Pun Salad

Mitt jumped into a huge phony lead this week. It could be due to people dusting off their old pages from 2012 and 2008:

… or it could be one of those oddball transient Google Glitches. We'll see.

• At The Week, Mark Ambinder laid out the positioning strategies for each of the GOP "mainstream" candidates, Jeb, Mitt, and Chris. For Jeb:

  Bush hopes that voters much prefer a real human with conservative instincts than a phony conservative with occasional flashes of human-ness. He will risk losing the primary to win the general election.

  Implied: Mitt and Chris are big phonies. I think this means phoniness will be a trending issue in the coming months. Good news for us!

• At the left-wing Mother Jones, David Corn detailed the intertwinings between Mitt's business and politics, as exemplified by Solamere Capital, run by son Tagg Romney, with which Mitt has been more actively involved post-2012.

  It gets pretty far-fetched at times:

  One of Solamere's initial investments was in a North Carolina financial-services firm operated by former officials of a financial company run by Allen Stanford, who was later convicted of running a massive Ponzi scheme. These officials had come from the Charlotte office of the Stanford Financial Group, which had been closed by the feds for selling phony certificates of deposit.

  Note there's no claim that the "former officials" did anything wrong; they just once worked for a guy that did. And Corn is quick to deploy the usual bullshit clichés about Romney's investments in companies that "downsized and shifted jobs overseas".

  On the other hand, Corn's article does illuminate the ease with which financial success comes to the politically well-connected. (And to his credit, he has in the past noted Hillary's comfy crony capitalist ties as well.)

• Speaking of Hillary, America Rising PAC examined her "Phony Populism On Free Trade" shortly before the elections:

  A peculiar thing happens every time Hillary Clinton decides to run for President; her views on free trade start sliding left and she calls for a “time out” on free trade agreements. We can only assume that the campaign for Gary Peters (D-MI) saw this and figured she would make the perfect surrogate for him. After all, Peters voted against every trade agreement that came up for a vote during his time in Congress and opposes attempts to give President Obama trade promotion authority. Even those Hillary Clinton backed as Secretary of State.

  America Rising PAC is dedicated to opposition research on Democrats, hiring "trackers" who "attempt to shoot video of every single public utterance the candidates' make, in hopes of catching gaffes and flip-flops and collecting an archive that can be mined for hypocrisy and errors." Sounds as if they could be a rich source for us over the coming campaign season.

• 

  For example, news of (a real actual thing): Hillary: The Coloring Book caused them to imagine its "missing pages", for example:

  

  Seems as if they might have a sense of humor.