Yo Republicans, It's Called A God Job

How are Republicans going to explain that while their party out-Gods the Democrats by a country mile, Hurricane Isaac already has disrupted their national convention in Tampa?  And is almost certain to hit New Orleans?

Moving beyond the fact that the Republican rocket scientists who chose the Florida city apparently were unaware that late August is the apex of hurricane season in the Gulf of Illegal Immigrants -- hey, remember Katrina in 2005 guys? -- George Bush sure hasn't forgotten and I am not alone in thinking that his meh reaction to that enormous disaster was the turning point of his presidency. 

Projections now have Isaac missing Florida and slamming into . . . New Orleans and the other population centers devastated first by Katrina and then by Bush administration nglect.  Were it not for the potential for destruction, death and misery, I would suggest that Isaac is well deserved for Republicans and especially Mitt Romney's running mate, Paul Ryan, who has ferociously opposed funding most disaster aid.

As it is, the convention will not be the choreographed love feast that Romney's handlers wanted.

First Todd Aiken didn't get the memo requesting that knuckle draggers like himself suspend the War on Women rhetoric until after the convention, while vocal Akin supporter Mike Huckabee -- who says that he "does not fully support Romney" -- will give a prime time speech.  Meanwhile, Ron Paul supporters threatened to upset the entire Republican apple cart and with it the illusion of unity.

Photograph from NASA's Earth Observatory

Wanted: A Smoking Gun To Prove That Romney Knowingly Profited From Fraud

Did soon to be Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney profit from healthcare companies that committed massive Medicare fraud?  Absolutely, as the record shows that was the case in at least two instances.  What is less clear is whether he was aware of these criminal activities.  In this regard the record suggests that it would have been difficult for Romney to miss the fraud, and if he is the master strategist and corporate know it all that he claims to be, he would not have missed it.

The companies are Damon Clinical Laboratories, which in 2004 paid the then-largest healthcare criminal fraud fine -- $35.3 million -- as well as a $83.7 million civil fine, and industry giant Health Care Corporation of America, which in 2002 agreed to a $1.7 billion settlement with the Justice Department because of accusations of wide ranging fraud.

Medicare is much in the news not because of pervasive healthcare industry fraud, but because Romney and Paul Ryan, his vice presidential pick (who reportedly was selected because of a $100 million bribe from one of the Koch brothers), are ceaselessly painting themselves as defenders of Medicare by obfuscating what President Obama intends to do with $700 billion in cuts he has made, which is distribute this money more equitably through the Affordable Care Act.

While their claim is utterly lacking in credibility, a potential bombshell lurks behind it: That in the cases of Damon and HCA, as well as possibly other companies, the eagle-eyed Romney, as CEO of Bain Capital and still a beneficiary of its money-making prowess, saw the fraudulent activities of these companies not as a turn-off but an opportunity to make big bucks because both were adept at milking greater profits even if it was at substantial taxpayer expense.

In 1988, Damon began the systematic practice of Medicare fraud that ended up costing taxpayers $400 million, according to the prosecutors' estimate.  In 1990, with Romney at the helm, Bain bought a minority stake in Damon.  He took a seat on its board of directors and was on its Strategic Planning Committee.  Romney later said he believed Damon CEO Robert Rosen's claim that the company was in compliance with government regulations.  In other words, he was uncurious about whether the claim was accurate and whether Bain had bought into a company that might not be operating above board.

Then in 1993, Corning bought Damon with Romney's encouragement, netting Bain between $7.4 million and $12 million, depending upon who is doing the counting.  Romney walked away with a paltry $437,000.  Corning immediately uncovered the fraud that had been perpetrated under Romney's nose for upwards of four years and went to the feds.  

In his unsuccessful 1994 bid to unseat Ted Kennedy, Romney boasted about the role he played in Damon's growth, then in 2002 when running for Massachusetts governor he had the temerity to claim that he helped uncover the fraud, which if nothing else shows that Romney had no inhibitions about lying through his ivories years before his presidential bids.

The key to HCA's success at generating enormous profits from its 163 hospitals during the Bush Recession, a time when many hospitals were going broke, was based on getting more revenue from insurance companies and patients by billing more aggressively, reducing emergency room overcrowding by refusing to treat some uninsured patients, reducing staffing to inadequate levels, providing kickbacks to doctors who referred patients to its hospitals, doing unnecessary surgeries, and of course fraudulent Medicare billing that prosecutors' estimated ran into the billions of dollars. 

Rick Scott was HCA's CEO during much of the period when there was fraudulent billing.  He resigned but was not charged in the fraud, went on to become a venture capitalist and then Florida's governor.  He is as enthusiastic a Romney supporter as former Governor Charlie Christ is a detractor.

When HCA's profits began sagging in 2006 because of fewer patient admissions, in part as a result of its skinflint practices, investment bankers from Merrill Lynch approached Bain and two other private equity firms to discuss a buyout, which took place later that year.

In the years since, HCA's industry-leading profit growth raised the value of its holdings to nearly three and a half times the initial investment of Bain and the two other firms in the $33 billion deal.  The firms -- with Romney along for the ride -- took the money and ran.  In 2011, HCA once again became a public company and floated a successful stock offering.

* * * * *

Most people naively view Medicare as a huge social program, but it is much more.

Medicare is a system of contracts that transfers more than $500 billion in taxpayer funds each year into the private sector.  While Medicare has taken the profit out of providing health insurance to seniors, it has left untouched the profit motive in the delivery of healthcare services. 

As one commentator put it, "Medicare's billions have played a central role in building the commercial healthcare leviathan it is today."

This begins to explain why providers, including individual physicians running Medicare mills, as well as Fortune 500 pharmaceutical and medical device companies, regularly try to bilk the system for more than they are entitled to, but in the forefront are for-profit hospital systems like HCA.  At the end of the day, it is these rapacious fraudsters and not poor and indigent seniors who created the Medicare crisis.

* * * * *

I feel liked a damned fool for not seeing it coming. 

The corporatocracy has become a shadow government that in some respects is more powerful than the federal government.  A tiny segment of the population, now commonly referred to as 1 percenters, has virtually all of the wealth as the chasm between the rich and middle class and poor grows apace.  The 1 percenters own practically everything else, so why not the White House?  Could this Vampire Elite do worse than with Romney, who is one of their own, as president?  Unlikely.  

Can the money that Bain and Romney made from Damon and HCA and Romney continues to make because of the millions he receives in largely untaxed stock dividends be considered blood money?  Absolutely. This is because Romney tries to project a holier-than-thou image and has boasted about all of the great things that Bain did under his tutelage. 

Meanwhile, there probably is a smoking gun in the form of someone who worked for Bain or in Bain, Damon or HCA documents that reveal Romney was well aware that taxpayers were being fleeced.  My gun is a pea shooter, so concerned voters should hope that The New York Times, which has aggressively investigated HCA's dark side in recent weeks, or some other media outlet with a conscience is looking for that smoking gun as Romney is coronated later this week in Tampa.

When found, that alone would disqualify Mitt Romney to run for president, let alone be president.

* * * * *

The information in this article was drawn from The Daily Kos, Dirt Diggers Digest, The New York Times and RedState. Links here, here, here, here and here.

Cartoon du Jour

Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

Why Romney & Ryan Are Albatrosses, Why Half Truths Are Lies & Much More

I continue to cling to the notion that voters have not lost their collective minds.  That there remains hope for a brighter American future. So I draw sustenance from the news that it has been nine days since Mitt Romney chose Paul Ryan to be his running mate in a desperate effort to curry favor with a right-wing Republican Party base less than enamored of him and thereby revive his subterranean campaign.  But hallelujah and all that.  The Tea Party darling from Wisconsin has provided no bounce.  Nor will there be a Romney rally.

This is because Ryan's vision for America is radical, which is kind of ironic given that Republicans have sought to tar Barack Obama with that label over the last four years.

Ryan, in word and deed, has stressed individualism over what he calls collectivism, a loaded word with communist-socialist connotations, but it is individuals like the rich who would benefit and individuals like the elderly, the infirm, the middle class and the poor who rely on Washington to get by, ease their suffering and provide job training who would be deeply affected by his slash-and-burn budgets of last and this year.  Oh, and financial markets -- the very banksters and others who drove the country into recession with a helping hand from George W. Bush -- would be relieved of all government oversight and regulation, thank you.

More than three-fifths of the cuts advocated by Ryan and rapturously applauded by the Tea Party come from programs for low-income Americans. We're talking billions of dollars eliminated for job training at a time of continuing high unemployment, Pell grants for students and food stamps for the hungry, cuts so severe that the National Conference of Catholic Bishops scolded Ryan, himself a Roman Catholic, for walking away from the nation's moral obligations.

New York Times polling guru Nate Silver found that Romney has gained an underwhelming net of one point, on average, in the eleven polls conducted wholly or partially after the Ryan announcement, while Gallup characterized public reaction to the pick as among "the least positive" that it ever has recorded. 

Translation: Voters aren't buying Ryan's toxic recipe and that could hand Obama Florida and Pennsylvania, swing states with large elderly populations.  Ryan also has accomplished something that Obama, his surrogates and the news media have been unable to do: Pin Romney down on some economic and social issues that he has been vague about or fled from.

This is the first time in my life -- which has included covering 10 presidential elections -- that a vice presidential nominee has actually defined the presidential nominee, but then this election is shaping up to be special, or I should say especially ugly given the vast gulf between a kinder, gentler but pragmatic Obama and Biden and a pair of challengers who would return the U.S. to the pre-New Deal era when the federal government cared and did little about those moral obligations.

Ben Smith noted at BuzzFeed Politics that: 

"[T]he campaign has reached its ugliest, most fevered moment. President Obama himself invoked an old story about Romney strapping a dog to the roof of his car. The Chairman of the Republican National Committee shot back with a jibe about Obama having eaten dog as a schoolboy in Indonesia. Biden suggested that Republicans want to put voters back 'in chains.' Romney demanded Obama takes his campaign of 'division and anger and hate back to Chicago.' Obama's spokesman called him 'unhinged.' The atmosphere bristled with conflict, Twitter spilled over with gleeful vitriol, and the campaign reached the sort of fevered political moment when it feels like anything can happen."

What will happen, and some Republican bigs are already saying so privately, is that the selection of someone as radical as Ryan to run with an empty suit like Romney all but hands the election to Obama, whom I believe is en route to an Electoral College rout.  (Go ahead, do the math yourself and you'll see what I mean.)  Consequently, these leaders are quietly working to try to inoculate down-ticket candidates from the havoc the twin albatrosses could wreak at the state and local level.

* * * * *

The entrance of Ryan into the race has resulted in a proliferation of half truths, which is to say not outright lies but lies nevertheless.  A pungent example is the claim that Ryan's plan to cut Medicare closely matches Obama's.

That is half true insofar as the pretty much identical amount that would be trimmed.

Here's the other half: Obama's Affordable Care Act puts this money back into the pockets of people who need help paying medical bills, fills the so-called "donut hole" in Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage and seeks efficiencies throughout the system. Ryan's 2012 budget -- now eagerly embraced by Romney -- takes those benefits away and replaces them with a voucher system that may work for healthy seniors but will be disastrous for those with various ailments.  The donut hole would open back up, access to preventive care would vanish and a portion of the cuts would be used to pay for tax decreases weighted toward the wealthy.

It is rich, or something, that Romney and other Republicans have repeatedly whacked Obama for "failing to lead" on fiscal issues because "he refuses to tackle the entitlement crisis," but then turn around and whack him for cutting $700 billion from Medicare.

Ryan has responded to criticism about this Revere Robin Hood Plan by saying that he actually is helping the poor by eliminating their dependence on the government, a notion that certainly resonates with many voters.  But he has been unable to explain how he would make the poor self-sufficient, let alone turn around a struggling economy.

State and local government employee layoffs and not welfare kings and queens are the big engine in the ongoing unemployment malaise, yet Ryan's budget would cut aid to these governments by at least 20 percent, as well as reduce mass transit and highway spending and some other things that we take for granted, like federal money for your local sewage treatment plan and fire department.  Unimportant stuff, I'm sure you will agree.

* * * * *

Ryan's grand introduction briefly enabled the Romney campaign to change the subject from the presumptive nominee's tax returns, which except for the year 2010, and apparently in a few days the 2011 return, he adamantly refuses to release, to more important subjects like taking class warfare to new heights.

It occurred to me, as well as other uh . . . great minds, that if Obama had made the same claim about his birth certificate -- that "We'll get attacked," which has become I Wannabe First Lady Ann Romney's meme about the refusal to abide by an income tax return transparency pioneered by her hubby's father in 1968 -- he would be laughed out of the White House and all the way back to Kenya.

Ron Dreher nails it when he writes that Romney pays far less in taxes than virtually all of us, on fact at a rate when we were in college, "and he still seems to think he deserves a cookie. I'm sick and tired of him and his wife whining about how people are so mean to them about their taxes."

Me, too.

* * * * *

Veteran political pundit Dick Polman raises an interesting question. When Romney tells lies day after day, is it fair for a political reporter to state unequivocally that the candidate is a liar?

Well yes, but don't hold your breath.

Polman cites the oft-repeated Romney canard, now taken up by Ryan, in ads and on the stump that Obama intends to hand out welfare checks to slackers who don't want to work.  There is no factual basis whatsoever for this claim because Obama is as committed as ever to enforcing the federal welfare-to-work requirements. What's new is a tweak that gives the states more flexibility in how they would meet those requirements. That flexibility was requested by (cough, cough) Republican governors.

"But surely the traveling reporters can do more," writes Polman.  "If 'lie' is too strong a word, then perhaps a more genteel sentence construction would work. Something like, 'Today, Romney said again that Obama has eliminated the work requirement for welfare recipients, an assertion that is contradicted by the factual record.' Anything would be better than the usual stenography."

Ryan is similarly disposed, claiming in recent days that Obama failed to rescue an auto factory in his Wisconsin district that closed in 2008 Bush.

* * * * *

Speaking of slackers, Romney has been pretty much been one save for making tons of money by shutting down companies and his one-term stint as Massachusetts governor, and this has been the case since he was eligible for the military draft.

Although an early and enthusiastic supporter of the Vietnam War, Romney avoided military service by seeking and receiving four draft deferments. They included college deferments and a 31-month stint as a "minister of religion" in France, where he luxuriated in a mansion when not proselytizing.  Church elders were concerned at the time that this classification for the church's missionaries was being overused at the height of the war.  Go figure.

Romney is in good company in this respect. Fellow chickenhawks include George Bush and Dick Cheney, as well as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rush Limbaugh among many, many others.

* * * * *

Stealing a march on Romney, Ryan now says that he will not reveal specifics of his updated 2013 budget plan until after the election.  Same for the specifics of how Romney will revive the economy.

This, if you didn't catch my earlier drift, is because both men's plans are political poison unless you happen to be spending a few leisurely days away from Wall Street and are sunbathing on your yacht.

Photograph by Win McNamee/Getty Images

Cartoon du Jour

Jeff Danziger/New York Times News Syndicate

Why Mitt Romney's Assertion That He Can Fix The Economy Is Flapdoodle

Hoover's business acumen crippled his presidency

Mitt Romney's leading qualification to be president -- okay, his only qualification -- is that as an experienced corporate executive officer he can lead America out of the economic wilderness in which it has wandered since Barack Obama . . . excuse me, George Bush drew on his own entrepreneurial experience to jump start America's ongoing economic malaise by pushing through an enormous tax cut for the wealthiest Americans while simultaneously waging two wars.

Romney's assertion that he can cure what ails us economically by magically creating millions of jobs -- some 12 million jobs by his own over-the-top estimate in a speech earlier this month -- is utter and absolute flapdoodle.  After all, those free-market capitalists whom the presumptive Republican nominee worships and Paul Ryan, his vice presidential running mate fetishizes, have shown little interest in creating jobs because they are far more interested in making record profits. 

Public opinion polls reveal that while voters in the swing states that Romney must win if he has a chance of ousting Obama are deeply concerned about the economy, they understand three things:

* That the president has been handicapped at every turn by obdurate Republicans like Ryan who would rather see him suffer in the polls than pitch in to turn the economy around.

* That even in this era of truth twisting, Romney and his handlers have lied continuously and shamelessly on an epic scale about virtually everything, including his own private-sector record.

* That Romney's tenure as a venture capitalist who destroyed jobs no more qualifies him as an able steward of the economy than it did Herbert Hoover.

The 31st president made a small fortune in mining while his apparent brilliance as a corporate organization man greased his election in 1928, then doomed an administration that was notably out of touch with Main Street as the Great Depression spread.

As Michael Kazin notes in Dissent magazine, no businessman has ever been a successful president. 

Beyond Hoover, the most pungent example of this is Bush himself, who was notably dismal in a series of businesses ventures until Poppy Bush sicced Karl Rove on him and this resume without a man became a governor and then, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, a president.  And then thanks to an electorate doped up on post-9/11 Republican fear mongering, re-elected him.

The biggest reason that Romney's claims that he would be an economic savior fall flat is fundamental: A country is not a corporation, something that former pizza mogul Howard Cain conveniently overlooked during his 15 minutes of fame behind the wheel of the GOP presidential clown car.

There are no counterparts to interest rates, tax rates and spending programs in the corporate world, and it is ironic that the biggest reason that Obama is likely to win re-election -- and perhaps win in an Electoral College landslide because so many voters have a visceral dislike of Romney -- is Romney's rapacious tenure atop Bain Capital, an issue that not only won't go away but becomes more pungent because he continues to refuse to release more than one year of his federal tax returns, defying a standard set by his father in 1968.

We do know from that single return that Romney paid a tax rate of 13.9 percent on income of $21.6 million. The richest of the rich, of whom Romney is one, pay income tax at a rate of 35 percent, but he "earned" most of his money from investments and has paid an obscenely low rate for capital gains. 

Corporate bigs don't necessarily have to be politically adept, as Hoover was not.  He was a wooden and uninspiring speaker who never connected with the downtrodden during those calamitous times. Kind of like Romney come to think of it, who infamously co-mingled Palestinian business and political culture (code for their religion) in asserting that Palestinians, who in fact are quite entrepreneurial minded despite the iron fist of their Israeli occupiers, are a bunch of lazy oafs.

In analyzing Romney's tax plan, the Tax Policy center found that "It is not mathematically possible to design a revenue-neutral plan that preserves current incentives for savings and investment and that does not result in a net tax cut for high-income taxpayers and a net tax increase for lower- and/or middle-income taxpayers."

Even if tax breaks "are eliminated in a way designed to make the resulting tax system as progressive as possible, there would still be a shift in the tax burden of roughly $86 billion [a year] from those making over $200,000 to those making less” than that. What would that mean for the average tax bill? Millionaires would get an $87,000 tax cut, the study says. But for 95 percent of the population, taxes would go up by about 1.2 percent, an average of $500 a year."

I rest my case.

Kazin writes that it was Franklin D. Roosevelt who became the exemplar of a chief executive: "Compassionate, witty, capable of switching from damning his opponents to winning enough of them over whenever necessary. And so, over the next six decades, the idea of a businessman as president largely went out of fashion."

It wasn't until 1992 with the emergence of billionaire Ross Perot that voters seemed again ready for a self-made mogul who would run America like a business. Perot made brash promises to balance the budget and curb free trade, all unsustainable, and eventually faded as a major party candidate because while he thrived in a corporate environment where he was the big cheese he was incapable of adjusting to a political environment and requisite consensus building.  The same thing would have happened to Cain had he not had a zipper problem.

Michael Tomasky summed up Romney best in a Daily Beast commentary: 

"Releasing your returns is just one of those things you have to do, like eating corn dogs in Iowa. That he is even fighting this point shows us, or at least gives us much reason to suspect, that the kind of capitalism he practiced for 25 years is utterly incompatible with civic responsibility."

Image by Oscar Cesare (1929)

Cartoon du Jour

Jim Morin/Miami Herald

Cartoon du Jour

Glenn McCoy/Universal Press Syndicate

Make No Mistake About It, Dear Friends, The American Dream Is Deader Than Ever

I wrote 16 months ago that America was broken.  The intervening months, including a presidential campaign already long on mud slinging and short on substance, should silence anyone who thought I was being overwrought.

The death of the American Dream has been ongoing for decades as the gap between the rich and poor has grown, but it was during the dark days of the Bush-Cheney interregnum that it shifted into high gear.  And has kept accelerating primarily because of a Republican Party that is concerned only about its own selfish interests, notably pampering the rich and screwing the poor. I hasten to add that the GOP has had considerable help from a Democratic Party that has too often capitulated to its increasingly reactionary views even with Barack Obama in the White House and control of the Senate.

Here is the death of the American Dream writ large:

 * It continues to abandon its youth, its elderly and its poor. It is imprisoning millions of its citizens for the most trivial of offenses, including many hundreds of thousands whose only crime was to get caught with a marijuana cigarette.

* It is suffocating its middle class, turning its back on newcomers, trying to disenfranchise minority voters in states with Republican-controlled legislatures, further cementing the GOP as the White Peoples Party, and giving obscene tax breaks to corporations and fat-cat financiers such as its presumptive nominee, empty suit Mitt Romney.

* It has turned the truth into a malleable concept beaten into shapes that bear no semblance to reality, the most pungent contemporary examples being repeated Republican misrepresentations about what the Affordable Care Act is about and the embrace of Obama birtherism by many adherents.

* It is ignorant of its own history, core values and virtues, and many of us, if shown a copy of the Bill of Rights, would believe it to be a subversive document.

* It has an insatiable addiction to foreign oil, values clean air and water only when they don't get in the way of profit making, and cares little that its infrastructure is crumbling one bridge and dam at a time.

* Thinking big has been replaced by thinking small, discourse by dumbing down and bickering, and bipartisanship by ideological extremism that in its ugliest manifestation has been the GOP's treasonous blood thirst to oust Obama instead of working with him to jump start a moribund economy.

* It is in thrall to the nation's most dangerous terrorist organization, the National Rifle Association, which has bullied politicians into making legal the sales of the killing machines in the most recent of a never ending series of slaughters that would be unthinkable in other nations --  the massacre of 12 people and wounding of 58 others in a Colorado movie theater -- with more bloodbaths to come.

* It has turned against people whose skin color is different and who worship non-Christian deities.

* It cares little that our world standing has been undercut by reckless foreign adventures, torture and use of the 9/11 attacks not to reaffirm core values but to undermine them.

* It has a Congress that is borderline dysfunctional, a president who promised hope and change but with the exception of the Affordable Care Act has pretty much delivered more of the same if with less fear mongering, and a deeply politicized Supreme Court that is a helpmate to powerful and wealthy right-wing interests.

The American Dream is one of if not the greatest gift of our democracy because it draws so deeply from the core values on which the republic was founded.  But it has become a cliched concept, endlessly reworked by Hollywood and Madison Avenue, and all the more so because because while America unravels so many other peoples elsewhere, notably the Arab World, have embraced the dream in striving to be free.

It is convenient to reinvent an imaginary past when every home had a white picket fence in the front, a vegetable garden in the back and a shiny made-in-Detroit sedan at the curb.  There once was an American Dream and it survived two world wars, a nearly decade-long depression between those wars, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Sadly -- and for me most bitterly as someone who has bled red, white and blue for his country -- the American Dream is not merely on sabbatical. It is dead. And while it is easy to blame feckless politicians and greed mongers for its demise, we all share responsibility as we take ever less responsibility for our country, ever less care in electing our so-called leaders, as well as ever less care for those things that should most matter for ourselves and future generations.

Photograph by Roger Blake 

Cartoon du Jour

(UPDATED) Penn State Hit With Major Fine, Loses 14 Years of Football Victories

And so the penultimate act in the Greek tragedy that the Penn State University sex abuse scandal has become played out today as the NCAA fined the storied Nittany Lion football program $60 million, imposed a four-year ban on post-season play and vacated of all of the team’s victories from 1998 to 2011.   The ultimate act will be the sentencing of pedophile football coach Jerry Sandusky and the tens of millions of dollars in settlements from lawsuits brought against an institution for whom protecting its image was more important than protecting vulnerable boys.

The punishment meted out by intercollegiate sports' governing body -- stiff but less severe than a "death penalty" that would have suspended the program for a period of time, nevertheless means that it will take the program years before it can return to the top echelon in which Penn State has dwelled for a half century and that disgraced former head coach Joe Paterno is no longer the major-college career leader in football wins.  The $60 million fine will be used to endow child-abuse charities while the Big Ten also fined Penn State $13 million, which is equivalent to its post-season revenue.

Long story short, and as Andrew Sullivan notes, Paterno built one of the most successful collegiate football program ever and is now responsible for almost completely destroying it.

The post-season ban and scholarship restrictions also imposed by the NCAA will keep the program from fielding a team that can be competitive in the always tough Big Ten, but players will be allowed to transfer to another university where they could play immediately, meaning that there could be a mass exodus from Now Not So Happy Valley.

NCAA President Mark Emmert said that no punishment the governing body could impose would change the damage done by Sandusky’s acts, but “the culture, actions and inactions that allowed them to be victimized will not be tolerated in collegiate athletics."

The package of punitive actions seems just about right. 

The program will continue but will be hobbled for years, an ongoing reminder of the rot at its core that Paterno willfully ignored, while it will be left to players to decide whether their loyalty to Penn State will trump the desire to play for a competitive program prior to having the opportunity to be drafted by a National Football League team as many Nittany Lions have been. 

The last Penn State victory that will officially count came in 1997. The quarterback of that team was Mike McQueary, who became an integral part of the investigation into Sandusky after witnessing him sexually assaulting a boy in the showers of the football building. 

Some commentators were critical of the NCAA action.  Penn State did not actually violate the NCAA rulebook and it is unclear whether it even had jurisdiction.

Opined Drew Magary: "I couldn't give two f---s what happens to the football team -- dress them in white unitards and make them a French mime troop, for all I care -- but there's nothing more ridiculous than watching the NCAA parade around its values and make frowny faces on national television, months and months after the scandal broke (and years and years after evil was allowed to take root)."

The announcement came a day after the statue of Paterno was removed from outside Beaver Stadium.  It was a belated if necessary action that was blunted by the news that Paterno’s name will remain on the campus library, which may be indicative of a skin-deep commitment to reform by the university administration and trustees since anything with the coach’s name on it presumably would be a "recurring wound to the multitude of individuals across the nation and beyond who have been the victims of child abuse," as university President Rodney Erickson put it in announcing removal of the statue.

The scandal led to the removal of Erickson's predecessor and ouster of Paterno, as well as the filing of criminal charges against two other top university officials. A report commissioned by Penn State’s board of trustees and compiled by Louis J. Freeh, a former F.B.I. director, found a series of failures all the way up the university’s chain of command that it concluded were the result of an insular and complacent culture in which football was revered.

Nearly three weeks after release of the Freeh report, a work crew arrived before dawn on Sunday and used jackhammers and a forklift to unceremoniously remove the statue of Paterno from its spot outside the football stadium, draping the figure in a blue tarp before hauling it off to an undisclosed locations and in so doing dismantling an iconic tribute to a coach who won more college football games than any other but has now had many of those victories vacated.

A lot of people believe that Paterno was neither villain nor saint. I held to that view after the initial revelations that Sandusky was a serial pedophile and that the university and possibly Paterno himself had engineered a cover-up. But with the drip, drip, drip of revelations since then and the release of Freeh’s damning 267-page report, I have changed my mind.

National championships do not counterbalance sexual abuse, and Paterno’s accomplishments and legacy no longer matter to me.

That he, a Roman Catholic as is Sandusky, could not summon the moral strength to do the right thing and instead deliberately and repeated concealed facts about Sandusky’s predatory behavior speaks volumes about the man he really was: A craven coward for whom image was everything (“Success with honor” was his motto) and sodomized boys were not to be fretted over. And was so powerful that the university did his bidding years after first learning of the scandal and even gave him a raise and lucrative other benefits.

Paterno’s family remains in deep denial as had the coach himself prior to his death in January.

The family has denied the Freeh report’s claims and said it plans its own review of the investigation. In a statement, the family said that removing the statue “does not serve the victims” or “help heal the Penn State community.”                                      

                              Photograph by Patrick Smith/Getty Images

'Check It Out. What Are You Saying? What Are You Playing?' It's A Cover Song, Man.

ROBERT HUNTER AND JERRY GARCIA

One of the things that make the great classic songs so special is that when they are interpreted by great contemporary artists they can become greater still. 

The works of Cole Porter, Hoagie Carmichael and Ellie Greenwich as covered by artists ranging from Linda Ronstadt to Willie Nelson to Elvis Costello come to mind, but this dynamic also is at work when the songs of more recent songwriting icons like the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell are "covered" in music business parlance. Occasionally a cover becomes more popular than the original.  Santana's version of "Black Magic Woman," first performed by Peter Green and Fleetwood Mac, and Jimi Hendrix's version of Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower," were huge hits that eclipsed the originals. 

I have three favorite cover albums.

Red, Hot and Blue is a 1990 release that raised a considerable amount of dough for AIDS awareness and research.  It includes no fewer than 21 covers of Cole Porter songs by, among many others, Neneh Cherry ("I've Got You Under My Skin"), Debbie Harry and Iggy Pop ("Well Did You Evah") and U2 ("Night and Day).  Porter would have approved.

Joni Mitchell was pigeon-holed early in her career as a folkie with a knack for clever lyrics.  This was disproven when she recorded Hejira in 1976, a seminal album featuring late jazz bass great Jaco Pastorius, and her music became increasingly jazz infused as she continued to mature as an artist.  In 1979, she recorded Mingus, a collaboration with Charles Mingus just before the legendary bassist's death, that horrified her fans still stuck in the Court and Spark era.  Tough. 

Other jazz greats soon beat a path to Mitchell's Laurel Canyon door, culminating in River: The Joni Letters, a  2007 album produced by Herbie Hancock that features Norah Jones ("Court and Spark"), Tina Turner ("Edith and the Kingpin"), Corinne Bailey Rae ("River"), Luciana Souza ("Amelia"), and Leonard Cohen ("The Jungle Line").  Mitchell not only approved, she sings "Tea Leaf Prophecy" on the album.

Then there is The Music Never Stopped: Roots of the Grateful Dead, a "reverse" cover album of songs from the Dead's repertoire performed by the original artists. The 1995 release was a head turner for Deadheads who assumed that songs like "Cold Rain and Snow" (Obray Ramsey), "Iko Iko" (The Dixie Cups) and "Morning Dew" (Bonnie Dobson) were Dead originals.

This brings us to one of the great songwriting teams of the last half century -- Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter of the Dead -- whose extraordinarily rich American songbook is chockablock with songs of love, loss, longing and the frontier spirit.  There is no doubt that the body of their work compares favorably with the works of the gods of Tin Pan Alley.

No cover, let alone album of covers, has so intimately captured the Garcia-Hunter genius than Songs of the Grateful Dead, a 2010 release featuring Jesse McReynolds, David Nelson and Stu Allen, among others, that only recently came to my attention when I heard their haunting cover of "Stella Blue" on the radio.

McReynolds is a longtime mandolin virtuoso, Nelson was a member of the original New Riders of the Purple Sage, while Allen has played with Garcia and San Francisco jam bands. 

Not to take anything away from Garcia, whose melodies are superb, but he was not the strongest of vocalists and sometimes garbled Hunter's lyrics.  Not so with McReynolds, who articulates the lyrics beautifully in a crystal-clear tenor, enabling me to hear old songs all over again for the first time, while his mandolin-infused arrangements are lovely.

There is not a weak cover on Songs of the Grateful Dead, and beyond "Stella Blue" four stand out: "Franklin's Tower," "Loser," "Deal" and "Alabama Getaway."  The album concludes with a Hunter-McReynolds composition titled "Day by Day." 

The album is, in a sense, the completion of a circle. 

Garcia adored bluegrass and first heard McReynolds on a road trip to the South in 1964.  In 1970, he formed Old and in the Way, a bluegrass "supergroup" featuring Peter Rowan on mandolin, Vassar Clements on fiddle, John Kahn on bass and himself on rip-snorting banjo.  This band's only studio recording remains one of the best selling bluegrass albums of all time, and I am privileged to have seen them play at the late great Sunset Park near West Grove, Pennsylvania.

Cartoon du Jour

Jim Morin/Miami Herald

Mitt's Tax Problem, Or 'I Love The Smell Of Republican Panic In The Morning'

The 2012 tilt will be the 11th (count 'em) presidential campaign that I have been involved with as a reporter, editor or blogger. That bit of lineage noted, I cannot recall anything remotely resembling the spitstorm -- in which powerful Republicans have joined the Obama campaign and news media -- over Mitt Romney's continuing refusal to release income tax returns beyond the January dump of his 2010 return and estimated 2011 return.

Count me among the people who have gone, in a matter of a few weeks, from believing that Mitt was merely being stubborn in not going with the presidential candidate flow, which included his dear old dad, in releasing all of his returns. It is now beyond obvious that his refusal is not about being bullheaded. It is about being scared -- well, scared spitless -- concerning the fallout from what might be revealed in those returns. Did he not have to pay any taxes in a particular year because of financial slights of hand? Or more likely are there bombshells, or maybe one really big bombshell, that might effectively end his quest for the White House?

No one knows for sure and John McCain ain't talking, but it is curious that Mitt made available all his returns when he was being vetted as the Arizona Republican's running mate in 2008 and McCain instead gave the nod to Sarah Palin. An interesting theory that is being much bandied about given the vacouous responses of Mitt and his campaign spokesmouths, but one that is probably a little too neat to be true since McCain was said to be a fan of the Killa From Wasilla's posterior and didn't care that she had the world view of a tree stump.

While Mitt might have erred in putting his Irish setter in a cage on the roof of his station wagon on a now infamous family vacation, he screwed up majorly in failing to anticipate that his returns would be an issue. After all, his opponents made the returns issues when he ran for the Senate in 1994 and Massachusetts governor in 2002, specifically over his involvement in . . . are you ready for this? Bain Capital.

An alternate theory some 18 years on -- 1994 being the year the Teddy Kennedy beat Mitt in a battle of millionaires -- is that he not only has no empathy for a poor working stiff whose IRA is million of bucks less than his, he believes himself to be well above working stiffs in general. Besides which, Obama smoked pot as a teenager.

But change the subject as he and his surrogates might try to do, there is now a focus on those mystery returns not seen since the frenzy of speculation over what was in mobster Al Capone's vault. As we found out, there was nothing in the vault except debris. While Geraldo Rivera has not yet been signed to do a television special on what's in Mitt's returns, there is little likelihood that it's merely dirt and empty booze bottles.

Wife Anne is furious that Obama and his surrogates, and how the news media, as well, are impugning her honey bunny's integrity, and Mitt himself obvious has his underwear -- special or otherwise -- in a knot. This has led a news source that is reliable except when it isn't reliable to quote two anonymice in Mitt's campaign as saying that they are now prepared to go eye for eye after ceding the momentum to the incumbent for weeks. This would entail calling him a liar, referencing that pot-smoking thing, as well as that Colombian marching powder thing that he also has fessed up to, and . . . hang onto your sombreros! that he associated with dirty Chicago politicians.

It will be left to the voters to decide who is dirtier: A Windy City pol who has his palm greased in return for leaning on the city to install streetlights in an alley or a pol whose claim to fame is getting filthy rich on the backs of those working stiffs. If you ask me, the tax return debacle defines Romney better than any opposition caricature could. And that might be fatal.

HEADLINE QUOTE FROM DOUGJ AT BALLOON JUICE

Cartoon du Jour

Non Sequitur via GoComics.com

A Mighty Cry Went Up As Mitt Romney Approached The Podium: '438! 438! 438!'

People who are resentful that Mitt Romney is filthy rich are missing the point.  Like many an American before him, he saw an opportunity to cash in and has done so on a grand scale. 

Nothing wrong with that, but how grand we don't know because of Romney's refusal to come clean about his wealth while sending out a top surrogate today to go off on President Obama about smoking dope as a teenager.  This is yet (cough, cough) another indication that he still hasn't figured out how to deal with the issue of his refusal to release tax returns which is verging on going supernova  with innumerable worried Republican governors, congressfolk and strategists urging him to please come clean..

We do know that through Romney's stewardship of Bain Capital he bought and gutted numerous companies, furloughing workers, stripping them of their pensions and outsourcing and offshoring their jobs to low-wage companies. 

This brings us to Post Office Box 438 in Road Town, Tortola, British Virgin Islands, which is one of those offshore havens where people like Romney are able to park their money without having to pay federal income taxes on it, as well as remain anonymous.  That is until Vanity Fair magazine went snooping and learned that among those using Box 438 are:

* North American Resources Group Limited, a major shareholder in Harken Energy, the Texas company that purchased President George W. Bush's failing oil-drilling venture in the 1980s, making him a wealthy man.

* Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynne, bought their family home in Jackson, Wyoming, from a Box 438 entity, which had bought it from the director of a Box 438 entity, who had bought it from another Box 438 entity.

* Scottish rugby star Bill Gammell’s CEH Australia Ltd., an oil-and-gas company, has used Box 438. Sir Bill counts Tony Blair and George W. as friends and was once married to Geraldine Gammell, who directed Prince Charles’s Trust in Scotland.

* Chaarat Gold Holdings Ltd. uses Box 438. Chaarat’s non-executive chairman Christopher David Palmer-Tomkinson is distantly related to Queen Elizabeth II and is a lifelong friend of Prince Charles's.

* Israeli diamond-and-copper magnate Dan Gertler has used Box 438 and has reportedly dealt on occasion with Central Asian billionaires Alijan Ibragimov, Alexander Mashkevich, and Patokh Chodiev.

* Pan American Energy Holdings (P.A.E.H.), until recently a BP subsidiary, was registered in care of Equity Trust, Box 438. P.A.E.H. is now fully owned by Bridas, an oil-and-gas giant developed by Carlos and Alejandro Bulgheroni, the wealthiest men in Argentina. When Bridas took an ownership stake in the American company Allis-Chalmers Energy, they registered it at Box 438. 

That Romney was pushing into the gray areas of offshore financing a mere two years out of Harvard and pursued those avenues aggressively while running Bain (which is now running away from) was his prerogative.  There is nothing wrong with that either if you are a capitalist in the Galtian tradition, but Romney is intentionally blurring a very big line here: Bain was not formed to create jobs.  It was formed to create wealth.

And this is a little off-putting for a guy who is claiming that if elected president he will wave his magic wand and poof! the U.S. will be running at a profit.

Photograph by Vladimir Godnik/Getty Images

Cartoon du Jour

Drew Sheneman via GoComics.com

Some Mid-July Musings On Bankstas, Mittster, Condi & Our Chinese Comrades

The news last week that independent brokers for Wells Fargo, the nation's largest home mortgage lender, routinely discriminated against black and Hispanic borrowers during the housing boom was not surprising in the least.   Show me a banksta and I'll show you a crook.

The bank, which you and I bailed out to the tune of $25 billion when it shat on its wingtips as the housing boom turned to bust, did not even bother to fight Justice Department and agreed to fork over $175 million to settle allegations that the brokers had charged higher fees and rates to more than 30,000 minority borrowers and steered more than other 4,000 minority borrowers into costlier subprime mortgages when white borrowers with similar credit risk profiles had received regular loans.

Meanwhile, JPMorgan, the nation's largest bank, disclosed that loses from a bad credit debt originally reported as amounting to a mere $2 billion or so actually is more than $7 billion.  JPMorgan CEO Jaime Dimon had repeatedly reassured investors that the losses would be contained.

Well Fargo, of course, admitted no wrongdoing as is typical in banksta settlements and the $175 million will be written off as the cost of doing business, not a lesson learned.  This is because the financial community is incapable of reforming itself and will do things that are detrimental to its customers again and again while further feathering its own platinum-lined nest. 

Which begs a question: Why not start jailing bankstas?  Or better still, taking them before firing squads?  Let's start with the self-righteous Mr. Dimon.

* * * * *

The best line of the month goes to political analyst Charlie Cook, who writes: "If President Obama's campaign machine can define Mitt Romney before his own campaign even tries, my bet is Obama wins reelection."

With Election Day now less than four months out, the president and his surrogates have seized the initiative like a hawk seizes a chicken in its talons and they aren't letting go.  A few members of a news media that overall has been notably uncurious about how Romney became filthy rich are providing the incumbent with a steady stream of new ammunition about how he got that way, while the presumptive Republican nominee seems incapable of fighting back in a meaningful way.

The Boston Globe reported that Romney was listed as CEO and sole owner and chairman for three years after he says he severed ties with Bain Capital in 1999.  A Romney spokesmouth denied the report and provided documentation that seemed to show that it was false, but that ducks a relevant question: Why was Romney listed as holding those positions but it took Bain three freaking years to correct the record and he cited those positions in that time frame when he filed to run for governor of Massachusetts?  And why was he paid $100,000 a year over those three years while ostensibly doing nothing?  Good work if you can get it. 

Oh, wait a minute.  The Romney campaign later did one of those course corrections that have branded the candidate as a flip-flopper possibly without peer and explained that he "wasn't involved in any investment decisions. He was on the SEC filings, because he was still technically the owner, but hadn't transferred ownership to other partners." 

As Henry Blodget notes, this dog won't hunt: "Sorry, Mitt Romney, You can't be chairman, CEO, and president of a company and not be responsible for what it does."

Or put less artfully, does Romney want to argue that being the CEO of a company doesn't mean you have any actual responsibility for it?  Leaving aside the question of whether he committed a felony, let alone perjured himself in SEC filings Andrew Sullivan says that this state of affairs "is a little troubling for a potential president's future accountability."

Sullivan notes that as Bain CEO, Romney once owned Stericycle, a company that disposed of aborted babies. 

"The point is not that Romney actively managed that acquisition; he almost certainly didn't," Sullivan argues.  "The point is simply that he was CEO of the company when it did this and was drawing a salary for it. That means he is formally responsible for it. Romney's response could still be that he disagrees with the transaction, didn't choose it, and wishes that Bain had never touched it. But that kind of parsing of responsibility and trashing of his own company comes off as both weasely and disloyal respectively"

There is a simple way to clear up the apparent "confusion" over his tenure at Bain:

Romney should stop giving contradictory answers to reporters, which he did on Friday in the face of withering attacks from the president to the effect that his opponent is not the solution but the problem.  He should release his tax returns for the relevant period, which is his only lifeline to credibility.  But he shows no sign of doing that because he has something to hide.  Or a lot of somethings.  Or maybe just something huge.

* * * * *

I suspected reports that former Bush lackey Condoleeza Rice was high on Romney's list for vice president was nothing more a passing fancy, or more likely a curtsey to the NAACP after he was roundly booed last week at their annual convention. Republicans concerned about the direction of his listless campaign certainly were praying that was the case.

Rice was utterly inept as George W. Bush's national security adviser, acknowledging after the 9/11 attacks that she was an old-school Kremlinogist who was not focused on Al Qaeda and other contemporary threats.  She was a mediocrity as secretary of state, spending four years telling leaders of states not in sync with the Bush-Cheney axis that if they didn't make nice the U.S. would bomb them.  

With Condi on the ticket, Romney would own the Bush record -- the eight darkest years in modern American history -- and he of course wanted to do no such thing.  Which is why he did not call attention to a fundraiser for him hosted by Dick Cheney at his Wyoming home last week. After all, the former vice president remains the most loathed man in America.

Oops!  It turns out Condi is pro-choice and Romney had vowed to choose an anti-choice running mate.  It should be noted that she does, however, play a mean classical piano.  By the way, the Condi boomlet last less than 72 hours.

* * * * *

Many prospective voters tell pollsters that they don't give a fig if Romney is a 1 percenter and did some not-so-nice things to mom-and-pop businesses, including outsourcing and, it turns out, offshoring to our dear comrades in China. 

But with every passing week Romney's mantra that It's The Economy, Stupid gets trampled he slowly loses ground on the issue while the economy slowly -- okay, painfully slowly -- gains ground.

With every passing week that he refuses to address other issues like health-care reform, deficit reduction and immigration head on, he cedes a little more of an edge to Obama in swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida where those crucial independent voters tell the same pollsters that they aren't buying Romney's embrace of the tired,decades old Republican economic formula of further lowering taxes on the wealthy while emancipating Wells Fargo and other bankstas from onerous regulations designed to try to deep them in line.

Asks the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol puts it: "Is it too much to ask Mitt Romney to get off autopilot and actually think about the race he’s running?"

Photo by Nicholas Kamm/Getty

Cartoon du Jour

Deep Cover via Go Comics

Moral Calculus & Joe Pa: Championships Do Not Counterbalance Sexual Predation

A lot of people believe that late great Penn State football coach Joe Paterno was neither villain nor saint.  I held to that view after the initial revelations that Jerry Sandusky, his longtime defensive coordinator, was a serial pedophile and that the university and possibly Paterno himself had engineered a cover-up in an effort to protect the university's image.  But with the drip, drip, drip of revelations since then and the release today of a damning 267-page report that found Paterno and senior officials failed for more than a decade to take any steps to protect Sandusky's young victims, I have changed my mind.

National championships do not counterbalance sexual abuse, and Paterno's accomplishments and legacy no longer matter to me.  That he, a Roman Catholic as is Sandusky, could not summon the moral strength to do the right thing and instead deliberately and repeated concealed facts about Sandusky's predatory behavior speaks volumes about the man he really was.  A craven coward for whom image was everything  ("Success with honor" was his motto) and sodomized boys were not to be fretted over.

“Our most saddening and sobering finding is the total disregard for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims,” said Louis J. Freeh, the former federal judge and director of the FBI who oversaw an investigation belatedly ordered by the university's board of trustees. “The most powerful men at Penn State failed to take any steps for 14 years to protect the children who Sandusky victimized."

“In order to avoid the consequences of bad publicity," the most powerful leaders of Penn State University "repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky’s child abuse from the authorities, the board of trustees, the Penn State community and the public at large.”

A new and central finding of the Freeh investigation is that Paterno knew as far back as 1998 that there were concerns Sandusky might be behaving inappropriately with children.

Freeh also confirmed a CNN report two weeks ago about an email in which the high-ranking administration officials planned to tell the Pennsylvania Department of Welfare of a 2001 incident involving Sandusky sexually abusing a boy in a football team locker room shower. After having a conversation with Paterno, it was recommended that they offer Sandusky "professional help" and if he cooperated, then they wouldn't report him. .

Campus police pursued a claim by a mother that her son had been molested by Sandusky in a shower at Penn State, but their investigation stalled because of the lack of cooperation from Paterno and high ranking university officials. The report asserts that Paterno not only knew of the investigation, but followed it closely.

Paterno, in denial to the end, wrote in a letter he had prepared but was not published before his January death that whatever the failings in the Sandusky affair — his or the university's — it did not constitute a "football scandal."

The Paterno family, in an attempt to blunt the force of the critical findings, had issued a statement on Tuesday that sought to undermine the fairness of the investigation.  They too are now complicitous in the horror that will forever tarnish the place called Happy Valley.

Sandusky, who clung to the fiction that he and his victims had merely engaged in horseplay, last month was convicted of 45 counts of sexual abuse. The jury found he had attacked young boys at his home, on the Penn State campus and at other locations over many years, while one of his adopted sons came forward and revealed that his father had repeatedly abused him, as well. 

The fallout from the report is likely to be substantial.

Penn State would seem to be liable and lawsuits by Sandusky’s victims are likely. The university’s multi-million dollar sports merchandise franchise has taken a hit, while he president of Nike Inc. said today that he has decided to change the name of the Joe Paterno Child Development Center, a child care facility at the company’s headquarters.

Oh, and by the way, it is time to take down the statue of Paterno that sits outside of Beaver Stadium.  Now.

Photograph by Paul Vathis/The Associated Press