Romney "Rented" Mormon Church’s Exemption to Defer Taxes for 15 Years

Mitt Romney may profess to be a devout Mormon, but once again information has come out that suggests that money is his real god.  It also suggests that he must view most tax paying Americans as dolts to be played as suckers.  They pay their taxes while he makes millions yet pays a lower tax rate than most in the middle class.  Worse yet, Romney apparently entered into some sweet deals with the Mormon Church to help screw over Uncle Sam.  It's unbelievable and further proof that Romney sees himself as above the rules that most of us live by.  I seriously do not like the man.  Raw Story has details on Romney's deal with the Mormon Church to avoid paying taxes.  Here are excepts:

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney used a loophole to “rent” the Mormon church’s tax exemption status and defer paying taxes for 15 years, according to a new report. 

Tax returns obtained by Bloomberg News through a Freedom of Information Act request indicated that Romney set up a charitable remainder unitrust (CRUT) in June 1996 just before Congress cracked down on the loophole in 1997.

“In this instance, Romney used the tax-exempt status of a charity — the Mormon Church, according to a 2007 filing — to defer taxes for more than 15 years,” Bloomberg’s Jesse Drucker explained. “At the same time he is benefitting, the trust will probably leave the church with less than what current law requires.”

Estates lawyer Jonathan Blattmachr told Bloomberg that Romney’s trust benefits from the Mormon church’s exempt status because charities don’t pay capital gains taxes when they make a profit from the sale of assets.

“The main benefit from a charitable remainder trust is the renting from your favorite charity of its exemption from taxation,” Blattmachr said, adding that the charitable contribution “is just a throwaway” and the church would receive little if any financial benefit from the trust.  “I used to structure them so the value dedicated to charity was as close to zero as possible without being zero,” he pointed out.

The CRUT allows individuals to “defer capital gains taxes on any profit from the sale of the assets, and receive a small upfront charitable deduction and a stream of yearly cash payments,” Drucker wrote. “Like an individual retirement account, the trust allows money to grow tax deferred, while like an annuity it also pays Romney a steady income. After the funder’s death, the trust’s remaining assets go to a designated charity.”

The trust represents a small fraction of Romney’s more than $250 million fortune and is only one of several methods the formal Bain Capital CEO has employed to avoid paying taxes.

Earlier this year, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), who is also a Mormon, had suggested that the Republican presidential nominee refused to release his tax returns because he had not paid any income taxes over a 10-year period.

“We know that Mitt Romney pays a lower tax rate than middle-class families, thanks to a number of things he’s done: Swiss bank accounts, Cayman Islands tax shelters. And we can only imagine what new secrets would be revealed if he showed the American people a dozen years of tax returns like his dad did.”

Reid noted that most of “those people” who Romney talked about “are not avoiding their tax bills using Cayman Islands tax shelters or Swiss Bank accounts like Mitt Romney. Millions of the 47 percent are seniors on Social Security, who don’t have Bain Capital retirement funds or inherited stock to fall back on.”

The Evangelical Dilemma: Vote for a Mormon or Vote for a Black

The perverse side of me finds some humor in the dilemma facing a number of racist evangelical Christianists:  do they hold their nose and vote for Mitt Romney a Mormon or do they vote for Barack Obama, a black man (assuming, of course, they are not total ignoramuses who believe Obama is a Muslim).   Andrew Sullivan looks at a video previously posted on this blog and the Christianist voter dilemma.  He also underscores the significant differences between Mormon theology and standard Christian theology - and the fact that Mormonism is not what most conservative Christians would even deem to be Christian.    Were America a country where religious belief was a private matter and where one political party, the GOP, did not seek to fuse religion into the party platform, these bigoted voters would not be confronted with this dilemma.  Here are some post highlights:

"Not to shun Mormons, but they teach that Jesus was a man exactly like you or me and that men can become gods. We have traditionally been a Christian nation, and God has blessed us because of that. And now we're going to hand the reins over to a Mormon?" - Ed Seyler, an undecided evangelical voter in Iowa. As the article notes, he is not alone:

Plenty of congregants at Grandview Park Baptist Church face the same predicament: Is it better to vote for a Mormon or to not vote at all? "It's a conundrum," says Smith, the senior pastor, who is personally keen on Romney. "It's tough for a lot of people."

Mainstream Christianity rejects the Mormon theology that God the Father is actually still a physical human being, that Jesus visited the Americas two millennnia ago, that men can become gods, that black people are inherently cursed by God in their DNA, that dead people (especially Jews) can be baptized by proxy, and, most critically, that God is not three-in-one, but three separate entities.

Many may object to my posting video footage of the kind of ceremony that Romney will be extremely familiar with, but which even many Mormons do not get to see. My view is that if you are running for president, transparency is essential.

I don't believe there should be double standards on this, as fervently as I believe that a candidate's religion should be irrelevant in the decision to elect him or her to a secular office. But then, I'm a secularist Christian, and Romney and his party strongly disagree, seeing religion and politics as inseparable. And indeed, in one debate, Romney recently stated, his belief that “We’re all children of the same God."  The trouble is, theologically speaking, and with all due respect for the sincerity of Romney's faith, we are not all children of Romney's version of God. The Christian Trinity is not the Mormon Godhead.

Christianists, willing to overlook the bizarre theology of Mormonism in order to promote the policies most fundamentalists of all types favor: re-criminalizing abortion, stripping gay people of the rights heterosexuals have, and a new war to protect Israel, [will vote for Romney].

I agree with Andrew.  If Romney and the GOP want to dispense civil rights based on whether and to what extent one adheres to certain Christianist religious dogmas, then it is only fair that Romney's religious beliefs and tradition be open game for scrutiny and criticism.

The Rise of Hate in the Age of Obama

I recently wrote a post about the growing level of hate and bigotry that is being disseminated and inflamed by those on the far right and their Christofascist political allies.  Yes, there is incredible vitriol being thrown at LGBT citizens by those who claim to be "godly Christians" and amoral politicians like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.   But gays are not the only targets of this growing wave of hate.  Blacks, Hispanics and other non-whites are likewise targeted, both by the Christofascists and the white supremacists who seem to be more and more prevalent in today's GOP.  Jonathan Capehart has a column in the Washington Post that looks at this disturbing rise of hate.  Here are some column excerpts:

While folks were obsessing over polls that showed their preferred presidential candidate being up or down, I obsessed over a poll that revealed a troubling rise in hatred among the American people. According to a poll for the Associated Press, anti-African American and anti-Hispanic attitudes have grown since the election of the nation’s first black president.

I’m not one of those people who thought sending Barack Obama to the White House would exorcise the nation’s racial demons, that centuries of strife and tribulation would simply melt away with one historic election. But I did hope that some remnants of the the wave of good feeling that swept over the United States between Election Day 2008 and Inauguration Day two months later would remain. How silly of me.
 
In 2008, anti-black attitudes were held by 48 percent of Americans surveyed. Today, that number is 51 percent. When implicit racial attitudes are measured, that statistic jumps to 56 percent. The viewpoint is even worse for Hispanics: A poll done last year showed that anti-Latino attitudes were held by 52 percent of non-Hispanic whites. On the implicit racial attitudes test, the negative views of Hispanics goes to 57 percent.

The sad truth is that the far right and the lily white Christianists have never accepted Obama as the legitimate President of the United States.  And with their support the Republicans have from day one sought to destroy Obama with no regard to the harm they were doing to the country or millions of Americans who could have benefited from legislation blocked by the GOP controlled House of Representatives.   The loss of white privilege and the power to force their religious beliefs on all simply terrifies these people.  As my prior post noted, they are like a cornered wounded animal and they will do all in their power to harm, stigmatize and denigrate those who they perceive to be a threat to their power and control.

For myself, I do not understand the fear and hatred of those who are different be the difference be in terms of skin color, national origin or sexual orientation.  The good news is that within not too many years the white Christofascists and white supremacists will literally be a minority in America and they'd best hope to Hell that the majority doesn't treat them in the vicious manner in which they have treated others.

 

Monday Male Beauty

Battleground Tracking Poll: President Obama Retakes Lead

Besides the bad news that Hurricane Sandy represents for many Americans, there is something to be happy about: a new poll shows that Barack Obama has pulled ahead of Mitt "I'm a lying sack of shit" Romney by 1 percentage point, 49 percent to 48 percent.  Yes, I wish the lead was larger, but it is nonetheless an improvement.  And I hope that voters wake up to the fact that Romney would eliminate federal disaster relief programs as noted in an earlier post today.  Fortunately, women seem  to be trending back towards Obama after initially believing Romney's feigned move towards the center in the first presidential debate.  Here are highlights from Politico:

MARION, Ohio — With eight days to go until the election, President Barack Obama has recaptured a narrow national lead over Mitt Romney, riding increased support from women and an edge in early voting.

A new POLITICO/George Washington University Battleground Tracking Poll of 1,000 likely voters — taken from last Monday through Thursday — shows Obama ahead of Romney by 1 percentage point, 49 percent to 48 percent. That represents a 3-point swing in Obama’s direction from a week ago but reflects a race that remains statistically tied.

Obama leads by 8 points among those who have already voted, 53 percent to 45 percent. These early voters represent 15 percent of the electorate, with many more expected to vote in the next few days

Obama leads among women by 11 points, 54 percent to 43 percent. The gap had narrowed to 6 points a week ago, but much of that survey was conducted before the GOP nominee’s comment at the second debate that he had reviewed “binders full of women” as part of a gender diversity effort as Massachusetts governor. Obama and his allies have also been hitting full swing at Romney as an enemy of women’s rights on abortion and contraception in advertising and speeches.

The president is now closer in standing to where he’s been the past few months, and the swing is due to female support. On every issue and question of character, women now favor Obama over Romney.

While Obama’s overall favorability is roughly the same, 51 percent, he finds himself underwater in the suburbs. Only 44 percent of suburban voters view Obama positively, compared with 54 percent who see him unfavorably. It’s a significantly bigger spread in rural America, but it’s offset by his 65 percent favorability in urban areas.

Obama maintained the 9-point foreign policy advantage he carried into the third and final debate last Monday, which focused on the subject. Asked which candidate has a better foreign policy, Obama is ahead 52 percent to 43 percent.

That debate in Florida also helped the president retake the lead on which candidate is the stronger leader, 49 percent to 46 percent, a 4-point swing his direction from last week. Obama also grew his lead on the question of who “shares your values” from 2 points to 3 points.

Obama retains an edge on other substantive issues. He’s up 2 points on which candidate has the better tax policy, 6 points on who is better for Medicare and 13 points on who stands up more for the middle class.

Video Footage of Romney Spouting Anti-Gay Talking Points

In numerous previous posts I have commented on how I cannot understand how any LGBT American - at least those who are not (i) self-loathing nut cases or (ii) worshiping money and a false promise of tax breaks more than their own dignity - can support Mitt Romney for president.  In addition to being a pathological liar, the man is a flaming homophobe who uses anti-gay talking points that sound as if they were scripted by Maggie Gallagher.   A reporter with the Boston Globe has unearthed video footage of Romney bashing gay parenting while speaking in one case to a far right gathering and in the second to the Senate Judiciary Committee.  In each case, Romney sought to bar recognition of same sex couples as parents.  Michelangelo Signorile has a post on Huffington Post that looks at these videos and the anti-gay batshitery spewing from Romney's lips.   Here are highlights from Michelangelo's piece as well as the videos:

Now, for the first time in this campaign, video has surfaced of Romney making those bigoted claims about gay parents while pushing his heartless policy against their children.

Waas' article revealed how Romney, as governor of Massachusetts, refused to allow birth certificate forms to be reprinted to accommodate the children of gay and lesbian couples, stigmatizing those kids and creating possible hardships for the rest of their lives. Documents Waas unearthed showed how Romney required hospitals to instead cross out "mother" or "father" on the birth certificates of children born to same-sex couples and write in, with a pen, "second parent," and only with the permission of Romney's office.

One of two video clips that Waas has now uploaded to YouTube shows Romney speaking to conservative voters in South Carolina in 2005, as he was testing the waters for a presidential bid, discussing his battle with the Registry of Vital Statistics and Records regarding the birth certificate forms. Romney distorted the Registry of Vital Statistics' plan, which was to change the labeling of boxes on the forms from "father" and "mother" to "father or second parent" and "mother or second parent." He claimed the plan was to change the form to have "Parent A" and Parent B" boxes, when, as the documents Waas obtained show, those terms were not in fact used:

Today, same-sex couples are marrying, under the law, in Massachusetts. Some gays are actually having children born to them. We've been asked to remove the phrase "mother" and "father" and replace it with "parent A" and "parent B." It's not right on paper. It's not right in fact. Every child has the right to have a mother and father.

The second clip, from C-SPAN, includes footage of Romney speaking before the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, D.C., a few months earlier (at the 6:11 mark). In that clip he speaks about child development:

The children of America have the right to have a mother and a father. Of course, even today circumstances can take a parent from the home, but the child still has a mother and a father. If the parents are unmarried or divorced, the child can still visit each of them. If a mother or a father of a child is deceased, the child can learn about the qualities of their departed parent. His or her psychological features can be developed by the contrasting features of both genders. Are we ready to usher in a society indifferent about having mothers and fathers? Will our children be indifferent about a having a mother and father?"

Romney outlined his battle with the Registry of Vital Statistics to the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding changing the birth certificate forms. He defended his position to the Judiciary Committee (and again claimed it was about changing the form to include boxes labeled "parent A" and "parent B" when that was not the case) even as a Massachusetts Department of Health attorney warned that it didn't conform to legal statues and could disadvantage the children later in life, impeding their ability to apply for school and get passports, drivers licenses or other forms of identification, particularly in a post-9/11 world where they might be viewed as security risks with altered birth certificates.

In 2006 Romney went on to stop the publication of an anti-bullying guide for public school students, because the term "bisexual'' and "transgender'' were used in a passage discussing harassment against students.

What seems clear now, looking at Romney's record, in which he made a lot of promises to gays in those early years but never delivered  .  .  .  .  The real Romney is the guy who actually delivered to cultural conservatives and sought to harm the children of gay couples, and who is now running for president with the backing of those very same religious extremists.

Hurricane Sandy - October 29, 2012

UPDATED:  This is a photo of the house taken by a neighbor from across the street:

People may laugh at our homemade flood doors, but, guess what - they work and keep the bulk of the water out.

We definitely dodged a bullet this morning.  Peak high tide has passed and the highest the water got was within about 4-5 inches of coming up over the deck in the back yard.  The water did start leaking into the garage under the flood door to a small extent and happily the new industrial sump pump has kept the water from accumulating in any significant way.  

Perhaps the most maddening thing has been the cretins joy riding up and down the flooded street that cause waves to go out and crash against the houses surrounded by water.  Did the Hampton police do anything to close off the street?  Of course not.  That might involve a shred of common sense.  

The top image is of the backyard looking across the tidal creek.  The first image below is of the side front yard (note the neighbors 3+ foot fence at their driveway is nearly covered).  The bottom image is a scene from the Ghent area of Norfolk a few blocks from my office.  Needless to say, the office is closed today.

Christian Preacher Blames Gays for Hurricane Sandy

It was only a question of time before someone among the self-congratulatory, falsely pious, flat earth believing, modern day Pharisee set blamed Hurricane Sandy on gays.  No doubt with New York City in the storm's cross hairs, gay marriage will be tied into the equation.   I would argue that rather than gays, its the Christofascists themselves who are inviting God's wrath since they embody everything Christ condemned in the Gospels.  In fact, the Biblical Pharisees look like pretty nice folks compared to today's Pharisee set.  Winning the race to be the first knuckle dragging hate merchant to blame Sandy on gay individuals is Internet chaplain John McTernan.  Gaystar News looks at McTernan and his foul bigotry. Here are highlights:

An anti-gay Christian preacher is already blaming Hurricane Sandy on gays.

As the east coast of the United States prepares for the storm, which has already killed 60 people in the Caribbean, author and chaplain John McTernan has decided who is at fault.

On his website Defend Proclaim The Faith, the preacher says the gathering storm must be God’s judgment on gays, and punishing the president Barack Obama for coming out in support of marriage equality.

He believes ever since George Bush Sr signed the Madrid Peace Process to divide the land of Israel in 1991, ‘America has been under God’s judgment since this event.’

McTernan said: ‘Obama is 100% behind the Muslim Brotherhood which has vowed to destroy Israel and take Jerusalem.

‘Both candidates are pro-homosexual and are behind the homosexual agenda. America is under political judgment and the church does not know it!’

Frankly, Ternan sounds like he belongs in a mental hospital.  Yet unfortunately he represents the face of today's form of conservative Christianisty.  If one wants a compelling argument as to why not to be a Christian, look no farther than individuals like Ternan, Tony Perkins, Pat Robertson, Billy Graham (who in his senility is showing his true colors), et al, and the cretins who are their followers.

Romney: Shut Down Federal Disaster Agency, Send Responsibility To The States

With literally millions of Americans huddling in their homes as Hurricane Sandy bears down on them, there is one point that ALL of us need to remember: Mitt Romney would eliminate FEMA and leave disaster relief to the states.  States that have nowhere near the money or ability to handle serious disasters.  In Romneyworld, it's all about spending as little as possible on regular Americans so that he and his fellow plutocrats can pay as little as possible in taxes.  And as for  the rest of us?  We are on our own.  When talking about the 47% of Americans that he holds in contempt, Romney for once was honest when he stated: it's not my job to worry about these people.  So much for the Gospel message to care for others.  I find the man to be morally repulsive.  If it's not his family and rich cat friends, his attitude is "f*ck them" - be they men, women or children.  Here are highlights from Huffington Post:

During a CNN debate at the height of the GOP primary, Mitt Romney was asked, in the context of the Joplin disaster and FEMA's cash crunch, whether the agency should be shuttered so that states can individually take over responsibility for disaster response.

"Absolutely," he said. "Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction. And if you can go even further, and send it back to the private sector, that's even better. Instead of thinking, in the federal budget, what we should cut, we should ask the opposite question, what should we keep?"

"Including disaster relief, though?" debate moderator John King asked Romney.

"We cannot -- we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids," Romney replied. "It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we'll all be dead and gone before it's paid off. It makes no sense at all."

To Romney - like so many among the Christofascist and Tea Party circles, most of us are disposable garbage.  A point that is underscored by Romney's desire to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act and leave millions with emergency rooms as their sole source of medical help.  It's morally sick, but it is the face of today's GOP. It is the true face of Mitt Romney.  Are all Mormons this morally bankrupt?

Quote of the Day: Andrew Sullivan on GOP-Confederacy Parallels

The bulwark of today's Republican Party is the states that comprised the Confederate States of America 150 years ago.   And sadly, the racism of the GOP is little different that the pro-slavery states of the Confederacy.  Here's a part of Andrew Sullivan's reflection on the parallels between the Confederacy and today's GOP:

[I]f Virginia and Florida and North Carolina flip back to the GOP from Obama this November, as now looks likely, Romney will have won every state in the Confederacy.

I think America is currently in a Cold Civil War. The parties, of course, have switched sides since the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The party of the Union and Lincoln is now the Democratic party. The party of the Confederacy is now the GOP. And racial polarization is at record levels, with whites entirely responsible for reversing Obama's 2008 inroads into the old Confederacy in three Southern states. You only have to look at the electoral map in 1992 and 1996, when Clinton won, to see how the consolidation of a Confederacy-based GOP and a Union-based Democratic party has intensified - and now even more under a black president from, ahem, Illinois.  I find it troubling - and interesting.

The current electoral map without toss-up states, and only the states that were in existence in 1861

The states in 1861, colored for their position on slavery