Okay, leaving aside the accusations of Nazi collaboration in the Daily Caller article -

The idea that this Romney web advertisement could be the subject of a copyright claim is fucking ridiculous.

I don't know how many of you saw the ad before it was yanked, but it featured Obama singing, like, two lines of "Let's Stay Together" - a capella - and the entire ad was only 00:36 seconds long, as well as being - it goes without saying - core protected First Amendment speech.

Of course, as a work of artistry it was a laughably incompetent response to this Obama ad, so maybe Romney is better off if it disappears down the memory hole, but that's neither here nor there.

ETA: Ars Technica covers this.

So why won't Romney release his tax returns?

That's basically the big guessing game - what's in them that's so terrible that he's made the calculation that it's better to endure the torrent of criticism than to make them public?

And by all accounts, he's very adamant - one report says he'd drop out of the race before releasing his returns.

Much of the speculation is that he paid very little, or possibly no, taxes in 2009, but - just pulling this out of my ass - I'm thinking that given all of the criticism that's coming down, that alone wouldn't justify withholding them, if he used legal methods to do it. I actually think this speculation sounds plausible - it's not just that he paid very little taxes in 2009 due to claimed losses in prior years, it's also that 2009 was the final year to take advantage of an IRS amnesty program for fraudulent nondisclosure of offshore income. If Romney took advantage of the amnesty program in 2009 - functionally an admission of tax fraud - yeah, that would be a reason to withhold the returns.