Ohio Republican Senate candidate Josh Mandel, who is running to unseat Sen. Sherrod Brown (D), couldn’t name his position on the auto bailout during an interview with the Youngstown Vindicator, despite being asked half a dozen times in a number of ways.

In the interview with the paper’s editorial board, Mandel continually said he would have “had trouble” supporting the rescue plan because workers at Delphi, a local factory, lost some of their pension and health benefits as part of the package. But Mandel struggled to ever enumerate an actual position on the vote when asked for a yes or no answer.

“As the grandson of a UAW worker, I will do everything I can in the United States Senate to protect auto jobs,” Mandel said. “But it needs to done under the umbrella of the free enterprise system, without the federal government picking winners and losers. And it needs to be done in a way without stripping these hardworking workers of their pensions.”

Watch Mandel’s full answer:

Mandel also struggled to answer the question in an interview with the Columbus Dispatch, though he did manage to call Brown’s support for the rescue “un-American.” Those comments drew fire from the United Auto Workers, whose president said Mandel’s comments were “out of a cartoon or something.”

And though Mandel, like Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, may wish the free enterprise system could have saved the auto industry, the facts belie the argument. The private sector was unwilling to provide General Motors and Chrysler with the loans they needed to enter a managed bankruptcy, leaving government intervention as the only path available. According to at least one auto industry estimate, the auto industry’s rescue saved at least one million American jobs.

It’s the worst wildfire season on record in an equally historic year of drought: Nearly 9 million acres have burned, and up to 20,000 firefighters were on the job at the height of the season. But thanks to congressional budget cuts, the U.S. Forest Service has needed to dip into funds for programs aimed at preventing future giant fires, like removing dried brush and dead wood, in order to combat existing fires. According to the Washington Post:

Recently, Congress stepped in and reimbursed the Forest Service and the Interior Department, which plays a far lesser role in fighting fires, with $400 million from the 2013 Continuing Resolution, allowing fire prevention work to continue. Forestry experts at state agencies and environmental groups greeted it as good news.

But they also faulted Congress for providing at the start of the fiscal year only about half of the $1 billion dollars it actually cost to fight this year’s fires. They argued that the traditional method that members of an appropriations conference committee use to fund wildfire suppression — averaging the cost of fighting wildfires over the previous 10 years — is inadequate at a time when climate change is causing longer periods of dryness and drought, giving fires more fuel to burn and resulting in longer wildfire seasons.

Climate change has caused the wildfire season to grow in intensity and duration, with the typical season now lasting up to 70 days longer. But federal spending on prevention and suppression has fallen since 2010 by $512 million (15 percent), according to The Guardian.

Over seven years, the Forest Service borrowed $2.2 billion from prevention services in order to pay for vital firefighting when the budget fell short. Lawmakers also drew hundreds of millions of dollars from the FLAME fund meant to fund firefighting during particularly bad years.

The CEO of a massive timeshare company sent an email about the upcoming election to his employees yesterday, threatening to fire some of them if President Obama wins re-election.

David Siegel, who owns Florida-based Westgate Resorts, sent an email to all his employees yesterday to discuss the upcoming election. “The economy doesn’t currently pose a threat to your job,” Siegel wrote, noting that the company is “the most profitable [it's] ever been.” “What does threaten your job however, is another 4 years of the same Presidential administration.” He went on to say that although he “can’t tell you whom to vote for,” if Obama is re-elected, it would mean “fewer jobs, less benefits and certainly less opportunity for everyone.”

Here are a few select paragraphs from the email:

Subject: Message from David Siegel
Date:Mon, 08 Oct 2012 13:58:05 -0400 (EDT)
From: [David Siegel]
To: [All employees]

To All My Valued Employees,

As most of you know our company, Westgate Resorts, has continued to succeed in spite of a very dismal economy. There is no question that the economy has changed for the worse and we have not seen any improvement over the past four years. In spite of all of the challenges we have faced, the good news is this: The economy doesn’t currently pose a threat to your job. What does threaten your job however, is another 4 years of the same Presidential administration. Of course, as your employer, I can’t tell you whom to vote for, and I certainly wouldn’t interfere with your right to vote for whomever you choose. In fact, I encourage you to vote for whomever you think will serve your interests the best.

However, let me share a few facts that might help you decide what is in your best interest.

[...]

So where am I going with all this? It’s quite simple. If any new taxes are levied on me, or my company, as our current President plans, I will have no choice but to reduce the size of this company. Rather than grow this company I will be forced to cut back. This means fewer jobs, less benefits and certainly less opportunity for everyone.

So, when you make your decision to vote, ask yourself, which candidate understands the economics of business ownership and who doesn’t? Whose policies will endanger your job? Answer those questions and you should know who might be the one capable of protecting and saving your job. While the media wants to tell you to believe the “1 percenters” are bad, I’m telling you they are not. They create most of the jobs. If you lose your job, it won’t be at the hands of the “1%”; it will be at the hands of a political hurricane that swept through this country.

You can view the email in full here.

Siegel earned national notoriety this year for his quest to build the biggest house in America, “a sprawling, 90,000-square-foot mansion inspired by Versailles.”

In a bizarre twist, Siegel’s email was modeled after a fake letter that made the rounds on the internet during the last presidential election. He confirmed his own email’s authenticity in a phone call to Gawker, saying that “it speaks the truth” and gives employees “something to think about when they go to the polls.”

ThinkProgress reached out to Siegel for comment, but no response was given.

During a speech today at the National Press Club, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) came out against one of Washington’s current favorite ideas: tax reform that closes loopholes and removes deductions, in exchange for lowering tax rates (particularly at the top of the income scale). Schumer called for scrapping that model, and instead instituting tax reform that uses the revenue raised from eliminating loopholes and deductions to reduce the deficit:

There is perhaps no issue facing Congress that is more complex than tax reform. But for all the disagreement on taxes, ask most policymakers—Democrats, Republicans and independents alike—what the broad outlines of tax reform might look like, and you get a startlingly consistent answer: dramatically lower the rates, and broaden the tax base by getting rid of loopholes in the tax code.

This approach has a distinguished lineage: Ronald Reagan and the 1986 Democratic Congress invented it. Simpson-Bowles validated it. The Gang of Six endorsed it.

But in the upcoming talks on the fiscal cliff, we ought to scrap it.

The reason is simple. The old style of tax reform is obsolete in a 2012 world. It just doesn’t fit the times because there are two new conditions that didn’t exist in 1986, but that are staring us in the face today: a much larger, more dangerous deficit, and a dramatic increase in income inequality. Old-style tax reform could make both conditions worse.

This sort of approach certainly makes sense, as income inequality has skyrocketed over the last few decades at the same time that income tax rates on the rich have tumbled. One of the drivers of income inequality is the low rate on capital gains, which almost exclusively benefits the rich.

Schumer, unfortunately, came out against revenue-positive corporate tax reform, which would also be a good idea. The Financial Times, meanwhile, reported today that some Republicans “are shifting their tone on the prospect of increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans,” in an effort to avoid the effects of the so-called “fiscal cliff.”

Irish lawmakers are contemplating a measure that would make it easier for underwater homeowners to reduce their mortgage debt. As the New York Times reported, “The initiative, which would lower a borrower’s monthly payment, could prevent a tide of foreclosures, an uncertainty that has been hanging over the Irish housing market for years”:

While banks aren’t required to reduce the mortgage debt, the legislation gives them a powerful incentive to write down mortgages for troubled borrowers. Under the new rules, it will be less onerous to declare bankruptcy, making it easier for people to walk away from their homes altogether. As the threat rises, banks are more likely to reduce homeowners’ debt, rather than risk losing the monthly income and getting stuck with the property.

“For the banks, where there are losses, they have to be recognized,” said Alan Shatter, Ireland’s justice minister, who has sponsored the new law, called the Personal Insolvency Bill. “This legislation gives homeowners hope for their future.”

As ThinkProgress has reported, Iceland had significant success with a debt forgiveness program that it implemented to help it recover from the 2008 financial crisis. Ireland’s move is in the same vein.

Here in the U.S., however, such measures have not been put into place. In 2009, the banking lobby and Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have allowed judges to write down mortgages for homeowners in bankruptcy. That defeat prompted Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) to pronounce that, when it comes to Congress, the banks “frankly own the place.”

Federal Housing Finance Agency director Ed DeMarco, meanwhile, has prevented government backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from writing down federal loans for underwater homeowners, even though several analyses show that doing so would be good for both homeowners and taxpayers. A bipartisan bill before Congress has the potential to help hundreds of thousands of underwater borrowers stay in their homes, but hasn’t gone anywhere.