[Artwork by MEATHEAD]

ASSOCIATED PRESS: Mayor Cory Booker to the long list of political stand-ins for both President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney who’ve veered wildly off message in a presidential contest notable for its attention-grabbing gaffes. An Obama backer, Booker forced the president’s campaign into damage-control mode over the weekend when he called its attack on Romney’s tenure at a private equity firm “nauseating.” It didn’t take long for Republicans to highlight the comment and for the Democratic mayor to try to clean up the mess he caused by releasing a YouTube video in which he said it was fair for Obama to make Romney’s business record a campaign issue. MORE

RELATED: The GOP’s I Stand With Cory web site/petition

THINK PROGRESS: A ThinkProgress examination of New Jersey campaign finance records for Booker’s first run for Mayor — back in 2002 — suggests a possible reason for his unease with attacks on Bain Capital and venture capital. They were among his earliest and most generous backers. Contributions to his 2002 campaign from venture capitalists, investors, and big Wall Street bankers brought him more than $115,000 for his 2002 campaign. Among those contributing to his campaign were John Connaughton ($2,000), Steve Pagliuca ($2,200), Jonathan Lavine ($1,000) — all of Bain Capital. While the forms are not totally clear, it appears the campaign raised less than $800,000 total, making this a significant percentage. He and his slate also jointly raised funds for the “Booker Team for Newark” joint committee. They received more than $450,000 for the 2002 campaign from the sector — including a pair of $15,400 contributions from Bain Capital Managing Directors Joshua Bekenstein and Mark Nunnelly. It appears that for the initial campaign and runoff, the slate raised less than $4 million — again making this a sizable chunk. In all — just in his first Mayoral run — Booker’s committees received more than $565,000 from the people he was defending. At least $36,000 of that came from folks at Romney’s old firm. MORE

JEFF DEENEY: He’s always been a neolib technocrat (like Obama, ironically), and ultimately at the end of the day he’s a proud Stanford Man, which means Wall Street is comprised of his former classmates and they see the world through the same lens, applied to different sectors.  He was always this way, that’s why he was such a hard sell for Newark and was beaten in his first election by a machine politician of Marion Barry-esque epic corruption; he wasn’t passing the smell test with the neighborhood oldheads.  He always figured he would bring them around when the saw what elite education and connections can do for a poor city. Results are mixed, but at this point, having paid dues, he’s thinking senate, eventually President, which is more in line with his own estimation of himself, anyway. Nutter isn’t very different; a Wharton guy at the end of the day. Better than Street, perhaps, but would Street have plugged a bomb in the school system and handed the fragments over to corporate privatizers?  Would love to hear what Nutter thinks about private equity; I suspect the same as Booker. Despite the fact that Wall Street nearly willfully annihilated itself, creating even more massive inequality in doing so, and this should defacto discredit the entire neoliberal experiment, most persistent in the assumption that marker forces applied in every sector is the way to a better world.

MSNBC: Mitt Romney could face new questions about his overseas investments after a campaign official acknowledged to NBC News that his campaign is revising his financial disclosure forms to report more than a half dozen offshore holdings, including income from a multi-million dollar Swiss bank account that was not disclosed last year. The tax returns released by the Romney campaign this week showed that the Ann Romney Blind Trust had reported $1,783 in interest income from a bank account held at UBS in Switzerland in 2010. But the Swiss bank account — as well as other offshore investments in the Cayman Islands, Bermudas and Ireland that appear in the trust fund’s tax returns — were not disclosed in Romney’s financial disclosure form filed with the Office of Government Ethics last August. A Romney campaign official emailed Thursday afternoon that Romney’s financial disclosure form is now being amended with the government ethics office “to address this minor discrepancy” and “to deal with some other minor issues.” MORE

RELATED: A Rasmussen poll conducted on Sunday, the day after the South Carolina primary, showed Newt Gingrich leading Mitt Romney by 9 points — 41 percent to 32 percent — in Florida. Rasmussen’s poll conducted on Wednesday now shows Romney leading Gingrich by 8 points: The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Florida Republican Primary Voters, taken Wednesday night, shows Romney with 39% support to Gingrich’s 31%. Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum earns 12%, and Texas Congressman Ron Paul runs last with nine percent (9%). MORE

Read more at: http://times247.com/articles/new-polls-mitt-surges-ahead-of-newt

ABC NEWS: The harshest attack against Mitt Romney to yet hit the South Carolina airwaves is coming not from his GOP rivals, but from comedian Stephen Colbert , whose Super PAC is up with a 60-second spot accusing Romney of being a “serial killer.” The harshly-worded ad spares no drama, showing a butcher carving up a carcass and a limp pair of feet being ominously dragged around a dark corner. But coming from the Comedy Central funnyman, the ad seems more like a tongue-in-cheek jest than a legitimate character attack. “Mitt Romney has a secret,” says the narrator, John Lithgrow, who played a serial killer on the Showtime series “Dexter.” “As head of Bain Capital he bought companies, carved them up, and got rid of what he couldn’t use. If Mitt Romney really believes ‘corporations are people, my friend’ then Mitt Romney is a serial killer. He’s Mitt the Ripper.” MORE

PAUL KRUGMAN: Aha. Romney concedes that the estimates people have been making about his taxes are basically right:

At an event in Florence, SC, Mitt Romney told reporters that his effective tax rate is probably close to 15% because most of his income comes from investments, reports Bloomberg’s Julie Davis.

And an immediate question is, do you agree that unearned income should be taxed at a rate so much lower than earned income?  Besides, he’s still fudging: how much of that is true investment income, and how much is carried interest, which is actually earned income that for reasons unclear manages to get taxed like investment income (making nonsense of the claim that investment income should face low taxes because it has already been taxed once)?Oh, and don’t give me the argument that private equity is special because it’s a risky business, in which you put in a lot of effort for an uncertain return. So is any kind of small business venture; and so, as it happens, is textbook writing. Yet small businessmen and textbook authors pay normal tax rates. MORE

WASHINGTON POST: Chris Christie, stumping for Mitt Romney, managed to shut down a heckler at a rally on Sunday with the political equivalent of a Your Mom joke. She yelled something indistinct, and he shouted back, “You know, something may be going down tonight, but it ain’t going to be jobs, sweetheart!” If he’d yelled, “That’s what she said!” I would have let it pass, because we can all agree that that would have been awesome. I thought the Republicans had gotten all that sex business out of their system at the Saturday night debate. This seems rude and uncalled for. Then again, there’s a fine line these days between “authentic” and “rude and uncalled for,” and Christie made his name as the former. In fact, his camp seems pleased with his performance. I wouldn’t know about this had Christie boosters not posted this video on his official YouTube channel, which, as Torie Bosch points out, is not exactly what you generally do with videos where your candidate yells fellatio jokes at people. MORE

SLATE: The video, which does not make Christie look great, wasn’t some hidden-camera “gotcha” depicting a private moment, a la the 2006 “macaca” video that may have cost George Allen his Senate seat. Rather, it was uploaded to the New Jersey GOP’s YouTube account. They seem to think his remark about “going down” is a zinger, something to be proud of, rather than recognizing it as flagrantly demeaning, even misogynistic. How would Christie have responded to male protesters saying the same thing? Probably not by changing the subject to what acts they perform in the bedroom. His handlers should be apologizing for the remark, not promoting it. MORE

SALON: Bosch actually mentions my recent piece on “the prudes of the GOP” by way of saying that, “clearly, Christie isn’t in that camp” — but I’m not so sure that prudery is at odds with a demeaning sex joke. In fact, I see it as an essential element of prudery, which casts sex as a dirty and shameful act (except under a very rigorously policed – and, quite frankly, rare — set of circumstances. I don’t know what Christie actually intended by his remark, but if it was to say, “Suck it, sweetheart,” I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised. It would be yet another prime example of right-wing conservatives viewing sex itself as a “gotcha.” MORE

PREVIOUSLY: What’s With All The Oral Sex Innuendo, Guv?