Harry Reid says a Bain investor told him that Mitt Romney didn’t pay income taxes for ten years. Reid’s chief of staff, David Krone, says he knows the identity of Reid’s source, and that this person is credible.

But reporters ask: Why would a Bain investor know whether Romney personally paid income taxes?

There is a possible answer to that question. It’s conceivable that Romney tried to persuade someone to invest in Bain Capital by telling him that the investment would yield large tax breaks. Romney may have told the putative investor that by taking advantage of the tax breaks himself, he had not paid any income taxes for ten years. He may even have provided this individual or his accountants with details.

If that’s the case, Romney probably made this representation to the investor while he was still managing Bain Capital. Romney became president of the Salt Lake City Olympics committee in 1999, and he would have been referring to a ten-year period that ended no later than the 1998 tax year.

I want to stress that this is pure speculation on my part. I make no judgment whatsoever about whether the scenario I’ve posited is likely. Nor do I pass judgment about the propriety of Senator Reid’s making his accusation based on an anonymous source. My sole point is that it is conceivable that Romney might have given a Bain Capital investor information about his personal tax situation.

One additional thought: Romney claims that Reid’s accusation is not true. Reporters might consider following up by asking Romney whether there was any period of years – not necessarily the most recent period – during which he paid no federal income taxes.

(You can access a CNN report about David Krone’s statement, with reporters asking why a Bain investor would know anything about Romney’s tax returns, here.) 

There has been another mass shooting today. Current reports are that twelve people were murdered and perhaps fifty more injured at a movie theater in Colorado.

This massacre is not very far from Columbine High School, where, thirteen years ago, two heavily-armed kids shot and killed twelve fellow students and a teacher, and wounded another 21 students, before killing themselves. In the intervening years, there’ve been mass murders at Virginia Tech; Geneva County, Alabama; Binghamton, New York; and Fort Hood, Texas. A total of 69 people were killed, and many more injured, in those four incidents. This doesn't include the shootings in Tucson, Arizona where Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was wounded. Six people were killed in that incident, which doesn’t qualify it as a mass shooting. Not by our standards in modern America.

What can be done about this? We could require that rifles, handguns, and ammunition magazines sold to and possessed by private citizens hold no more than six rounds. That would make it harder for madmen to kill large numbers of people without significantly impeding self-defense or hunting. Barry Goldwater famously said that if you need more than one round to shoot a deer, you should take up another sport.

The mass shootings are bad enough, but far more blood is spilled in prosaic, daily gun violence. In the last five years, 47,856 people were murdered with guns in America. You can look at the data here. The biggest problem, by far, are handguns. It’s more difficult to devise effective but lawful gun control for handguns because the Supreme Court has held that the Second Amendment guarantees, at a minimum, an individual right to keep a handgun in one’s home. In an article available here, I have described why I believe that effective gun control requires restricting the number of handguns in general circulation. If I am right about that, effective gun control may be unconstitutional.

Will today’s massacre stimulate us to do at least what we can do to reduce gun violence, such as limiting privately-owned weapons to six rounds? Almost certainly, it will not. The NRA has buffaloed politicians into believing that supporting gun control can be a career-ending move. There hasn't been any serious gun control effort at the federal level since 1994 – eighteen years ago – when the assault weapon ban was enacted. That legislation was too weak to be truly effective; but instead of strengthening it, Congress allowed the act to expire ten years later.

We can expect much hand-wringing – and nothing more – as a result of today’s slaughter.

Speculation about who Romney will select for his vice-presidential running mate has shifted from Marc Rubio to Condoleezza Rice – and now to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.

There’s not a snowball in hell’s chance that Romney will select Jindal. Such an announcement would drown in howls of laughter.

What’s so funny?

In 1994, Bobby Jindal wrote an article titled “Beating a Demon: Physical Dimensions of Spiritual Warfare” that describes how he performed an exorcism on a friend. No, I’m not making this up. It was reported by Mother Jones magazine; you can access that piece here.

Bobby Jindal was in college when he drove the “strange evil force” from his friend’s body with a crucifix and Bible readings. Many of us – well, actually, all of us – have done weird things during that stage of their lives. Jindal was still only 23 when he wrote about the experience. But for two reasons, the Romney campaign is not going to say “full steam ahead and damn the torpedo” on the assumption that voters will overlook Jindal's beliefs as a very young man. Both of those reasons may be unfair. But they are real political perils nonetheless.

The first reason is Christine O’Donnell, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate seat from Delaware in 2010. O’Donnell
was a lightweight who won a surprise upset in the GOP primary over moderate Congressman Mike Castle during the tea party storm, and she never had much of a chance in the general election. But whatever chance she did have went up in flames when she appeared in a television commercial and announced, “I am not a witch.I'm you.” O’Donnell had previously become fodder for late-night comics because she said she had “dabbled in witchcraft” in high school. She ran the commercial to try to end the laughter. Suffice it say, it didn’t work. Jindal would become O’Donnell redux.

Moreover, Romney can’t afford to have his running mate’s interviews veer off into questions about whether he once believed – and still believes – in demonic possession. Nor can Romney afford to have the reporters plague him with questions about whether he knew that Jindal performed an exorcism when he selected Jindal as his running mate. (There are only two bad answers to that question.)

The second reason is that Mitt Romney is a Mormon, a religion about which some Americans are not fully comfortable, and he cannot afford a running mate with any kind of religious issue. If Romney chose Jindal as his running mate, cable shows would inevitably wind up discussing whether the Church of Latter-Day Saints believes in demonic possession. (The answer may be a simple no, but asking the question does the damage all by itself.)

Though regular readers of this blog may be getting tired of hearing me say it, assuming that he didn’t practice animal sacrifice while at Dartmouth College, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio will be the GOP vice-presidential nominee.