Quickies

The private equity firm run by Tagg Romney—Mitt’s eldest son, who is now taking a leadership role in guiding his father’s presidential campaign—misled reporters last year about its involvement with a company run by men accused of taking part in a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme.

Last year, I reported that Tagg had formed a business partnership with several North Carolina investors who are still facing a lawsuit for receiving bonus pay for selling CDs as part of the $8 billion Stanford Financial Group Ponzi scheme.

In a nutshell, Tagg helped these investors form a company—called Solamere Advisors, a nod to Tagg’s firm Solamere Capital—shortly after their boss, Allen Stanford, was caught by law enforcement for his elaborate Ponzi fraud.

When I interviewed him in Las Vegas, Tagg told me that his associates were “cleared” of any wrongdoing associated with the Stanford Ponzi scheme. Court documents directly contradict Tagg and show that the lawsuit has not been dismissed.

The New York Times followed up on my story with its own report and confirmed that Tagg’s business partners received incentive pay for selling bunk Stanford CDs. They wrote about one Stanford victim, a local Charlotte businessman and philanthropist named Herman Stone. Stone was pressured by Brandon Phillips, an executive working now for Tagg’s firm, into putting $2 million into a fraudulent Stanford CD and lost everything. ...Lee Fang, The Nation

[It gets deeper and dirtier here.]

___

There was a huge economic issue—or, rather, set of issues—that went totally missing from last night's vice presidential debate: Any acknowledgment that a world exists outside the borders of the United States of America. The same thing happened at the first presidential debate, but I thought that might have been a consequence of the outdated artificial separation of domestic and foreign issues. But the veepfest mixed the two together and still missed the entire international economic scene, with the dialogue stuck in a dynamic where the only question to ask about a foreigner is whether or not to drop a bomb on his house. ...Yglesias, Money Box

___

The incumbent is at least incrementally better than his Republican rival on foreign policy. It’s impossible to imagine Romney not having done every bellicose thing that Obama that did in his first term (from ramping up the drone war in Pakistan to participating in the Libya attack), and Romney has promised a great deal more: more brinksmanship with Iran, more baiting of Russian bears and Chinese dragons, more taxpayer dollars for Pentagon pork. For a smaller military budget and the prospect of fewer wars — according to both candidates themselves — a pragmatic anti-empire conservative might lean toward Obama....

... The other thing to keep in mind is the long view: a Republican president means a greater likelihood of Democratic gains the House in 2014. A second Obama term means a good chance of a Republican picking up the White House in 2016, by which time someone much better than Romney might be on the ballot — or perhaps someone much worse. Once more, it’s a question of weighing the probabilities. ...American Conservative, "An intelligent conservative’s guide to the presidential election... "

___

[Biden] found a way to complain about Republican obstructionism without sounding whiny or self-pitying. (“Just get out of the way! Stop talking about how you care about people! Show me something! Show me a policy! Show me a policy where you take responsibility!”) And in the exchange about abortion, he was the voice of ordinary Catholics—attached to the Church as if to his own family, respectful on some personal level to its doctrines but implicitly reserving the right to make his own judgments while explicitly supporting the right of women to make theirs. Biden was like an understanding parish priest. Ryan was more like a callow seminarian eying an assignment on a Cardinal’s staff or a post in Rome.

Biden’s staccato interruptions made it hard for Ryan to develop coherent lines of argument, but Ryan, to his credit, didn’t complain about it. If he thought Biden was out of line, he didn’t show it. He made his points adequately. He stayed calm. He made no big mistakes. He committed no gaffes. He hung in there. He didn’t lose. It wasn’t because of him that Biden won. It was because of Biden. ...Hendrik Hertzberg, New Yorker