up by The Boston Globe.
This is the kind of attack you’d expect the Obama campaign to pursue in the fall, after the conventions, when they want to go after Mitt’s character and brand him a liar.
That’s why I wonder if there are GOP Powers That Be who are trying to derail Mitt now and keep him from being the nominee. They know he’s a disaster.
Would it be too late for someone else to get a campaign up and running? I don’t think so. First of all, a lot of the work is going to get done by outside groups like Karl Rove’s. Those folks are already geared up. Plus, there are plenty of good policy advisers, strategists, ad people, etc. who aren’t currently working for Mitt, but who have solid experience on presidential campaigns. The state and local parties have their people in place ready to help with events and logistics. And no one runs in all 50 states anyway.
Who would they crown? Not Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry or Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum. I’m thinking someone who doesn’t freak out independents, but would be fine with the base, someone like Tim Pawlenty or Mike Huckabee.
If I’m right — you read it here first. If I’m wrong, it won’t be the first time!
Mitt keeps saying that he retired from Bain Capital in February 1999. He’s been saying this since his run for Massachusetts governor in 2002 to avoid responsibility for bankruptcies and layoffs in companies Bain owned. It’s been his claim in both his presidential runs.
But nine SEC filings between 1999 and 2002 name Mitt as Bain’s chief executive and chairman, including five new partnerships. If people invested in Bain believing that he was running it, and he wasn’t, that’s one hell of a misrepresentation.
Moreover, Mitt filed a financial disclosure in Massachusetts in 2003 declaring that he owned all of Bain Capital in 2002. And Mitt’s severance agreement with Bain was reached in 2002.
Either Mitt is lying to the American people now or lied to the SEC then. If it’s the former, he shouldn’t be president. If it’s the latter, he should be prosecuted.
My guess is that since the SEC filings didn’t become an issue in his Massachusetts run, he figured he could get away with his claims about leaving Bain in early 1999 at the presidential level. Politicians believe this at their peril. National politics is a whole other level of scrutiny. Sleeping dogs wake up, and sometimes they bark very loudly demanding attention.
Of all the companies for Bain to invest in! David Corn has a piece up at Mother Jones* about Mitt’s investment in a medical waste company, Stericycle, that disposes of aborted fetuses.
Corn says that Bain earlier argued that Mitt was not involved in the investment, but documents he’s now obtained show that’s not true:
“The company said Romney left the firm in February 1999 to run the troubled 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and likely had nothing to do with deal. The matter never became a campaign issue [during the primary]. But documents filed by Bain and Stericycle with the Securities and Exchange Commission — and obtained by Mother Jones — list Romney as an active participant in the investment. And this deal helped Stericycle, a company with a poor safety record, grow, while yielding tens of millions of dollars in profits for Romney and his partners. The documents — one of which was signed by Romney — also contradict the official account of Romney’s exit from Bain.
“The Stericycle deal — the abortion connection aside — is relevant because of questions regarding the timing of Romney’s departure from the private equity firm he founded. Responding to a recent Washington Post story reporting that Bain-acquired companies outsourced jobs, the Romney campaign insisted that Romney exited Bain in February 1999, a month or more before Bain took over two of the companies named in the Post‘s article. The SEC documents undercut that defense, indicating that Romney still played a role in Bain investments until at least the end of 1999.”
Talk about blood money! Lying and dead fetuses — this will help Mitt with a right wing that already doesn’t trust him. Yeah, I know they’re not voting for the Kenyan Muslim Communist, but some of them will stay home.
* “Romney Invested in Medical-Wasate Firm That Disposed of Aborted Fetuses, Government Documents Show”
Embattled Farmers 