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When Romney thinks he’s behind closed doors and he’s just telling other people like him how politics really works, the picture he paints is so ugly as to be bordering on dystopic. It’s not just about class, but about worth, and legitimacy. His voters are worth something to the economy — they’re producers — and they respond to legitimate appeals about how to best manage the country. The Democrats’ voters are drags on the economy — moochers — and they respond to crass pay-offs.

Romney doesn’t voice these opinions in public. He knows better. But so did the voters. That’s what you see in the overwhelming rejection Romney suffered among African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and young voters. They sensed that Romney fundamentally didn’t respect them and their role in the economy, and they were right.

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De maatregelen van nu zijn het resultaat van dingen uitruilen tussen de VVD en de PvdA, zonder dat er een samenhang in zit. Want al die dingen zijn onderling niet verbonden, de draadjes ontbreken. Dat komt door dat systeem van Wouter Bos met die plastic kaartjes. De formatie was een soort pim-pam-pet: de VVD krijgt pim, de PvdA krijgt pam en het resultaat is pet.

Hans Wiegel in Intermediair. (Pretty much untranslatable, but negative on the compromises between the Dutch government’s coalition parties.)

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Rapson, 59, has been charged with one count of rape, five counts of indecent assault, four counts of indecently assaulting a child under 16, and one count of gross indecency from 1973 to 1990.

He had been a teacher and former vice-principal at Rupertswood.

A witness, 50, who cannot be named, told the Melbourne Magistrates Court on Wednesday that as Rapson began to abuse boys one night at the Salesian College Rupertswood, he told another priest, who was urging him to resist the temptation: “God made us this way and it’s his fault”.

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A pack of millionaires descended on Washington, DC, Wednesday to tell Congress to take more of their money. The Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength, a group formed in 2010 to push Obama to allow the Bush tax cuts on millionaires to expire, are back, and lobbying for the same thing as Congress faces the looming fiscal cliff.

A dozen or so 1-percenters, representing the group’s total membership of about 200, are meeting with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle this week to deliver the message that “we care as much about our country as we do about our money,” and that any budget agreement Congress cobbles together in the coming weeks should include fat taxes on the rich.

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BP Plc is expected to pay a record U.S. criminal penalty and plead guilty to criminal misconduct in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster through a plea deal reached with the Department of Justice that may be announced as soon as Thursday, according to sources familiar with discussions.