Republicans Game Out Life After ‘Obamacare’
Jim Bakker Now Hawking Survivalist Gear
Fred Davis, Joe Ricketts Disavow Rev. Wright Proposal
TPM Editors’ Blog Opinions, Context & Ideas from TPM Editors
Saverin to USA: Catchya, Suckas
Eduardo Saverin just released a statement which was first interpreted as pledging to pay the taxes he had renounced his citizenship to avoid. But it actually means just the opposite and amount to pushback and goodbye to the USA.
Chilling
Most disturbing part of this new Drudge story is that President Obama was apparently once repped by the same literary agent as New Kids on the Block.
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The Golden Ticket?
Will Republicans ride the Citizens United SUV all the way to the White House? The numbers are looking daunting.
The ‘Ex-PATRIOT’ Act (Really)
Democrats unveil new bill to target tax dodgers like Facebook’s Eduardo Saverin.
Long Live The Disco Queen
A photo of Donna Summer, who died today, from her heyday.
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Remember Him
Archetypal disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker is back – now hawking apocalyptic survivalist gear on the web. Including full body cleanses!
When Is a Website Not a Website?
My conversation with Niemanlab about TPM’s return to original video and when I realized that TPM is no longer a website.
We’re Still Doing This?
Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall on opposing the judicial nomination of a gay man: “Sodomy is not a civil right.”
Stick A Pin In This
RNC on whether Arizona is in play in the Obama-Romney race: “If something does turn, and we need to start putting resources there, we are ready to do so. But there are absolutely no plans to put resources into Arizona right now.”
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Trouble
For the second time this year, the Missouri National Guard is investigating one of its soldiers for alleged connections to racist groups.
We Shan’t See Him Again
Saverin likely to be barred from re-entering US.
TPM Morning Poll Update
The TPM Poll Average this morning stands at Obama 45.1%, Romney 44.6% – a .5% margin for Obama.
Other top numbers from PollTracker.
TPM Poll Average, North Carolina: Romney +.2.7.
TPM Poll Average, New Hampshire: Obama +10.1.
TPM Poll Average, Virginia: Obama +8.8.
TPM Poll Average, Massachusetts Senate: Warren +.2.
Senators Announce Crackdown on Saverin
It looks like Sens. Schumer and Casey are moving to make sure that Eduardo Saverin really does pay a pretty hefty price for ditching his US citizenship to duck US taxes.
Read More →Birther Congressman Gone Wild
Colorado Congressman Mike Coffman (R) goes on birther rant against the president at fundraiser. Listen.
It’s All Good
Mitt Romney: JP Morgan’s $2 billion loss was someone else’s $2 billion gain.
Stung Hard
A new public corruption case bubbling up in, of all places, Arizona …
Saverin: This Had Nothing To Do With Taxes
Eduardo Saverin tells the Times his decision to renounce his US citizenship had nothing to do with US taxes. “This had nothing to do with taxes. I was born in Brazil, I was an American citizen for about 10 years. I thought of myself as a global citizen.”
He Was Warned
It sounds like consular officials in Singapore would have made very clear to Eduardo Saverin that he faced being barred for life from the USA.
Read More →Buh-Bye
Over recent days we’ve been following the story of Eduardo Saverin, the co-founder of Facebook, now residing in Singapore, who has renounced his citizenship to avoid the big time tax bill that would have come with the Facebook IPO windfall. But will Saverin ever be able to set in the US again?
Read More →Crosstabs: Episode 2
In today’s Crosstabs, TPM Poll Editor Kyle Leighton looks at the key demographic groups Obama and Romney are fighting over for November.
To view full sized video, click here.
Dems Unveil Bill To Crack Down On Tax Dodgers Like Facebook's Saverin
New legislation announced Thursday aims to crack down on Americans who renounce their citizenship in order to avoid paying taxes. It would force them to pay a 30 percent tax on all future U.S. investments and prohibit them from ever setting foot in the country again.
Does The Missouri National Guard Have A White Supremacist Problem?
For the second time this year, the state’s guard is looking into a member’s alleged white supremacist ties.
Most Recent Latest news stories from TPM reporters
Saverin: Criticism Of My Tax-Dodging Move ‘Unfortunate’
Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin defended himself Thursday from harsh criticism for his decision to renounce his U.S. citizenship in time to avoid paying a large sum in taxes. In a statement to TPM from his spokesman Tom Goodman, Saverin strongly hinted that he does not intend to pay U.S. capital gains taxes on the earnings from Facebook’s initial public offering – projected between $60 million and $100 million. “My decision to expatriate was based solely on my interest in…
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Merkley: Reid’s Got My Back On Filibuster Reform
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid raised eyebrows a week ago when, in a moment of frustration on the Senate floor, he acknowledged that he was mistaken to quash his junior members’ effort early last year to rein in abuse of the filibuster. Many observers assumed that Reid – a fierce protector of Senate traditions – was either bluffing or exasperated and would quickly reverse course. But one of the leaders of the failed filibuster reform effort notes that Reid has publicly…
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How The Jeremiah Wright Trial Balloon Crashed And Burned
Some Republicans still believe that if John McCain had wielded the incendiary Rev. Jeremiah Wright against Barack Obama in 2008, he might have been elected president. But a fierce backlash Thursday after the New York Times revealed a GOP super PAC was revisiting the possibility of using Wright in anti-Obama ads may have been the final nail in the coffin for that line of attack. The Times detailed how a Republican billionaire and a group of strategists were mulling a…
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Forget Jeremiah Wright: Democrats’ Real Worry Is GOP Money
The surprise return of Reverend Jeremiah Wright to the 2012 campaign as part of hypothetical plan to paint President Obama as a “metrosexual black Abe Lincoln” may be an amusing story, but it’s a sideshow to the real takeaway of the week: Republicans’ impressive fundraising. In 2008, Obama dominated John McCain with unprecedented campaign cash, too much to spend effectively at once, leading to luxuries like a half-hour network infomercial in the final stretch. But Democrats are…
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White House: Senate Budget That Failed 99-0 Wasn’t Ours
Facing a barrage of attacks after a version of President Obama’s budget failed 99-0 in the Senate, the White House pushed back Thursday with a simple response: Hold your horses, that wasn’t actually our budget. The White House faced harsh criticism from conservatives and liberals after the vote on the budget, which was put forth by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and used spending targets from Obama’s budget proposal offered earlier this year. A similar bill by Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC)…
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Why An Adverse Supreme Court ‘Obamacare’ Ruling Puts Republicans In A Tough Spot
If the Supreme Court overturns part or all of President Obama’s health care law, House Republicans will find themselves on the horns of a dilemma. They will be implicitly responsible not just for the demise of the individual insurance mandate and other unpopular parts of the Affordable Care Act, but also its popular provisions and the return of some of the insurance industry’s harshest practices, like discriminating against people with pre-existing medical conditions. RecentNew York…
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Dems Unveil Bill To Crack Down On Tax Dodgers Like Facebook’s Saverin
New legislation announced Thursday aims to crack down on Americans who renounce their citizenship in order to avoid paying taxes. It would force them to pay a 30 percent tax on all future U.S. investments and prohibit them from ever setting foot in the country again. The “Ex-PATRIOT Act” was unveiled in the Capitol by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Bob Casey (D-PA), who made no secret that bill was inspired by Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook co-founder who is in the news after…
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Fallen Televangelist Jim Bakker Now Hawking Apocalyptic Survivalist Gear On The Web
What kind of gift can you get for the budding survivalist in your life? How about a great big Jim Bakker food bucket. The disgraced televangelist is now hawking survivalist gear and books about the apocalypse on his website almost 20 years after he was released from prison on a conviction of bilking followers out of millions of dollars. Back from the evangelical wilderness, Bakker now tapes a daily TV show from the rolling Ozarks of Missouri and uses his website to pitch what he,Ed A …
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Virginia GOPer Who Opposed Gay Judge: ‘Sodomy Is Not A Civil Right’ (VIDEO)
Virginia Delegate and Republican Senate candidate Bob Marshall, who led the battle against the judicial nomination of an openly gay Richmond prosecutor, appeared on CNN Thursday and defended his position, saying, among other arguments, that “sodomy is not a civil right” and that he was worried how a gay judge would rule in the case of a “bar room fight between a homosexual and heterosexual.”
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Facebook’s Eduardo Saverin Likely Barred From Re-Entering U.S.
Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s decision to renounce his U.S. citizenship just in time to avoid a large tax payment essentially means he will not be able to re-enter the United States again, immigration experts tell TPM. “There’s a specific provision of immigration law that says that a former citizen who officially renounces citizenship, and is determined to have renounced it for the purpose of avoiding taxation, is excludable,” said Crystal Williams, executive director of the…
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Hertz and IBM Launch Smart Microgrid for Electric Car-Sharing
By Tina Casey IBM’s Ehningen Innovation Center campus in Germany is about to become ground zero for the development of an advanced personal transportation system that combines Hertz’s car sharing know-how with distributed renewable energy, electric vehicles and smart microgrid technology. The new system, announced earlier this week, will piggyback on an existing car sharing agreement between the Ehningen campus and nearby Stuttgart Airport, through Hertz’s online self-service…
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Senate Republicans Stumble On Student Loans
In an awkward move Wednesday, Senate Republicans voted overwhelmingly for two GOP-written budgets that would each let student loan interest rates spike in July, even as they insist they want to avert such an outcome. Budget measures by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) went down 41-58 and 42-57, respectively. Both let Stafford loan rates double from 3.4 to 6.8 percent, which President Obama and Democrats have been pushing to prevent. Mitt Romney and GOP leaders say…
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Republicans Have Emergency Plan To Defend Arizona In The Fall
Democrats and the Obama campaign continue to insist Arizona is on the list of potential Obama pickups in November. Republicans continue to insist that idea is lunacy. But Republicans are now hedging on earlier assertions that the Grand Canyon State is a pipe dream for Democrats. The Republican National Committee told TPM Wednesday that they consider Arizona in the same category as Missouri and Indiana – states that seem safely red, but can’t be ignored. Republicans have an…
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Missouri National Guard Investigates Another Soldier’s Alleged Racist Ties
For the second time this year, officials with the Missouri National Guard are investigating whether a white supremacist has been serving in their midst. In March, officials accused a Missouri guardsman of participating in neo-Nazi activities while also serving in the military’s honor guard, which routinely helped pay last respects at funerals for veterans who fought in WWII. The sergeant was fired from the honor guard after former coworkers said he kept a picture of Adolf Hitler in…
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FBI Snags Arizona Republican-Turned-Democrat In Ticket-Bribery Sting
Update: May 16, 2012, 7:37 PM A three-year undercover FBI operation has nabbed an Arizona Democrat who allegedly accepted thousands of dollars’ worth of tickets to sporting and charity events in exchange for advancing the interests of a fake real estate company in Tempe. Ben Arredondo, 63, was charged by a federal grand jury with bribery, fraud, attempted extortion and making false statements to FBI agents. The Republican-turned-Democrat allegedly received over $6,000 in tickets…
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Senate Republicans Vote Overwhelmingly For Controversial GOP Budget
Nearly all Senate Republicans joined their House colleagues in risky territory Wednesday by voting in support of the controversial GOP budget, authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) – a blueprint for the country’s future that has become a political lightning rod and a defining document for the 2012 elections. Among its most contentious features, the plan would phase out the existing Medicare program and replace it with a subsidized private insurance system for seniors; dramatically slash …
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Widow Unnerved By James O’Keefe Voter Fraud Stunt
“If he were my son I would spank him.” That’s how the widow of a North Carolina man whose name was presented at a polling station by an activist working with James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas responded to a video the group released this week showing an individual using her deceased husband’s name. As Media Matters points out, Michael Bolton, Jr. – a very much alive son of the widow who spoke to TPM – is registered to vote at the same address as his recently deceased father. The poll …
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Obama Order Looks To Deter Disruptions In Yemen
An executive order issued by President Obama today authorizes sanctions against people and entities who “obstruct” Yemen’s political transition, the latest sign of the administration’s increased focus on the country. The order allows the Treasury Department, in consultation with the Secretary of State, to seize the U.S.-based assets, or assets that come under the control of a U.S. person or entity, of anyone who has “engaged in acts that directly or indirectly threaten the peace,The…
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Biden To Ohio Workers: Romney Doesn’t ‘Get Who We Are’
Mitt Romney just doesn’t get it. That’s the message Vice President Joe Biden drilled in to a crowd in eastern Ohio Wednesday, playing up his working-class roots. “They don’t get us. They don’t get who we are,” Biden bellowed. “My mother and father dreamed as much as any rich guy dreams.” “Absolutely,” a man in the audience volunteered. In a passionate speech at M7 Technologies, an advanced manufacturing facility in Youngstown, Biden used his own working-class roots – his family…
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National Coalition For Men Endorses GOP Version Of VAWA Bill
House GOP legislation to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act got an unexpected endorsement Tuesday – one that Democrats couldn’t be happier with. In a letter to all members, provided to TPM by Democratic aides, the president of the National Coalition for Men, wrote to endorse the House GOP’s VAWA bill over a Senate-passed counterpart that extends the laws protections to same-sex couples, immigrants, and native American women (you can read the full letter here): “The Houseand…
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