Did Mitt Romney leave Bain Capital in 1999, or later, perhaps as late as 2002? The answer matters for a couple of reasons:
1. Bain outsourced thousands of U.S. jobs overseas after 1999 — which Romney, understandably, would like not to be associated with. If Romney wasn’t around after 1999, he can say his hands are clean (though he continued to earn profits from Bain stock and investments up until ... er, right now ... ).
Illinois U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., one of the steadiest and most reliable Democratic votes in the House of Representatives, has been out of sight for more than a month, being treated for a mood disorder at a residential facility, God knows where. So naturally there’s tons of talk about what this means, the suffering of his constituents during his absence and even chatter about the congressman’s possible resignation.
I’m thinking: Seriously? Poor Junior has to carry the burden of his old man around every day of his life, and now he can’t get medical help without the whole world speculating about his condition and his future?
My advice? Take it easy, Congressman. Get well. There’s absolutely no hurry. Here’s why:
You’ve probably heard by now that Mitt Romney and the Republicans have swept the fundraising floor with Barack Obama and the Dems for the second month in a row, beating them this time by a whopping $35 million.
"People understand that the path that President Obama is taking us on is one of socialism,” said Daniel Dumezich, one of the Mitt’s Hoosier fundraising co-chairs. "If he keeps advancing the causes of illegal aliens and those kinds of issues, then I think, yes, Gov. Romney will keep raising more money.”
Enrique Peña Nieto will likely survive the post-election scandal brewing about his party, the PRI, having bought and given away more than $5 million of gift cards in exchange for votes, but he’s not going to have it easy no matter what. Peña Nieto won with only 38 percent of the vote -- and the PRI actually lost seats in Congress. (A partial recount is underway.)
In other words, a full 62 percent of Mexicans voted for somebody else.
And, you know, maybe for good reasons.
Or weird ones.
Here are five truly strange things about this man.
This morning, like thousands of other Chicagoans, I woke to the Chicago Tribune’s story essentially threatening to fire Pulitzer Prize winner Clarence Page, the paper’s most visible African-American writer and arguably one of its most popular staffers, both among the Trib’s readers and his colleagues.
My impulse, I confess, is to redeem John Roberts after today’s decision on the Affordable Care Act. I want to thank him for his role in letting stand the law that will very likely be the only reason my family and I have decent healthcare in the future. I turn 56 today, with not a few pre-existing conditions; I freelance for work and have no fixed salary; and my son is only seven months old.
I want to say that I knew Roberts would come through in the clutch, that when faced with the kind of life and death choice this decision presented for so many people, that the core values we both learned in the same idyllic Midwestern town were going to come through.
I asked Chris Bergin, a veteran immigration attorney with the Shiller/Preyar Law Office, about what directives the Supreme Court had laid out when it upheld today Arizona’s “papers please” section of the state’s controversial immigration law.
Here’s the deal, as Bergin explains:
*Section 2(B) allows state and local law enforcement to make a reasonable attempt to determine the immigration status of a person stopped, detained or arrested on some other legitimate basis, if "reasonable suspicion" exists that the person is illegally in the U.S.
But there are three limits on this section:
President Obama’s people can insist all they want that his recent move to direct Homeland Security to defer deportation for DREAMers — young undocumented people who had no say in being brought to this country by their parents — is not political, but, frankly, that’s pure crap.
In fact, it’s about as political a move as Obama has made since he’s been in the White House. On March 28 of last year, the president himself rejected the idea that he could do exactly what he just did.
“With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case,” he said at a town hall meeting sponsored by Univisión, the largest Spanish-language network in the U.S. “There are laws on the books that Congress has passed.”
