Harry Reid's Other Bold, Badass Moment

Harry Reid has been speaking up quite a bit lately. While the media are still running in circles over what he's been saying about Mitt Romney's tax records, he made even more news when talking about an issue that affects the entire planet. And yesterday, he didn't hold back.



And here's the ultimate kicker.

The seriousness of this problem is not lost on your average American. A large majority of people finally believe climate change is real, and that it is the cause of extreme weather. Yet despite having overwhelming evidence and public opinion on our side, deniers still exist, fueled and funded by dirty energy profits.

These people aren't just on the other side of this debate. They're on the other side of reality.

It's time for us all – whether we're leaders in Washington, members of the mea, scientists, academics, environmentalists or utility industry executives –to stop acting like those who ignore the crisis or deny it exists entirely have a valid point of view. They don't.

Virtually every respected, independent scientist in the world agrees the problem is real, and the time to act is now. Not tomorrow. Not a week from now. Not next month or next year. We must act today.

As Americans, we have the power to choose the kind of world in which we live. Every decision we make – large and small – matters. Some choices are as simple as turning off the light when you leave the room. Others are more ambitious -- such as committing the Department of Defense, the largest energy consumer in the world, to transition to clean, renewable energy.

But every choice has benefits -- or consequences.

And we all know he's so right about this.

We have discussed the powerful potential of clean energy that we can unleash to renew our economy and create more & better jobs. We have also discussed the frightening reality of climate change. We can no longer afford to ignore either.

Even the "Tea Party, Inc." funded climate study concluded that climate change is real, and that it's happening at a more accelerated pace than scientists had earlier expected. The scientific consensus is now even more overwhelming than ever before. July was the hottest month on record. Yes, that's right. Just last month, our planet had the hottest month on record!

So if anyone takes issue with what Harry Reid said yesterday, one is certainly not basing it on science.

This is why it's so refreshing to see Harry Reid speak out like this. Once and for all, we need to cut the "climate denial" crap and acknowledge reality. And then, we need to start taking action!

As Senator Reid said yesterday, now is the time to end our addiction to dangerous fossil fuels. The Reid-Gardner coal plant has to go, along with other fossil fuel relics that are holding us back. If we want to succeed in transitioning to a clean, green, lean, & mean economy, we need to cut the crap and take action. And if we want to survive as a human race, we need to cut the crap and take action.

Yes, a Few Rich, Angry, Old White Men DO Want to Buy This Election.

And he's back! Harry Reid has really been showing off his badass side lately. He did it again yesterday when speaking about the Republican filibuster of the DISCLOSE Act.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) warned Monday afternoon that if Congress fails to limit campaign donations from the wealthy, a group of "angry, old white men" with billions of dollars to contribute will be able to determine political outcomes in the United States.

Reid's remarks on the Senate floor set up a vote later in the day on the Disclose Act, which would require companies and groups to report all campaign spending above $10,000. He said Republicans were expected to prevent consideration of the bill.

"Their newfound opposition to transparency makes one wonder who they're trying to protect," Reid said. He then offered the theory that Republicans do not want voters to learn about how they are sourced, and indicated that GOP money comes from a few wealthy contributors.

"Perhaps Republicans want to shield a handful of billionaires willing to contribute nine figures to sway a close presidential election," he said. "If this flood of outside money continues, the day after the election, 17 angry, old white men will wake up and realize they just bought the country."

The Disclose Act is a reaction to the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case, which said the government cannot limit campaign spending by corporations, unions or other groups. Democrats have sought to temper that ruling by requiring these groups to publicly report their campaign spending.

As usual, certain pundits were throwing their hands into the air and screaming about what a horrible thing Harry Reid just said. Does he even know what he's talking about?!

Actually, yes. And I'll explain why. No wait, I already did!

Sheldon Adelson has already dumped tens of MILLIONS of dollars into pro-Romney and pro-Congressional Republican Super PACs. In addition to "Mr. Macau Megabucks", Romney has lined up even more corporate titans to bundle for his campaign. Yet while they're raising money for Romney, he refuses to tell us who they are and how much they're giving.

Here's the problem. As Desert Beacon warned us yesterday, we're seeing elections turn into auctions. This is not what our Founders had ever intended.

It's horrifying enough that we now live in an era when a few ultra-rich individuals and multinational corporations can spend as much as they want to buy elections. It's even scarier that we don't know the full picture of who's actually giving how much to what. In a rational environment, the DISCLOSE Act is just basic common sense. It's really the least that can be done to help us figure out who's behind the shadowy attack ads popping up on our TVs, tablets, and mailboxes.

But apparently, Capitol Hill is no longer a rational environment. And common sense is now being vilified for overly political reasons. I'll let Kevin Drum explain this.

The DISCLOSE Act was initially a response to the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, which permitted unlimited contributions to independent expenditure groups but explicitly allowed Congress to require disclosure of those contributions. From the very start, though, the DISCLOSE Act was opposed more-or-less unanimously by Republicans. The thing is, disclosure had always been something of a fig leaf for them, a way of demonstrating that they had a reasonable policy alternative to contribution limits. But once they had the Supreme Court on their side, making contribution limits a dead letter, they suddenly didn't need the fig leaf anymore and support for disclosure evaporated. That happened the very first time the DISCLOSE Act was introduced in 2010, and it's been the solid Republican position ever since. It really doesn't have anything to do with the current campaign season.

But that's not the whole story. The current Republican position is not merely that Democrats want to "shame" rich donors, but that Barack Obama has compiled a Nixonian "enemies list" and is secretly using the full power of the United States government to harrass and intimidate anyone who dares to oppose him. Because of this, it only stands to reason that America's richest and most powerful citizens need to keep their campaign contributions in the shadows. Whether the Republican leadership has actually talked themselves into believing this fantasy, or merely trots it out to gull the Fox News set, is anyone's guess.

Ironically enough, "Senator by Appointment Only" Dean Heller was too busy "campaigning" to even bother voting on the DISCLOSE Act yesterday. How funny. So for Heller, campaign finance reform is only important when he distorts Shelley Berkley's record in his attack ads to make himself look better? OK, whatever.

I just wonder what Dean Heller and Mitt Romney will say to each other when Romney returns to Reno on August 3. It's supposedly his last trip to Northern Nevada before the election. And of course, it's for an uber-exclusive very-high-dollar fundraiser full of rich, angry, old white men (with a few of those women folk allowed in).

Why Harry Reid Busted Mitt Romney

There he goes again. When Harry Reid gets badass, the Beltway press corps have to pay attention. So of course, he's making them pay attention to this.

“[Mitt Romney] not only couldn’t be confirmed as a cabinet secretary, he couldn’t be confirmed as dog catcher,” Reid told reporters at a Capitol press briefing, in response to a question from TPM. “Because a dog catcher, you’re at least going to want to look at his income tax returns.”

“The long report that we have in the Boston Globe today indicates that, as one of his own employees said, it doesn’t make sense,” Reid continued. “He said he left Bain to go to the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and stopped any association with Bain. But his SEC filings indicated that he was Chief Executive Officer, sole stockholder, and ran the corporation for at least 3 more years. And that’s why people who say there’s been advertisements where businesses were closed, people laid off - and he says oh I wasn’t there, I left in 1999. As his own operative said, it doesn’t make sense. And it doesn’t.”

Reid said the issue is important because Bain was accused of being involved with outsourcing jobs in those ensuing years, and Romney’s campaign has argued that he had left by then.

Senator Reid was talking about this explosive Boston Globe story debunking Mitt Romney's claim that he wasn't in charge of Bain Capital when his company began massive layoffs early last decade. While Romney claimed he left Bain in 1999, the documents Bain Capital filed with the SEC listed Romney as 100% owner and CEO, and that Romney earned a $100,000 annual salary in 2001 and 2002 on top of his Bain investment earnings.

So why does this matter? Here's why.



Need more details? Read this from Kevin Drum.

SEC documents show that he was CEO and owner of the firm between 1999 and 2002. In a political context, there's just no way to weasel your way around that, and Romney is going to look increasingly weaselly if he tries. Your average Joe sees a multi-gazillionaire trying to claim that he was only technically CEO and isn't reponsible for what happened during his technical CEO-ship. That's like a Mafia don taking the Fifth. It's not going to fly, especially from a guy who's constantly yammering away about personal reponsibility and accountability.

So Romney has a problem, and he'd better figure out a better way of dealing with it than releasing increasingly tortured explanations of the definition of "CEO." Voters want a president who takes responsibility, not one who tries to blame other people when something goes wrong.

And while we're on the subject, check out David [Corn's] latest piece on Bain's investment in a Chinese manufacturing company that "depended on US outsourcing for its profits—and that explicitly stated that such outsourcing was crucial to its success." This happened in 1998, when Romney was unequivocally in charge. This stuff is piling up, and it doesn't look very salt-of-the-earth to those independent blue-collar voters Romney is so anxious to court. He'd better figure out an answer.

And speaking of David Corn's explosive Mother Jones article, it reveals even more lurid details on what Mitt Romney was doing at Bain Capital... And another outfit that's just starting to make headlines.

On April 17, 1998, Brookside Capital Partners Fund, a Bain Capital affiliate, filed a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission noting that it had acquired 6.13 percent of Hong Kong-based Global-Tech Appliances, which manufactured household appliances in a production facility in the industrial city of Dongguan, China. That August, according to another SEC filing,Brookside upped its interest in Global-Tech to 10.3 percent. Both SEC filings identified Romney as the person in control of this investment: "Mr. W. Mitt Romney is the sole shareholder, sole director, President and Chief Executive Officer of Brookside Inc. and thus is the controlling person of Brookside Inc." Each of these documents was signed by Domenic Ferrante, a managing director of Brookside and Bain. [...]

At the time Romney was acquiring shares in Global-Tech, the firm publicly acknowledged that its strategy was to profit from prominent US companies outsourcing production abroad. On September 4, 1998, Global-Tech issued a press release announcing it was postponing completion of a $30 million expansion of its Dongguan facility because Sunbeam, a prominent American consumer products company and a major client of Global-Tech, was cutting back on outsourcing as part of an overall consolidation. But John C.K. Sham, Global-Tech's president and CEO, said, "Although it appears that customers such as Sunbeam are not outsourcing their manufacturing as quickly as we had anticipated, we still believe that the long-term trend toward outsourcing will continue." Global-Tech, which in mid-1998 announced fiscal year sales of $118.3 million (an increase of 89 percent over the previous year), also manufactured household appliances for Hamilton Beach, Mr. Coffee, Proctor-Silex, Revlon, and Vidal Sassoon, and its chief exec was hoping for more outsourcing from these and other American firms.

And in case that isn't damning enough...

Brookside downsized its Global-Tech holdings later in 1998. An SEC filing submitted on December 21, 1998, reported that the Bain affiliate now controlled only 4.63 percent of the company's shares. But Brookside was sharing its stake in Global-Tech with Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors LTD—a Bermuda-based corporation of which Romney was the "the sole shareholder, a director, and President." That is, Romney had split his Global-Tech holdings between two of his various business entities. (The SEC filing doesn't indicate why he did that.)

Sankaty is a story in itself. It was recently the focus of an Associated Press investigation that reported that Sankaty "is among several Romney holdings that have not been fully disclosed" and that there is a "mystery surrounding" Sankaty. Reporting on this Romney entity, Vanity Fair noted that "investments in tax havens such as Bermuda raise many questions, because they are in 'jurisdictions where there is virtually no tax and virtually no compliance,' as one Miami-based offshore lawyer put it." With Sankaty, Romney was using a mysterious Bermuda-based entity to invest in a Chinese firm that thrived on US outsourcing.

Wow. This is even worse than I had originally thought. I just knew that Mitt Romney was/is a vulture capitalist who profited from destroying American jobs. Now we know he's caused even more damage to our economy by outsourcing formerly American jobs to China AND by hiding his money in offshore Bermuda based investments!



But really, should we be surprised? This truly is the Mitt Romney way. He makes money while American workers suffer.Desert Beacon warned us back in May. His voodoo economics, as well as his embrace of just plain voodoo emanating from Donald Trump's ass, should have been enough of a warning for us.

And this is why Harry Reid said what he said this morning. Mitt Romney can't be trusted to speak the truth on his own financial records. Mitt Romney can't be trusted to protect American jobs. Mitt Romney can't be trusted to stick to the same position on anything. Is there anything Mitt Romney can be trusted on?

"That's a Clown Question, Bro."

For some reason, the Beltway pundit crowd always gets puzzled whenever Harry Reid gets badass on them.

It’s no secret that Sen. Harry Reid is a fan of Bryce Harper, the 19-year-old slugger from Las Vegas who’s led the Washington Nationals from the butt of capital-city jokes to first place in the National League’s Eastern Division.

But few ever expected the septuagenarian senator would start emulating the phenom teen’s now-infamous quips.

When confronted with a question Reid didn’t feel like answering at his weekly press availability, Reid turned and told a reporter: “That’s a clown question, bro.”

Harper said the same thing to a Canadian reporter last week who asked him if he would celebrate hitting a home run against the Toronto Blue Jays with a beer. Harper is above the legal drinking age in Canada.

Reid invoked Harper’s line when a reporter asked him what he thought of Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, saying the Republicans were going to wait to fully respond to President Barack Obama’s announcement last Friday that DREAM-Act eligible youth could start applying for work visas until Mitt Romney presented his response.

And apparently, they're further confounded by "Abuelito" Reid's ability to shame the G-O-TEA by simply unmasking their crazed extremism. They just didn't know how to handle President Obama's recent announcement on immigration policy, so they clumsily tried to spin away their filibusters against the DREAM Act. I guess they figured that was their least bad option, since they're winning over no new supporters with their xenophobia.

Someone must have told them to wake up and smell the polling.

The latest poll from Bloomberg was conducted after the president’s June 15 directive, which applies to undocumented immigrants under 30 years old who were brought to the United States before the age of 16, have been in the country for at least five years and graduated from high school, earned a GED or served in the military. In the nationwide survey, 64 percent of likely voters agree with the president’s decision, while 30 percent disagree. Sixty-six percent of independents — a crucial portion of the electorate that will likely decide the presidential race — support the policy.

Although Obama insisted that he bypassed Congress to advance the policy because it was “the right thing to do,” it is hard to ignore the political shrewdness of the move. The policy could prove to be a galvanizing force among the nation’s largest ethnic minority group. A poll on Monday showed Latino voters in five swing states are much more enthusiastic about Obama in the wake of the move.

Obama has also placed his general election opponent in a political quandary. Mitt Romney, who took a hardline position on immigration during the Republican nomination contest, has actively avoided the issue since the president’s Friday announcement. The presumptive Republican nominee may now be handcuffed, stuck between potentially alienating his party’s base — the Bloomberg poll shows 56 percent of Republicans oppose the president’s policy — and disenchanting a voting bloc whose influence on American elections will only grow. Obama’s move will affect upwards of 800,000 undocumented immigrants.

This just further complicates Republicans' dilemma. After all, "TEA" fueled radical righties like Romney have been the ones using racism immigration to whip the "tea party" into a frenzy. No matter how hard they try to spin it, that's the reality behind the spin.

And now, they're angry that their anti-immigrant strategy is blowing up in their faces. So what does the G-O-TEA do? Simple, just try to blame someone else and distract with something else...

That is, if Republicans can finally agree on a response. I wonder if Dean Heller will say anything soon. Ah, why even bother? That's such a clown question, bro.