Ed Kilgore makes a point about yesterday’s Romney’s video that’s been bouncing around in my mind too:

I don’t know whether the greatest danger to Romney’s campaign right now is the video (and there are more segments from it rolling out today) or the “Hell yes!” reactions to it from the rawer elements of the conservative chattering classes.

I’m not a mind reader, so I have no way to know if Romney truly believes the sentiments he expressed yesterday or if he was just pandering to the tea party sensibilities of the rich donors at the fundraiser he was attending. But it almost doesn’t matter, because Romney’s big problem right now is exactly those sensibilities. He’s dealing with a base that (a) believes deep in its gut that moochers and freeloaders really are the core of the Democratic Party, (b) has never really trusted Romney, and therefore (c) won’t tolerate any sign that he’s backing down. Romney has no choice but to stick to his guns. Here’s Dave Weigel:

Back on Friday, I trudged around the Values Voter Summit in D.C. and asked conservatives why they thought Barack Obama might win. (The polls, then and now, suggest that he’s in the position to do it.) The single most common answer? Well, Obama’s Democrats have been pumping up the ranks of the poor with free goodies, and those saps might be numerous enough to vote for him. They’d been hearing that on talk radio for, well, years. “We have 47, 48 percent who pay no income taxes,” said Rush Limbaugh in July. “We have 3 million more off the unemployment rolls and on the disability rolls, and they all vote!”

The damage Romney did to himself by privately pandering to this sentiment is bad enough already. But the most unhinged segment of his supporters is going to make it even worse, repeating his argument endlessly in far cruder terms than Romney did. For at least the next few days, we’re going to be consumed with a very public debate about whether America really is in a battle for its soul between the makers and the takers, and that’s not a debate that can possibly help Romney. Even if he handles the situation decently himself, he’s going to be undone by his own fever swamps.

But it gets even worse for Romney, because the opposite side of his base of supporters is made up of moderates and practical politicians. David Brooks is an example of the first, and he’s all but given up on Mitt. Bill Kristol is an example of the second, and he’s pretty much given up too. Yet again, Republicans are learning the downside of handing their party over to the fanatics.

Want another look at that secret Romney fundraising video that MoJo uncovered today? It’s down below. Enjoy! But why should Romney be the only guy who can raise money from claptrap like this? Why not us too? After all, this is what we do. This is the whole reason we exist: so we can blow the whistle on venomous conservative rubbish like this.

Your contributions are what keep us in business and keep this blog going. So how about this: since Mitt Romney apparently believes that 47% of us don’t count, show him just how much we do count by donating $47 to help Mother Jones continue its fight to expose right-wing deception and sleaziness. Make a difference. Do it now. It only takes a minute.

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Jim Miklaszewski, NBC’s Pentagon correspondent, reports that in the aftermath of the insider attacks that killed six NATO troops yesterday, all joint U.S.-Afghan military operations have been suspended:

“We’re to the point now where we can’t trust these people,” a senior military official said. So far this year, 51 NATO troops have been killed in these so-called blue-on-green attacks.

“It’s had a major impact on our ability to conduct combat operations with them, and we’re going to have to back off to a certain degree,” the official said. The suspensions of the joint operations are indefinite — according to one official, they “could last three days or three months.”

If it’s three days, this might not be too big a deal. If it’s three months it’s a very big deal indeed. After all, Obama’s whole justification for doubling up in Afghanistan was to provide enough support to fight the Taliban and train Afghan troops at the same time. If the training isn’t working, then the whole plan isn’t working. Remember this conversation from Jonathan Alter’s The Promise?

Inside the Oval Office, Obama asked Petraeus, “David, tell me now. I want you to be honest with me. You can do this in 18 months?”

“Sir, I’m confident we can train and hand over to the ANA [Afghan National Army] in that time frame,” Petraeus replied.

“Good. No problem,” the president said. “If you can’t do the things you say you can in 18 months, then no one is going to suggest we stay, right?”

“Yes, sir, in agreement,” Petraeus said.

This was at the end of 2009. It’s been 30 months since then, and I think it’s pretty safe to say that our training of the ANA has not been a rousing success. And yet, we stay. Why?

Is it true, as Mitt Romney says, that 47% of Americans don’t pay federal income tax? Yes! That’s mostly because they’re either poor, elderly, or take advantage of tax credits for low-income workers. Details here. But why do these people pay no income tax? Ezra Klein breaks it down into Twitter-sized chunks:

• Rs have spent years cutting income taxes and increasing things like the Child Tax Credit. This means fewer people pay income taxes.
• So whenever you hear a stat like “47% don’t pay income taxes,” remember: Reagan and Bush helped build that.
• These tax cuts for the poor were partly in order to make further tax cuts for the rich political palatable.
• But now that fewer people pay income taxes as a result of GOP policies, they’re being called lazy and dependent.
• And thus the GOP’s tax cuts are being used to make a case that the rich are overtaxed and that the less-rich are becoming dependent.
• Which thus leads to a policy agenda of tax cuts for the rich and cuts to social services for the non-rich.

Yep, that’s about it. Also worth noting: the poor often pay higher state tax rates than the rich. Add in payroll taxes and excise taxes, instead of cherry picking only a single tax, and it turns out that the poor and the working class end up paying a fair chunk of their income in taxes. Not as big a chunk as the rich, it’s true, but then, it strikes most of us as perfectly fair that the poor should pay lower tax rates than the rich. I wonder if this strikes Romney as fair too?

Here is Mitt Romney speaking at a private fundraiser recently. At least, it was a fundraiser he thought was private. Turned out somebody had a camera rolling and caught him explaining what really animates Obama supporters:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what….who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it….These are people who pay no income tax.

….And so my job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

The video is below. David Corn has more clips from Romney’s pitch here.

Over at Power Line, Steven Hayward says the picture on the right “ought to cost Obama this election.” In case you haven’t been following events in wingnut land, this is a picture of LA sheriff’s deputies taking in Nakoula Basseley Nakoula for questioning a few days ago. Nakoula is the guy behind the anti-Islam YouTube video that supposedly sparked all the recent turmoil in the Middle East. Adam Serwer explains what’s going on:

As Roy Edroso documents in the Village Voice, conservatives are now claiming that Nakoula’s recent arrest for potentially violating the terms of his probation is proof the Obama administration is caving to violent protests around the world. Popular conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds demanded Obama resign for “sending — literally — brownshirted enforcers to engage in — literally — a midnight knock at the door of a man for the non-crime of embarrassing the President of the United States and his administration[.]” The “brownshirts” are the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, whom Reynolds is comparing to militia of the Nazi Party in Germany. Powerline blogger Scott Johnson declared “I am Nakoula Basseley Nakoula,” (a reference to the anti-Red Scare film Spartacus). Pajamas Media blogger Roger Simon wrote “Hillary Clinton, I insist that you have me arrested. I am thinking of making a movie about Mohammed.”

Speakers at the annual Values Voters gathering of mostly Christian religious conservatives on Saturday were drawing similar conclusions. “The big headline this morning is ‘federal authorities investigate Christian filmmaker because of this film,” Fox News commentator Todd Starnes told attendees during a panel on religious freedom.

It is, of course, vanishingly unlikely that the Obama administration had anything to do with Nakoula’s questioning. But it’s certainly been fascinating to watch Nakoula morph into a right-wing hero within a matter of days. Initially, even the most zealous conservatives merely claimed that the Obama administration wasn’t defending free speech strongly enough. The reasons were slightly obscure, but when pressed they usually said that a defense of free speech should have been in the first sentence of some statement or other, rather than the second. Or something. But they didn’t actively defend Nakoula.

But now he’s a conservative martyr. Not because the Obama administration did anything to him, but because they can weave some kind of weird conspiracy theory linking probation officers in Los Angeles County to the White House. Within a heartbeat, Obama was Hitler and Nakoula was a “Christian filmmaker” who was being persecuted.

What makes this all the more bizarre is that, as Adam points out, the Obama administration actually has done a couple of things that are pretty iffy:

Some of the Obama administration’s decisions do raise free-speech concerns, however. The government’s inquiry to YouTube about whether the video violated the site’s terms of service was potentially coercive. So was the call that Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made to a fringe Florida pastor to urge him to stop supporting the film.

You’d think this would be enough of a hook for conservatives to attack Obama. But no. Obama’s got to be Hitler and Nakoula has to be a martyr to his thuggish politics. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the modern conservative movement at work.

The Washington Post reports today on dueling trade complaints between China and the U.S. Here’s the American side:

U.S. officials accuse China of giving subsidies to its auto parts industry, and the Obama administration has steadily amped up enforcement actions against China at the WTO through tariffs and other duties….“Export subsidies are prohibited under WTO rules because they are unfair and severely distort international trade,” U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said in a statement on Monday.

….On Monday [Mitt] Romney quickly pounced on the WTO filing, accusing the administration of waging a “campaign-season trade case” that “may sound good on the stump but is too little too late for American businesses and middle-class families.”

Don’t you just love campaigns? I mean, Romney is probably right: the timing of this action does seem a mite convenient, doesn’t it? On the other hand, no one has used China bashing as a cynical campaign tool more than Romney himself. It’s a little hard to take his feigned outrage seriously.

But I’m sure we’ll clear this all up during the debates. Those are usually calm, clear-headed discussions of policy differences that help the American public cut through all the election-year hot air. Right?

Politico has a long piece today about the Romney campaign being in disarray and how it’s all the fault of chief strategist Stuart Stevens. Ed Kilgore comments:

So long as there is Politico this kind of piece will continue to be published. What’s odd about it, however, is the timing: this sort of fragging from within a presidential campaign typically occurs early on, when the pecking order is still taking shape, or at some other obvious transition point like the beginning of the general election phase of the cycle. Actually, this piece is savage enough that you’d guess it would have appeared after election day. So it’s not a good sign for Team Mitt.

Hold on. Is this true? Ed knows about a thousand times more than me about this kind of stuff, so I really shouldn’t be arguing with him about this, but it seems to me that stories like this frequently appear at exactly this time during presidential campaigns. That is, they appear right at the point where a candidate appears to be in serious trouble, and senior staffers start desperately trying to point fingers away from themselves for the coming debacle. Sure enough, that’s where we are. Romney has had a rough summer, capped by a listless convention and polls showing Obama starting to open a substantial lead in swing states. The stink of defeat around Romney HQ these days is probably strong enough to make hardened sewer maintenance workers turn tail and run away.

Roughly speaking, then, my advice is to ignore this story. Oh, you can go ahead and read it. It’s good, clean fun. But it’s basically just rats deserting a sinking ship and trying to make sure that other rats get the blame. It’s a classic Beltway genre, and only the details change from campaign to campaign.

The Washington Post reports that Mitt Romney is tired of being derailed and is determined to refocus his campaign on the economy. He’s going to create 12 million jobs during his first term, and here’s his detailed 5-point plan to do it:

• Drill, baby, drill
• Bash China
• Fix our schools
• Cut spending
• Cut taxes and regulations

Am I being unfair? Not really. If you click the link above you’ll see that his plan is about half a page long. There’s no real detail there and there never has been.

There are at least two reasons for this lack of detail. First, there’s the usual one: he knows that if he starts to get specific about taking away tax loopholes and cutting spending, people will realize that they don’t like some of the specifics. Cut ag subsidies and farmers get mad. Take away the home mortgage deduction and homeowners get mad. No politician ever wants to get specific about the price that voters might have to pay to balance the budget or let kids go to any school they want.

But there’s a second reason for fuzziness that’s very specific to Romney: his numbers don’t add up. They don’t even come close. Romney can’t offer details even if he wants to because any detail he provides would immediately demonstrate just how laughable his plan his.

So all those tea partiers who want details can forget it. They may be convinced that the American public will swoon if someone presents them with a full-throated, blow-by-blow defense of their principles, but Romney knows better. If he did what they want, his election chances would go from bad to zero overnight.

But there is one thing Romney is being oddly accurate about: his jobs claim. If he’s elected, he probably will be able to create 12 million new jobs over the next four years. That’s because this is a very modest goal. The economy will probably create 12 million new jobs no matter who’s president. This is a case where Romney is taking advantage of the public’s general innumeracy. Most people have no idea how many jobs a good economy produces, so there’s no point in making an outrageous claim. Sure, he could say he’ll produce 20 million jobs, but to the average voter that’s just as meaningless as 12 million or 100 million. So he might as well stick to reality.

Dan Drezner doesn’t think Mitt Romney needs to give a speech about the Middle East. He thinks Barack Obama probably ought to do that:

Right now, it’s the president who needs to deliver a major address. Americans are rightly confused by what the United States is doing in the Middle East, and President Obama had a pretty uneven week. On the one hand, there appears to have been some adroit behind-the-scenes diplomacy on Egypt. On the other hand, there are crisis moments when patience begins to look too much like passivity, and that’s beginning to happen to this administration. Sure, there have been times in the past when U.S. embassies and consulates around the world faced even greater threats — but things still seem pretty uncertain, U.S. lives have been lost, and the only thing that can be said for Barack Obama’s leadership this week is that he’s not Mitt Romney. Oh, and that the administration’s argument that this has been caused by a single stupid YouTube clip is utter horses**t.

Sign me up for putting a lid on the nonsense from Obama’s various mouthpieces about how these riots and protests were all caused by a single poorly produced YouTube trailer. We deserve better than that from this administration.

So what should Obama say about all the turmoil in the Middle East? Dan has a few ideas about that too. Click the link for more.