Paul Ryan is like opie of the damned. Man, just ascend already. Lawrence O'Donnell thinks that Romney got Swiss bank account amnesty.(He used a lot more words than that, as always.)

opie of the damned

HAH. Brilliant, erika!

Ftr, despite copping to voting for Nixon, I don't think Ron Howard would do any of that other stuff. But it seems to me with the checked shirts and making sure you look everyone in the eye and all that, that is what he is trying to evoke. That nice paperboy you tip at Christmas that suddenly turns on you when you get groped by another paperboy,

I'm thinking more Eddie Haskel than Opie.

Erika,

(forgive me for getting into Romney's lack of producing tax returns), I know Lawrence O'D thinks Romney took the Swiss account bank amnesty - but is that a big enough problem NOT to release taxes? It seems like there would be other problems in there for them to take all these heat.

I think Reid is on to something. I think Romney's tax rate is very very low. Perhaps not actually zero, but very very low. I would not be surprised if he paid under 10% or under 5%.

So I think the following: a) his unexplainable IRA being hundreds of millions of dollars. How the fuck did he manage that? b) the Swiss amnesty c) the (presumably) low paid tax rate; d) most of his money is likely overseas. I don't know what I think about the address shenanigans when he was trying to establish residency in MA to run for governor. He amended his taxes, so I assume he took care of that shit, so I can't think that is the heart of it.

I will never understand why he didn't clean up his finances in recent years since he has been running for president forever. You give me a 3-4 year heads up and I could clean up just about anything.

There's also this theory: [link]

That's part of the address shenanigans though. The only problem he would really have is if he voted in Utah and MA close together. He already established residency in MA to the satisfaction of the MA election board, so I am not sure I buy the election fraud theory.

Hubby was once working surveys using a voter registration list in Colorado. He got a George Bush and was idly wondering what it must be like to have the same name as the President--until the Secret Service agent who answered the phone demanded to know how he got that number and ordered him to get his supervisor on the line.

All Hubby could think was it a vacation home or something, and he declined to speculate on why the President was registered to vote in Colorado.

O'Donnell may be partially right(Nobody knows as much as he thinks he does, ever.) but basically that just adds to his rich-guy justice and Scrooge McDuck optics problems he's already got. But combine it with Reid being either exactly right(or proportionally so)...you're right, there must be a LOT of shit in there. Plus, probably some more stuff for Ann that would make the easiest feature story/soundbite in the world...so easy a stenographer could do it. He's...not very good at this campaign stuff...it's like he thought he'd just stomp around Iowa for a while, notice the foliage in New England in the fall, and they'd give him the keys as if 1600 were just some villa he rented.

I've come to think people are missing something in connection with the Todd Akin "legitimate rape" remarks, and I'd like to run it by here. Not least because, if I'm way off base, people will tell me so politely as a well-meaning (if clueless) man as opposed to someone with ill will.

Somewhere or other, I heard someone defend Akin along the lines of "punish the rapist, not the child." But it seems to me that the no-abortion-in-rape line punishes the victim far more than anything else.

First, if she becomes pregnant, the victim is forced to spend every minute of the next 9 months with a reminder of the crime committed against her. And, above and beyond that, for 5 or so of those months, her situation is obvious to any passing stranger she meets F2F. While the passing stranger wouldn't necessarily be aware that the woman was raped, any person that she sees with any degree of regularity is likely to realize that she was raped. (Unless there's a significant other to pose as biological father.) Which is likely (not least because of the -- may I call it societal baggage? -- surrounding rape) to create significant awkwardnesses. Not least because, under the Akin reasoning, the pregnancy itself proves that she wasn't "really" raped.

When the baby is born, the situation may become even worse. As I understand the law (and any expertise I had dates back to the 1980s, so things could easily have changed even if my memory is accurate, which it may not be), both parents have to give up parental rights before adoption can occur without a potentially messy courtroom battle. Or the woman can keep the baby, which means the rapist is on the hook for 18 years of child support. Which means that the rapist may be a significant part of his victim's life for the next 19 years (again, unless the woman can persuade a court to terminate the rapist's parental rights), and there isn't a lot the victim can do about it.

Is my logic missing anything?