What do Marriott, Waffle House, Orlando Magic, New Balance, Omni Hotels, Charles Schwab, Ritz Carlton, Georgia Pacific, Menards, Dixie, Brawny, and Venetian Hotel Las Vegas have in common? .

These companies and their owners have donated millions to Mitt Romney’s super PAC Restore Our Future, Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, the Koch brothers’ anti-Barack Obama operations, and other purveyors of attack ads.

According to Think Progress, Bill Marriott has given over $1,000,000; so has Omni’s co-founder Robert Rowling; so has Jim Davis of New Balance; so has John Menard. Charles Schwab has contributed at least $250,000. And, of course, the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson are into the super PACs and 501(c)4’s for tens of millions of dollars.

The list is growing larger—more and more companies putting millions into this year’s political race for president, almost all of it on the Republican side, much of it secret. When the dust settles, hundreds of millions of dollars will have been spent to defeat Barack Obama and the Democrats in the Senate and House. Many believe it will top a billion dollars in this election cycle.

The press and pundits believed that after Citizen’s United few corporations would play seriously in this political space. Boy, were they wrong. If anything, the proliferation of executives and businesses that are writing six-figure checks, even seven and eight-figure checks, is astounding.

What can be done about this run-away train? Not much this election cycle. But we need to move on this soon after November.

At the very least, we should make all donations public. No more secret contributions to political groups and organization that skirt the law. There should be legislation brought up in the Congress repeatedly that requires groups to file political contributions and expenditures when a candidate’s name is mentioned in advertising. Make the Republicans vote on this over and over until it is passed. With electronic filing there is no reason that transparency should not be the norm and our process should not be open and honest.

Second, many of these organizations have been given tax-exempt status by the government. If they are given such status they should be investigated if they are engaging in political campaigns. They should be forced to become political organizations or stop hiding their donors under their tax-exempt status.

Finally, we should stop the sham that these groups are independent from the campaigns. There are more often than not interlocking directorates with the same band of consultants, advisers, spokespeople, operatives, contributors, friends, colleagues, associates—for all practical purposes they are one and the same, joined at the hip.

All this adds to the public’s cynicism about politics and campaigns. The sooner we deal with it the better.

The Tea Party charade

Forget the fear that the Republicans and the Tea Party spread across the financial markets on the debt-ceiling fiasco last year. Forget the gridlock they created over the budget and inability to solve real problems such as getting out of the economic rut. Forget that they turned upside down every rule of sound fiscal management with their antics.

Now the Government Accountability Office (GAO) tells us that the extremist Republicans cost the taxpayer over $1.3 billion in 2011 with their months-long obstructionist behavior. That figure will only increase in years to come, according to the GAO.

Borrowing costs for the United States went up; 400 hours of overtime to deal with the manufactured “crisis”; nearly 6,000 hours of work; 1,200 hours in the weeks prior to the drop-dead date to prepare contingency plans and spreadsheets.

Real money lost, real time lost, real work that could have been put to productive use.

And that $1.3 billion doesn’t even count the wasted time that Congress put into this effort or the lack of any meaningful compromise that could have been struck.

Maybe the next time someone comes up with such a counterproductive strategy to play politics with the debt ceiling they will think twice.
 

Mitt Romney wanted to have his cake and eat it, too. He wanted to make himself fabulously rich, be the captain of the financial universe, and become senator, governor and, now, president.

He wanted to do it all, without making public his financial dealings, his tax returns, his web of foreign tax shelters. That was his business, not the public’s. He should have chosen one path or the other—in his case, they don’t mix.

Mitt Romney was too cute by half.  He was guaranteed payouts at Bain no matter how many bankruptcies, lost jobs, destroyedpensions. He thought parking money in off-shore Bermuda corporations, Swiss and Cayman accounts, and using fancy accounting gimmicks to create tax avoidance schemes could be either kept secret or explained away.

Now Republicans are calling for him to come clean, to release his tax returns, to untangle the web of financial dealings. But he can’t because he was up to his eyeballs in Bain when he said he wasn’t, as he continues to reap huge amounts of money from his years there.

So why all this back and forth on whether he “retired” from Bain in 1999? Simple. Ted Kennedy caught him in the Senate race in 1994 by exposing Bain and what it did to workers and companies.

When Romney saw a big opening with the takeover of the Olympics in February of 1999, he grabbed it and by 2001 he knew he had a shot at being governor of Massachusetts and maybe a great deal more.

But he also knew that Bain was a liability in another race in Massachusetts and decided that his “leave of absence” better become a “retirement.” After all, he was disengaged from the day-to-day operation of the company, even though reaping a six figure salary as an officer and many millions more because of his association as “president, CEO and sole stockholder.”

The last thing Mitt Romney wanted to do as he was planning his political future was have that Bain albatross around his neck again—no, the Olympics was his ticket.

[Read the U.S. News Debate: Is Mitt Romney Blowing It Against Barack Obama?]

But, now he has this very big problem—he can’t release his incometaxes back 12 years as his father, George Romney, did when he ran for president. He can’t provide 23 years of tax returns as he did to the McCain campaign when he was angling for vice president and being vetted.

Tax returns will show his continued financial windfall from Bain and it will show all his off-shore shenanigans. And it will show that this is someone who was not paying his fair share of taxes according to almost anyone’s definition. That is my guess.

When Kevin Madden, his spokesman, read a statement that Romney did not put his money in foreign bank accounts and trusts to avoid taxes he was not asked the very simple question: Why did he do it, if not to avoid taxes? What was the reason for all these off-shore accounts? What was he trying to hide?

And now, Romney is in real trouble. If he is transparent about his financial dealings and taxes, he knows it would be devastating to his campaign. If he tries to stonewall, he has three and a half months of a long campaign, not three and a half weeks. That is a long time to keep trying to change the subject.

So the question for Romney is: Can he have his cake and eat it, too? Can he simply deny further requests for information and hope he can keep it secret?

While he is telling the middle class to “eat cake,” maybe he has to be careful he won’t be eating crow.

The Supreme Court’s decision will not bring the debate on healthcare to a close in the short term, prior to November. But it may do so in the middle and long term, sooner than most think. And, more importantly, it may see the kind of real change in American society that Obama campaigned on in 2008.

It allows us to move forward, not backwards. It allows real benefits for families to be implemented that would have been hard to imagine if the Supreme Court had thrown out the law.

[See a collection of political cartoons on healthcare.]

The facts are clear: Seventeen million children with pre-existing conditions can no longer be denied coverage, 6.6 million young adults have the security of coverage until they are 26, 86 million Americans have benefited from free preventive services like mammograms or wellness visits for seniors, and tens of millions of Americans will be covered now who were not before.

This is doing for everyday Americans what Medicare did for seniors in the 1960s, and every day since. That program failed in Congress twice before it was passed in 1965. Polls showed real concern back in the late 1950s and early ’60s that we were entering into an era of “socialized medicine.” Doctors opposed it and Ronald Reagan was their key spokesperson. Both came around to a deep appreciation of how it transformed the lives of seniors, over a third of whom lived in poverty and were one illness away from financial ruin.

[See a collection of political cartoons on the 2012 campaign.]

This may do for Barack Obama what the Cuban Missile Crisis did for President Kennedy—a real win that demonstrated leadership at its best. It took courage, perseverance, and patience, when many urged just the opposite. It took vision and the ability to work through a complex series of choices and possible outcomes to pull people together when a lot hung in the balance.

Republicans believed that this would be Obama’s Waterloo, and 50 years ago they believed Kennedy could not stand up to Khrushchev. But at the end of the day this may prove to be not Waterloo, but D-Day, not capitulation but strength.

It took a long time to pass healthcare legislation since Harry Truman first introduced it, but we are on the right road now and the Supreme Court ruling makes all the difference. It was a transformative decision.

• Follow the U.S. News Live Blog covering the Supreme Court’s heathcare ruling
• Follow the Thomas Jefferson Street blog on Twitter at@TJSBlog.
• Check out U.S. News Weekly: an insider’s guide to politics and policy.

So, finally we have it. The Republican “Tax Cut Plan” in all its glory.

Mitt Romney and his Republican colleagues were intent on putting forth what they thought would be a nice series of tax cuts and popular, new, simple, reduced tax brackets.

Oops.

This is not actually reducing the burden on middle class families, it is increasing it. A new Joint Economic Committee Study exposes this sham of a plan. Making President George W. Bush’s tax cuts permanent and further reducing the top rate to 25 percent is truly class warfare, Robin Hood in reverse, stick it to the middle class. The fact is that to close the so-called loopholes and get rid of thecredits, many of which help the middle class, we are seeing a further redistribution of wealth to the wealthy.

The Romney-Ryan plan would increase taxes on wage earners who make between $50,000 to $100,000 by $1,300. It would increase taxes on those who make between $100,000 to $200,000 by $2,600. Another great idea for taking us back to the Bush-era, on steroids.

If you make between $500,000 and $1 million, you get another nice check for $35,000—go buy a new car or a big diamond ring. And if you happen to make over a million dollars, the average redistribution of wealth comes to an unbelievable $285,000.

When Romney talks about the middle class needing help, it is not hard to figure out his definition of the middle class—those friends who have Swiss bank accounts and offshore stashes in the Cayman Islands.

His plan, like Bush’s, would once again harm the middle class and help the wealthy even more.

The report by the Joint Economic Committee shows one thing about Mitt Romney: The emperor has no clothes.

• Robert Schlesinger: ‘Fiscal Cliff’ Unavoidable Experts Say
• Follow the Thomas Jefferson Street blog on Twitter at@TJSBlog.
• Check out U.S. News Weekly: an insider’s guide to politics and policy