An excerpt of an interview between Reuters Global Editor-at-Large Chrystia Freeland and investor George Soros.

Reuters:

George Soros on what the 2012 election means for Wall Street and why he’s a traitor to his class

Chrystia Freeland: I’d like to turn now, if we may, to the United States, where politics and the economy are also quite volatile. You were a very early supporter of President Barack Obama. What report card do you give him now?

George Soros: Well, look, either you’ll have an extremist conservative, be it Gingrich or Santorum, in which case I think it will make a big difference which of the two comes in. If it’s between Obama and Romney, there isn’t all that much difference except for the crowd that they bring with them. And that’s not very encouraging on either side because Obama’s administration is a bit exhausted — a lot of the talent has left — and the Republicans would have to, or a Republican candidate would have to, bring in probably an extremist vice-president.

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Notice that anybody that isn’t an extreme leftist is an extremist.

ABC has a slide show of the men behind 8 super pacs. Its interesting that pacs 1-5 and 7 are Republican and pacs 6 and 8 are Democrat. Of course the intended message is that those sleazy fat-cat Republicans dominate the evil money flow to elections through 75% of the super pacs.

ABC News:

Super PACs can be lifeboats for some candidates who have trouble raising money the old-fashioned way (soliciting donations while being bound by legal limits). In some cases, the aid of a single rich benefactor can help an underdog candidate win a state’s primary.

Here’s a guide to some of the most generous donors to super PACs:

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The poisonous practice of irresponsible smears is an issue that is bigger than Gingrich, Romney, or any other candidate of either party.

I really like Thomas Sowell’s stuff. He ranks at the top of my list (with Mark Steyn) for producing cogent political columns that are always perfectly articulated. Both writers have consistently supported conservative views.

However, I was dumbfounded a couple of weeks ago when I realized that Steyn was supporting Demolite Mitt Romney. At least that’s my take on his recent NRO post.

Now, Sowell turns out to be more befuddling. On the day of Florida’s primary election he has published a column deploring the lies spread by Romney and Obama’s media.

Had Sowell published today’s treatise earlier, thousands of GOP voters in Florida might have been enlightened. However, he didn’t write such a column until today; the day of the Florida GOP primary.

Perhaps one or two people will read today’s column — after they vote for Romney.

Thomas Sowell at NRO:

The Republican establishment is pulling out all the stops to try to keep Newt Gingrich from becoming the party’s nominee for president of the United States — and some are not letting the facts get in their way.

Among the claims going out through the mass media in Florida, on the eve of that state’s primary election, is that Newt Gingrich “resigned in disgrace” as speaker of the House of Representatives as a result of unethical conduct involving the diversion of tax-exempt money. Mitt Romney is calling on Gingrich to release “all of the records” from the congressional investigation.

But the Wall Street Journal of January 28, 2012, reported that these records — 1,280 pages of them — are already publicly available online. Although Speaker Gingrich decided not to take on the task of fighting the charge from his political enemies in 1997, the Internal Revenue Service conducted its own investigation which, two years later, exonerated Gingrich from the charges. His resignation was not due to those charges and occurred much later.

Do the Romney camp and the Republican establishment not know this, a dozen years later? Or are they far less concerned with whether the charges will stand up than they are about smearing Gingrich on the eve of the Florida primaries?

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More NRO bullshit:

Yesterday (yep, yesterday) the rag published a column by Brian Bolduc that explains “Why Newt Left the House.” The tag line: “He didn’t have the votes to be speaker.” The article explains:

On November 3, 1998, Republicans lost five seats in the House of Representatives, shaving their majority to 223 seats, leaving them with a dangerously thin margin.

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The “dangerously thin margin” was 7 votes because at that time Newt needed 216 votes to win. Also at that time, there were at least a dozen disgruntled GOP old-timers still in the House and they were still pissed at Newt because he had removed them from committee assignments and leadership roles where they had served in lockstep with Democrats for many years.

That’s the “leadership style” old members of the House are out on the campaign trail carping about.

Pick who you want to run against Obama but it’s high time full-time liars like Romney are taken out of the mix.

Freddie’s moves to limit refinancing affect not only individual homeowners but the entire economy.

The Charlotte Observer:

Freddie Mac, the taxpayer-owned mortgage giant, has placed multibillion-dollar bets that pay off if homeowners stay trapped in expensive mortgages with interest rates well above current rates.

Freddie began increasing these bets dramatically in late 2010, the same time that the company was making it harder for homeowners to get out of such high-interest mortgages.

No evidence has emerged that these decisions were coordinated. The company is a key gatekeeper for home loans but says its traders are “walled off” from the officials who have restricted homeowners from taking advantage of historically low interest rates by imposing higher fees and new rules.

Freddie’s charter calls for the company to make home loans more accessible. Its chief executive, Charles Haldeman Jr., recently told Congress that his company is “helping financially strapped families reduce their mortgage costs through refinancing their mortgages.”

But the trades, uncovered for the first time in an investigation by ProPublica and NPR, give Freddie a powerful incentive to do the opposite, highlighting a conflict of interest at the heart of the company. In addition to being an instrument of government policy dedicated to making home loans more accessible, Freddie also has giant investment portfolios and could lose substantial amounts of money if too many borrowers refinance.

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Miami Herald:

WASHINGTON — The White House says it’s concerned and disappointed about the situation in Egypt, where a handful of U.S. citizens who are being prevented from leaving the country have taken shelter at the American embassy in Cairo.

White House press secretary Jay Carney says the administration has made its concerns clear in discussions with Egypt’s military authorities. He said U.S. officials are working to resolve the matter as quickly as possible.

The unusual situation comes amid an Egyptian crackdown on U.S.-funded groups promoting democracy that has jeopardized more than $1 billion in U.S. aid to Egypt.

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It appears Tuesday will not be Newt’s best day and could be a beginning of the end for his hard-fought and contentious campaign altogether. Newt denies such rumors, but the reality of his situation is money – the milk of all political campaigns.

Among a lot of missteps, Gingrich made the same mistake in Florida that Rick Perry made coming out of Texas: they both assumed that legal Latino immigrants support illegal immigration.

To assume that Cuban-Americans of South Florida welcome illegal Latinos is as dumb as the assumption that European-Americans would welcome illegal whites from Europe.

Newt went to Florida touting his amnesty plan for illegal grandmas. That may play well in Peoria but its political suicide among South Florida’s large voting block of Cuban-Americans.

Perry tried to come out of Texas with a message of taxpayer funding for illegal alien college students. Perry’s ploy might be good policy for illegal aliens (who aren’t supposed to vote anyway) but it’s very bad policy for legal Texans who got there playing by the rules.

The Examiner.com:

Heading into tomorrow’s all-important Florida primary, Mitt Romney has taken a clear lead for Latino support. That support was never more obvious than last Friday during a reception at the Hispanic Leadership Network in Miami where both Romney and Gingrich spoke.

Applause for Romney was clearly more voluminous in scale than that for Gingrich.

A recent survey shows 49 percent of Latinos likely to vote will back Romney, with Gingrich coming in a distant second at 23 percent, according to a poll by Latino Decisions for ABC News and Univision. Eleven percent of the Republican primary electorate is Latino, and in a close race could tip the scales.

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In 1998, Bain Capital, led by Mitt Romney, bought Domino’s for $1.1 billion, investing $385 million in cash and borrowing the rest. Thomas Monaghan (on left) founded the company in 1960.

Cornell Law Professor William A. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection makes the point:

I have told you that Bain would be our undoing in a general election. But whenever someone questions Bain, they are accused of being anti-capitalist.

Wishing it away will not make it go away, ….

Beth Healy at The Boston Globe:

Amid a flash of cameras, Mitt Romney signed the check to buy Domino’s Pizza with a flourish. It was a huge deal for Romney’s Bain Capital back in 1998, worth $1.1 billion.

Thomas Monaghan, the pizza magnate and orphan raised by nuns in the Detroit area, was cashing out all but a small stake. He wanted the proceeds to start a Catholic university. So he handed over control of the company he built from a small pizza shop in Ypsilanti, Mich., in 1960, to Romney and the partners of Bain Capital.

Domino’s was not in need of rescue, nor was it a classic turnaround case for Bain. But it was still a bonanza for the Boston leveraged buyout firm, which makes money by buying and selling businesses. Bain reaped a 500 percent return on its investment in the nation’s largest pizza delivery chain over 12 years. [Bold added]

Domino’s grew its revenues and earnings under Bain, but its debt also surged to $1.5 billion, leaving the chain with a higher debt ratio than most of its rivals, and interest payments that eat up half its profit each year.

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I spent many working years deeply immersed in the business of leveraged buyouts and venture capital investments in troubled and start-up businesses.

The way it works in the honest world is the investment company buys control of a troubled or start-up company, puts in more cash, reinvests profits back into the company, reworks the board of directors and key management positions and when the company is healthy and ready, it sells all (or most) of its holdings in a public offering. The investment company takes a huge risk but if the strategy works, profits are huge.

That’s not what Bain Capital did with Domino’s Pizza. They bought a healthy company, pulled out cash reserves, borrowed to the hilt to pocket more cash, and then sold the debt-laden company to poor suckers that couldn’t read balance sheets. That’s capitalism in reverse.

Obama will be correct to run ads that say that Bain killed jobs and cheated the public.

WildBillforAmerica:

Abrams, Lord writes, was surely hoping no one would bother to “get into the weeds” and uncover the full record of what Gingrich said in 1986.

Newsmax.com:

Jeffrey Lord, a political insider in the Reagan White House, railed against Newt Gingrich critic Elliott Abrams today for “grossly misrepresenting” Gingrich’s speeches on the floor of the House of Representatives in the 1980s as anti-Reagan when Gingrich was in fact lauding Reagan for his fight against Communist insurgents in Central America.

“It does no one — least of all Elliott Abrams or Governor Romney — any good to try and say that Newt Gingrich, as loyal a friend and ally to Ronald Reagan as could be found in the day — was somehow some crazed anti-Reaganite who got the Cold War wrong. Not only is this not true, its laughably untrue,” writes Lord in today’s American Spectator.

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Delivering the State of the Union, Jan. 24, 2012: What Obama offered the nation Tuesday night was a pudding without a theme: a jumble of disconnected initiatives, a gaggle of intrusive new agencies, and a whole new generation of loopholes to further corrupt a tax code that screams out for reform.

Charles Krauthammer at NRO:

Of course, this being Obama, there was a reach for grandeur. Hope and change are long gone. It’s now equality and fairness.

That certainly is a large idea. Lenin and Mao went pretty far with it. As did Clement Attlee and his social-democratic counterparts in post-war Europe. Where does Obama take it? Back to the decade-old Democratic obsession with the Bush tax cuts, the crusade for a tax hike of all of 4.6 points for 2 percent of households — ten years of which wouldn’t cover the cost of Obama’s 2009 stimulus alone.

Which is why Obama introduced a shiny new twist — the Buffett Rule, a minimum 30 percent rate for millionaires. Sounds novel. But it’s a tired replay of the alternative minimum tax, originally created in 1969 to bring to heel all of 155 underpaying fat cats. Following the fate of other such do-goodism, the AMT then metastasized into a $40 billion monster that today entraps millions of middle-class taxpayers.

There isn’t even a pretense that the Buffett Rule will do anything for economic growth or job creation (other than provide lucrative work for the sharp tax lawyers who will be gaming the new system for the very same rich). Which should not surprise. Back in 2008, Obama was asked if he would still support raising the capital-gains-tax rate (the intended effect of the Buffett Rule) if this would decrease government revenues.

Obama said yes. In the name of fairness.

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