Today Mitt Romney released his 2011 tax returns. They show that the Republican nominee earned more than $13.5 million — mostly from investments — and paid $1.9 million in taxes. He has his wife also gave generously to charities.
In addition, Romney also released a summary of his taxes going back to 1990. The summary reported that, during the period from 1990 to 2009, the Romneys paid taxes every year, with an average annual effective federal tax rate of 20.2 percent. Romney has now provided information about 23 years of tax returns, including releasing the tax returns themselves for 2010 and 2011.
Let’s not forget that the abominable Harry Reid claimed back in August that an anonymous source had told him that Mitt Romney had not paid taxes for 10 years. It was appalling that the Senate Majority Leader would rely on an unnamed source to launch such serious and slanderous accusations, which have now been shown to be false. Do you think there is any chance that Harry Reid will apologize to Mitt Romney for making such reckless and unfounded accusations? That’s what any decent person would do. Unfortunately, any person of character would never have made the unsupported accusations in the first place, so I wouldn’t bet on old Harry doing the decent thing. Instead, he’ll just endure another blow to whatever shreds of credibility he might still possess.
I hope Romney’s release of his tax returns takes that silly issue off the table, and lets the candidates and the American public focus on the big issues in the race — like who is better equipped to get our economy going, and how we can get people back to work and bring this unending recession to a long-overdue end.
Lately Reid has been claiming that an unnamed person, or persons, have told him that Republican candidate Mitt Romney didn’t pay taxes for 10 years. Never mind that Romney has released returns for the last two years that show he paid substantial sums in taxes. Never mind that 
It’s only one seat of 435 in the House of Representatives, of course, and simply adds to an already existing Republican majority in that chamber. The question, however, is whether the outcome reflects broader shifts in the views of American voters — and already the spin game seeking to influence the answer to that question has begun. Republicans say the vote is a referendum on President Obama and his economic policies and note that Turner urged voters to send a message to the President. Democrats say the race was decided by unique local issues — like a large presence of conservative Orthodox Jews who are angry with President Obama’s position on Israel — and add that Weprin was just an inept candidate. As a result, they argue, the result is no reflection whatsoever on voters’ opinions of President Obama.
The wealth in Congress knows no party-line boundaries; Republicans and Democrats alike are doing well. According to the reports, the 
From the self-congratulatory tone of some the public statements of the participants, you’d think our elected representatives had discovered a cure for cancer, rather than just belatedly completed a job that should have been done last year. I’m glad that the ludicrous spectacle of a federal government shutdown was avoided, but forgive me if I don’t join in the hosannas for President Obama, Speaker John Boehner, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Republicans and Democrats in Congress. If progress can be made on reducing spending, shoring up revenue, balancing the budget, and eliminating our federal debt only by incremental steps, after weeks of invective and name-calling, when 
How fractured and ridiculous our governmental processes have become! Our politics are so polarized that we can’t do anything without having our backs to the wall and disaster looming just ahead. Consider that the budget being discussed now is the current budget, and is an issue only because last year Congress and the President didn’t enact a budget when they were supposed to — and that was when the process was totally controlled by one political party, with a Democrat in the White House and huge Democratic majorities in each House of Congress. If agreement wasn’t possible then, what chance do we have now, where Democrats control the Senate, Republicans control the House, and President Obama has already announced that he is running for reelection?
Yesterday, in a speech on the Senate floor, Reid railed against the”mean-spirited” budget proposed by House Republicans. As an example of such hardheartedness, he lamented that passage of the Republicans’ budget proposal would eliminate 
On the national scene, there is a lot of uncertainty, which should make 2011 very interesting indeed. President Obama had a tough 2010, with falling public approval ratings, a bad economy, and mounting public concern about spending and debt, and the Democratic Party took a shellacking in the 2010 election as a result. But the President nevertheless managed to accomplish some of his initiatives in the lame duck session of Congress, leading some people to talk about a comeback. In 2011, will we in fact see a comeback by the President and a resurgence of some of the passionate support he received in the 2008 election?
When you are in the moment, it is difficult to assess what the ultimate judgment of history will be. I doubt that many Americans would put the current Congress up among the great Congresses of the past, however. After all, voters just gave the boot to many of the Representatives and Senators who passed the legislation Reid touts, and Congress’ approval rating is 
In this instance, the Senate has failed to pass individual appropriations bills, which is one of its most basic responsibilities. So, Senate Democrats have followed their game plan from the appalling debacle of the “health care reform” legislation, have combined a dozen individual spending bills into one massive bill that no outsider has had a chance to read, and then have announced that the legislation has to be enacted by the end of the lame duck session or the government will shut down due to lack of funds. Why not? Process and public scrutiny be damned. They are the Senate, after all, and they can do what they want. They obviously believe that they don’t need to concern themselves with the unmistakable message in favor of fiscal restraint that the voters sent on Election Day, or the effect of this tawdry, trillion-dollar exercise in vote-trading on the United States and its staggering debt problems.
*Disgruntled
