Mr. Romney Takes Stand That is Not in His Best Interests; Mr. Obama Just Takes a Stand; Supporters of Ron Paul Move to Have Him Committed and Other Miracles of the Season

News That Didn’t Happen – But Could Have in a Holiday Setting

Mr. Mitt Romney today announced that he would be offering employment to several thousand workers who had been laid off as a result of the buyouts he engineered at Bain Capital while he was in the private sector and making millions.  Mr. Romney was quoted as saying “I made a lot of money by basically doing nothing, and a lot of people suffered so it is only right that I do this”.  In a related story Mr. Romney said he would not longer strap his dog to the top of his car when going on vacation (Thanks to Gail Collins of the NYT).

At the White House President Obama said that he would stand his ground on at least one issue in 2012, and that if he felt good about it he would not compromise his principles on a second issue.  The President admitted that he too often gave in to pressure from Republicans and that he owed it to his many supporters to support at least one position that he had taken and said that he would not abandon. 

Instead of voting for Ron Paul during the Iowa Caucuses, his supporters said that they would use those meetings to pass the hat and collect money for therapy for the perennial Presidential candidate. 

Eric Cantor, the Republican Majority Leader in the House told supporters that he would stop trying to go behind the back of House Speaker John Boehner and would support Mr. Boehner in the future, regardless of what it meant for his own ambitions to replace Mr. Boehner as Speaker.  Mr. Cantor though denied Mr. Boehner’s request that Mr. Cantor never be behind Mr. Boehner, and that Mr. Cantor pass through a knife detector when entering the same room as Mr. Boehner.

Vladimir Putin of Russia spoke to a crowd of voters in Moscow and said that in the upcoming election there would be a totally secret ballot and that the election would be supervised by outside monitors to assume that no fraud would take place.  Mr. Putin, a former KGB leader said that until recently he didn’t know that democracy was supposed to work that way.

In Alabama elected officials revealed that they would amend Alabama’s harsh anti-illegal immigration law and no longer require anyone who spoke with an accent or whose skin was not pure white to have to show a U. S. passport in order to buy milk.  The officials said that while they supported the requirement in principle, dairy farmers had pressured them to drop the requirement.  They said that instead they would replace it with those persons having to produce an affidavit from either the President, the Vice President or the Secretary of State that testified that they were in the country legally. 

In a humanitarian move a group of major colleges said that while they would not support returning the right to vote to convicted felons who had served their time, they would act to restore full eligibility for college football to any convicted felons who promised to limit their crimes to misdemeanors during their time on the team.

Because the Congress could not pass year end tax legislation, the IRS has sent a notice to every taxpayer that they will owe the same for 2011 that they owed for 2010.  The Service said that they had no idea what the tax rules for 2011 would be because Congress has failed to act in a timely manner, and that individuals could just file their 2010 tax return for 2011, and mark through the 2010 number at the top of the 1040.

Finally, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker and PolitiFact issued the Republican Party certificates good for seven separate lies that they could make in 2012, and not be subject to critique by the fact checking services.  Both the Post and PolitiFact said that holding Republicans to a standard of truth was unfair, because the facts, logic and data were biased against Republicans.