The outsourcing candidate strikes again, according to Boston.com:

The Mitt Romney campaign’s chief financial officer described himself as a “financial outsourcing consultant” on the professional networking website LinkedIn until at least July 17, according to a cached version of his profile page, but has since changed the description to “political/finance professional.”

The CFO, Bradley Crate, is also the founder and president of Red Curve Solutions , a Beverly-based financial management company that works with political campaigns, start-up companies, and nonprofit organizations.

Romney trusts his campaign's finances with an outsourcing expert. Romney himself has outsourced jobs at Bain Capital and as governor of Massachusetts. I think at this point it would be smarter for Republicans to embrace outsourcing than to pretend they're not votng for an outsourcer-in-chief.

It's been a while since I've seen fear mongering like this in an ad. And I don't know if I've ever seen 9/11 footage in a political ad like this:

Wow. This is shameless stuff. It's just full of misstatements and lies about President Obama, saying he's turned his back on Israel (not true) and apologized for America (also not true) and it tries to drag America back to 2004-style fear of terrorism, when everybody in every podunk town thought that every single strip mall in West Virginia and Wyoming was about to be attacked by evil Muslim terrorists with M-16s. This is the kind of attack ad that can turn people away from a candidate; the smartest thing about it is that Mitt Romney never appears or is mentioned in the ad. This should be the first piece of evidence in the case against super PACs.

This pro-Obama ad serves as an in-case-you-missed-it reintroduction of Mitt Romney's tax returns into the political debate, just in time for Romney's return stateside.

I don't blame them for remounting this issue. It's a solid one, and Romney seems terrified to release his taxes, so the tax returns are basically an endless source of attack ads for the Obama campaign. Of course, they also run the risk of exhausting the media's patience on this topic. Our media outlets are famous for letting go of stories that appear to have no resolution (look at how quickly the news networks rolled over for the Bush campaign during the drawn-out aftermath of the 2000 election, for example) and so the Obama campaign runs the risk of obsessing on a topic that nobody will report.

But the Democrats always seem to find new ways to make the story fresh. Case in point: Harry Reid's comments today about Romney not paying taxes for a solid decade, which may seem irresponsible but which get everyone talking about Romney's taxes again. Someone should start a Romney tax rumor generator. It would get a ton of hits.

Last week, I made the prediction that Rmoney would, while visiting Israel, say: You Jews are so good at business. This prediction turned out to be true.

“I was thinking this morning as I prepared to come into this room of a discussion I had across the country in the United States about my perceptions about differences between countries,” Romney told a group of high-dollar donors at a fundraiser in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. “As you come here and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000 dollars, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality.”

As the Associated Press noted, Romney actually got the numbers very wrong: Israel’s GDP per capita was $31,000 in 2011 and Palestinians’ per capita GDP was just $1,500. Romney at no point mentioned that the Palestinian territories have for decades been occupied without sovereign control, where residents face significant restrictions on movement and employment.

“Culture makes all the difference,” Romney said. “And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things.” Among them, he cited “the hand of providence.”

• White House Flickr Photostream
• Harry Reid (second from right) among friends and enemies and sandwiches. This photo's from two months ago.

Holy shit! Could it be? Huffington Post:

A month or so ago, [Harry Reid] said, a person who had invested with Bain Capital called his office.

"Harry, he didn't pay any taxes for 10 years," Reid recounted the person as saying...

"You guys have said his wealth is $250 million," Reid went on. "Not a chance in the world. It's a lot more than that. I mean, you do pretty well if you don't pay taxes for 10 years when you're making millions and millions of dollars."

Again, this is just something Reid says he heard—and it's important to point out that Reid refuses to name the investor he allegedly heard this from—but if Romney continues to refuse to release his taxes, it's going to harden into truth. The Romney camp denies that Romney didn't pay any taxes, but obviously they are not being forthcoming with the facts, and they refuse to release the paperwork that would contradict this, if in fact the paperwork would contradict this.

Here's a new ad, in which Mitt Romney somehow looks almost human:

So far as these ads go, it's a good one. It introduces Romney's biography in a pleasant, inoffensive way. It doesn't attack President Obama (although the "Believe in the America you built" at the end is of course another dig at "you didn't build that," it's subtle enough that people who don't know about it won't get it) and it makes an uncharismatic man at least seem like a human being, albeit a terribly square one. They achieve that using a bunch of tricks, but the most prominent one is the fact that we're sitting in the back seat of the car as Romney tells his story back to us, as though he's the dad driving and telling us kids about the way the world works. It creates a subliminal sense of comfort, and trust in Romney.

The story in this ad can be pretty easily punctured by an attack ad or two, though. Note that Romney doesn't say what kind of a business he started. That bit about him knowing what it's like to "wonder whether you're going to be able to make ends meet down the road" will seem disingenuous when viewers realize that he comes from money and went on to make a quarter of a billion dollars. But for a biography ad, it's well-made.