No, not the latest 'superfood' vegetable fad....

That would be Kohlrabi, that's a gongylodes -- one of the new, trendy 'superfoods'. For those looking for a better reference, it's in the same family as broccoli.  Apparently, if you're a Mormon, it's where God keeps one of his vacation homes (possibly with a car elevator), and where Mitt is hoping to establish another tax shelter to park his money in cooperation with the Mormon church.

It's like a more far-out version of Nut Gingrich's moon colony, only further out there (in many senses of the word further).

One more example of the anti-science thinking you get from religion, and why you do not want it intruding on government.

Scientology isn't the only wack-a-doodle theology with outer space craziness at its core...

I can only wonder how the missionary shtick Romney did while using his religion to avoid the Viet Nam war so he could live in comfort in a chateau with servants waiting on him. Because this stuff sounds even less persuasive in French, and the French do not take kindly to the fake photo op kinds of persuasion.

We quite properly have no test of religion for public office. That doesn't mean we cannot individually assess someone's character which includes how they embrace their faith. I am quite offended by how Romney and the Mormon's appear to have used their tax exempt status to shift the tax burden of the nation more fully onto the backs and shoulders of the rest of us. This is just dirty; I don't care if it is a legal technicality. It is wrong - wrong of Romney, wrong of the church.

And it looks more and more like fellow Mormon, Senator Harry Reid, was right about the Mitt's on R-money and his taxes. This strongly suggests the source of his information might be another Mormon, or at least someone familiar with their financial dealings.

This definitely puts a different slant on all Mitt's charitable giving.

From Salon:

How Romney used his church’s charity status to lower his tax bill

Mitt rented the Mormon church's tax exempt status to decrease his bill, new documents show

By Alex Seitz-Wald
 We already know that Mormon Mitt Romney has been tremendously generous to his church, giving over $5 million in the past two years alone, but now we learn that his charitable activity with LDS may not have been entirely altruistic. Bloomberg’s Jesse Drucker reports that Romney exploited the church’s tax-exempt status to lower his tax bill.
Romney reportedly took advantage of a loophole, called a charitable remainder unitrust or CRUT, which allows someone to park money or securities in a tax-deferred trust marked for his or her favorite charity, but which often doesn’t pay out much to the nonprofit. The donor pays taxes on the fixed yearly income from the trust, but the principal remains untaxed. Congress outlawed the practice in 1997, but Romney slid in under the wire when his trust, created in June 1996, was grandfathered in.
The trust essentially lets someone “rent” the charity’s tax-exemption while not actually giving the charity much money. If done for this purpose, the trust pays out more every year to the donor than it makes in returns on its holdings, depleting the principal over time, so that when the donor dies and the trust is transferred to the charity, there’s often little left. The actual contribution “is just a throwaway,” Jonathan Blattmachr, a lawyer who set up hundreds of CRUTs in the 1990s, told Bloomberg. “I used to structure them so the value dedicated to charity was as close to zero as possible without being zero.”
Indeed, this appears to be the case for Romney’s trust as well. Bloomberg obtained the trust’s tax returns through a Freedom of Information Request and found that Romney’s CRUT started at $750,000 in 2001 but ended 2011 with only $421,203 — over a period when the stock market grew. Romney’s trust was projected to leave less than 8 percent of the original contribution to the church (or another charity that he can designate).  This, along with the trust’s poor returns — it made just $48 in 2011 — suggest the trust is not designed to grow for the LDS church but just serve as a tax-free holding pool from which annual payments can be disbursed to the Romneys.

This is hardly the first tax-avoidance strategy Romney has employed. It’s well known that he holds offshore bank accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands, but he has used more obscure vehicles as well. There’s the “total return equity swap,” where a taxpayer calls a stock he owns by another name and doesn’t pay taxes on it. There’s the way he’s been avoiding gift and estate taxes through a trust that he set up for his children and grandchildren. And there’s the neat trick whereby private equity firms claim that management fees are capital gains and thus qualify for a lower tax rate than straight income. Bain Capital was known for pursuing an aggressive tax-mitigation strategy (they’re now under investigation for it), and so was Marriott Hotels when Romney was an influential board member.
And it’s not just taxpayers who lose out. “The Romneys get theirs off the top and the charity gets what’s left,” said Michael Arlein, a trusts and estates lawyer at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP. “So by definition, if it’s not performing as well, the charity gets harmed more.”