Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: The company Mitt keeps...

Visual source: Newseum

John McCormick and Roger Runningen at Bloomberg analyze Mitt Romney's "I want your money but not necessarily your crazy, wild-eyed discredited birther theories" problem:

Mitt Romney will join billionaire Donald Trump tonight in Las Vegas for a fundraiser five days after the real estate developer and reality television star sought to re-ignite debate about President Barack Obama's birthplace.

The appearance with Trump brings with it some political risk for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and former Massachusetts governor.  [...]
Trump's comments illustrate the risks associated with celebrity endorsers who have the potential to throw a campaign off message. Romney's campaign has sought to downplay Trump's remarks, while trying not to anger someone who can be helpful with fundraising.

'I can't speak for Donald Trump,' Eric Fehrnstrom, a Romney senior adviser, said May 25 on CNN. 'But I can tell you that Mitt Romney accepts that President Obama was born in the U.S. He doesn't view the place of his birth as an issue in this campaign.'

CNN:

Mitt Romney said Monday he wasn't concerned about Donald Trump's commitment to the "birther" conspiracy, one day before the GOP presidential candidate hosts a fund-raiser alongside the celebrity business magnate.

Asked on his charter plane whether Trump's questioning of President Barack Obama's birthplace gave him pause, Romney simply said he was grateful for all his supporters.

"You know, I don't agree with all the people who support me and my guess is they don't all agree with everything I believe in," Romney said. "But I need to get 50.1% or more and I'm appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people."

The Obama campaign has put out a new web video on Romney's refusal to distance himself from Trump. It contains some of Trump's most ridiculous birther statements.

Carla Marinucci at the San Francisco Chronicle:

With Democrats portraying Mitt Romney as an out-of-touch millionaire and "vulture capitalist" from his years at Bain Capital, the GOP presidential candidate may be handing opponents some ammunition when he holds a fundraiser Wednesday at a 65,000-square-foot estate that's opulent, even for upscale Hillsborough.

The exclusive location of the 95-room Carolands Chateau, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, and tickets running as high as $50,000 apiece aren't the only reasons Romney's political foes are stirred up.

The former Massachusetts governor's fundraiser is co-chaired by billionaire Meg Whitman, his former employee at Bain Capital and the 2010 Republican candidate for California governor who promised to produce 2 million new jobs if elected. Now Whitman is CEO of Hewlett-Packard, which said last week it plans to lay off 25,000 workers.

Leo W. Gerard at The Huffington Post:

Mitt Romney made a boatload of money for himself and his fellow fat cats. No doubt about it. Billions. But he made it the way Americans hate most -- Wall Street style wheeling and dealing.

Americans hate it because when all that scheming went bad, when the market collapsed, it was the 99 percent who footed the bill to bailout Wall Street. The same is true of Romney and Bain. When Bain bankrupted the companies it bought -- and Bain did that shockingly often -- workers and Main Street businesses paid the price.

Romney contends his money making as CEO of Bain qualifies him to be President of the United States. That's true if Americans believe money should flow out of their pockets, out of the cash registers of Main Street shops and into the Swiss bank accounts of Romney and his 1 percenter cronies.

Eugene Robinson at The Washington Post bluntly speaks the truth:

There are those who tell the truth. There are those who distort the truth. And then there's Mitt Romney.

Every political campaign exaggerates and dissembles. This practice may not be admirable ' it's surely one reason so many Americans are disenchanted with politics ' but it's something we've all come to expect. Candidates claim the right to make any boast or accusation as long as there's a kernel of veracity in there somewhere.

Even by this lax standard, Romney too often fails. Not to put too fine a point on it, he lies. Quite a bit.

The New York Times editorial board on "political attacks masquerading as 'issue ads,'" and a recent federal ruling requiring group sponsoring those types of ads to disclose their donors:

So will the Chamber of Commerce, which sponsors more political advertising than any other group, follow the clear language of the court order and begin revealing the names of its donors? Of course not.

Secrecy is at the core of its political strategy and its business model. The chamber is worried that the public might learn which companies pay for the biennial barrage of negative ads, allowing voters to decide whether to take their business elsewhere.

'We're not going to pull back from anything we're doing,' said R. Bruce Josten, the chamber's executive vice president for government affairs, speaking at a Washington breakfast last week that was reported by the newspaper The Hill. 'It's full steam ahead.'

Joe Nocera at The New York Times:

Time to fess up: With the two-year anniversary of the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law approaching, I'm still not sure what to think about the darn thing.

Will the law prevent another bank bailout if we have a repeat of September 2008? Will it bring transparency to the trading of derivatives? Will the Volcker Rule truly eliminate the ability of banks to make risky trades for their own account? Are all the new regulations burying small and medium-size banks in excessive costs? Or are they ensuring their safety and soundness? No one can say for sure.

The crucial difference between the Glass-Steagall Act, the landmark banking reform law that was passed during the Great Depression, and Dodd-Frank, is that the former had an appealing simplicity that Dodd-Frank lacks. Glass-Steagall did one basic thing. It forced banks to get rid of their investment banking arms. Dodd-Frank, by contrast, accepts the complexity of modern banking ' and then adds to that complexity with its thousands of pages of regulations. That complexity is something to worry about.