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If your neighbor’s house is on fire, you don’t haggle over the price of your garden hose.

- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

I have been wondering obsessively why Romney is so keen on saying that he left Bain in 99 instead of 02. I mean it's not as if he's running from his career there in general. So why is so adamant that he not be associated with it during that period? The easiest answer is that he stupidly said it without really thinking through the implications of holding the title and being compensated while allegedly being uninvolved and now he's stuck with it because of his FEC filing.

On the other hand, there are some things beyond the usual off-shoring and layoffs that he might not want it known that he profited from. Henry Blodget writes:

If only. If only Brian Moynihan designed fashionable shoes, Jamie Dimon pitched a mean slider, and Lloyd Blankfein had written the song "Boyfriend" for Justin Bieber. Then they'd prosecute bank fraud.

Almost six years ago, the nation watched poor, mostly African-Americans suffer and die waiting for government help in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Meanwhile, conservative pundits declared that Katrina victims only had themselves to blame.

Originally published at Capital Gains and Games..

The story is that Republicans want and need the federal budget to be a big campaign issue in the presidential election. The Republican hierarchy supposedly thinks the president is very vulnerable on the issue and that talking about the deficit and national debt will appeal to the GOP’s tea party wing.

There’s also a good deal of concern that the party’s base will decide that presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney is downplaying the importance of the federal budget if it’s not one of his big campaign issues and that it will abandon him if he does. Much like the first-term Republican House Members have done during the past two years whenever the leadership strayed from what they thought should be done on the budget, this would cause the tea partyers to be openly critical of their presidential candidate.

No one thinks they’ll vote Democratic instead of Republican. Instead, the concern is that the tea party wing won’t vote for anyone for president and will skip directly to the Congressional races on the ballot or, even worse, stay home on Election Day.