Will It Be a Neo-Republi-CON Party-Line Vote?

UPDATE XI:  After the case that "could never be cited as precedent," did Chief Justice Roberts decide for the sake of the Court's public legitimacy and historic legacy, not to play politics with the decision?  Read the Washington Post, John Roberts, umpire and The New York Times, John Roberts’s Political Decision. 

UPDATE X:  Did the Supreme Court split the difference, by rejecting the Commerce Clause reasoning, but find the mandate is a tax?  This possibility was suggested before the ruling was announced.  Read the Washington Post, Four ways the Supreme Court could split the difference on health care.

UPDATE IX:  If the Supreme Court does overturn the health care law in the face of decades of precedent,would it be yet another case showing the "today's Supreme Court is moving toward the confederationist framework of protecting corporate interests. From its decision authorizing corporations to spend unlimited political money in the Citizens United case to its assaults on equal pay for women and job security for older workers, the Court's five conservatives have left no doubt about their willingness to obviate the commerce and general-welfare clauses of the Constitution to protect powerful corporate interests"  Read The Atlantic, The Real Affordable Care Act Battle: Constitutionalists vs. Confederates, which notes:

"[T]hat, throughout the last century, when the corporatist strand has conflicted with the state's-rights position -- from Lochner (in which the Court infamously overturned New York's public health regulations in 1905) to the current Court's reversal just this week of Montana's anti-corruption campaign-finance law -- the corporatist side has won.

Respected conservative constitutionalists have all but begged the Supreme Court to stay loyal to the document. Judge Laurence Silberman, a Reagan appointee who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush, warned that the case against the Affordable Care Act has no basis "in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent." Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a runner-up for the Supreme Court nomination that eventually went to Chief Justice John Roberts, warned that striking down health reform "is a prescription for economic chaos that the framers, in a simpler time, had the good sense to head off."

During his confirmation hearing, Chief Justice Roberts claimed the mantle of these conservative constitutionalists, as an umpire calling balls and strikes. But if he and the other four conservative justices overturn the Affordable Care Act, they will effectively be taking the umpire off the field. In historical context, this amounts not to a reinterpretation of the Constitution but rather its rejection. If the law is upheld, the real victory is not for President Obama but for that most durable of governing documents, the U.S. Constitution."

UPDATE VIII: If the Supreme Court does overturn the health care law in the face of decades of precedent, will it be because:

"The post-New Deal consensus about the scope of federal power has broken down amid national, and global, concern over the welfare state’s cost and intrusiveness — a sea change of which the tea party is but one manifestation" or 

The 2000 presidential election was 'decided by five people, who don’t even try to explain their choice in normal legal terms. Then the beneficiary of that decision appoint[ed] the next two members of the court, who present[ed] themselves for consideration as restrained, humble figures who care only about law rather than ideology. Once on the bench, for life, those two actively second-guess[ed] and re-d[id] existing law, to advance the interests of the party that appointed them. Meanwhile their party’s representatives in the Senate abuse[d] procedural rules to an extent never previously seen to block legislation — and appointments, especially to the courts. And, when a major piece of legislation g[ot] through, the party’s majority on the Supreme Court prepare[d] to negate it — even though the details of the plan were originally Republican proposals and even though the party’s presidential nominee endorsed these concepts only a few years ago.' 

Read the Washington Post, Redefining American government through Obamacare and The Atlantic, SCOTUS Update: La Loi, C'est Moi.

UPDATE VII:  Republi-con only hate Obamacare because he passed it.  Read the Washington Post, Poll: Republicans hate ‘Obamacare,’ but like most of what it does.

UPDATE VI:  If it does overturn the health care law in the face of decades of Supreme Court precedent, then how to explain the change.  By creating a 'permission structure.'   Read the Washington Post, How Republicans made it possible for the Supreme Court to rule against the mandate.

 

UPDATE V:  "Bloomberg surveyed 21 top constitutional scholars and found that, while 19 think the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act ought to be upheld on the basis of legal precedent, just eight think the Supreme Court will actually do so ."  Read the Washington Post, Poll: Legal scholars think the mandate is valid, will fall anyway.

UPDATE IV:  Citing The New Yorker article below, a writer asks what is going on in Washington.  He concludes, " — based both on [his] experience as a reporter in Washington and on an increasingly voluminous psychological literature about how partisans form opinions — is that human beings are very good at convincing themselves of whatever their self-interest would have them believe, and that Washington has become an increasingly sophisticated machine for encouraging and accelerating this sort of 'motivated reasoning.' That is to say, strategic incentives do drive shifts in opinion, but the new opinions are sincerely held.

This distinction is, I think, crucial to make, because there’s a real difference between bargaining with a political party that has fixed policies it would like to achieve but shifting strategic incentives and a party that has shifting policy and strategic incentives. In the former case, the fixed policy preferences give you something to hold onto, something you can use to fight against the shifting strategic incentives. In the latter case, there’s nothing to hold onto, and in a political system where elections are zero-sum and so compromise is rarely in the minority party’s strategic interest, it’s very difficult to see how many major compromises can be reached. This model, I think, does a much better job explaining the previous few years."

Read the Washington Post, The individual mandate: What happened?

And what is the Republi-con's interest, as noted in February 2009, Republi-cons hope Obama will fail.

UPDATE III:  Another Republi-con flip-flop, "the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act -- better known as the DREAM Act ."  Read the Washington Post, DREAMing of bipartisanship. 

UPDATE II:  Of course, the flip-flop is a tried-and-true Republi-con tactic,  Read the Washington Post,  A GOP bait-and-switch on disclosure. 

UPDATE:  So why did the Republi-cons propose a mandate?  Because "[i]t became pretty clear that, if you want a market to work, you need a mandate."  Read the Washington Post, Health reform without a mandate: Lessons from Washington state.

I say neo, the ancient Greek prefix meaning new or young, because Republi-cons were for the individual mandate for two decades, before they were against it.  To understand why they changed their minds, read The New Yorker, Unpopular Mandate.

Republi-CON Fear, Anger and Hatred At Work Before the Election

"It was a blood-boiler of a story, a menacing tale of government gone too far: The Environmental Protection Agency was spying on Midwestern farmers with the same aerial 'drones' used to kill terrorists overseas.

This month, the idea has been repeated in TV segments, on multiple blogs and by at least four congressmen. The only trouble is, it isn’t true."

Read the Washington Post, Reining in the rumor about EPA 'drones'.

Is God a Bacteria?

I ask because Genesis 1:27 (KJV) states that "God created man in his own image."  Read The New York Times, In Good Health? Thank Your 100 Trillion Bacteria. 

Who Cares About the Economy, the 'Single Most Important thing is for President Obama to be a One-Term President'

For years now the Republi-cons have been sacrificing workers to appease their imaginary inflation god.  They want to crucify the middle class 'upon a cross of gold'. It's all part of the Republi-cons war on the middle class. 

So, of course, the Republi-cons have been trying to tank the economy, because good news for the economy is bad news for their election hopes.

Now others have started to notice that the Republi-cons have "blocked pro-growth policy and backed job-killing austerity – all while blaming Obama."  Read The Guardian, Did Republicans deliberately crash the US economy?

Republi-CON Solyndra Half Truths

UPDATE IV:  Ricj Perry and Ron Paul weren't the only Republi-cons that were for government subsidies of clean energy, before they were against them.  Read the Washington Post, Romney’s conflicting remarks on Solyndra-like investments.

UPDATE III: "House Democrats on Wednesday called for Congress to expand its investigation into federal loan programs to include a Bush-era loan to the bankrupt broadband Internet firm Open Range.

Open Range went bankrupt earlier this month after receiving the federal government’s biggest broadband loan totaling $267 million. Its collapse has put in jeopardy $74 million in money doled out to the firm."

Read the Washington Post, Democrats call for investigation into bankrupt Open Range federal loans.

Another example of what goes around comes around.


UPDATE II: More Republi-con hypocrisy, shocking, NOT.

Two Republican presidential candidates who have spoken out against federal subsidies for energy projects tried to obtain such benefits three years ago. Read the Washington Post, Rick Perry, Ron Paul have mixed record on energy subsidies.


UPDATE: "Today, the Republican-led Energy and Commerce Committee is investigating Solyndra, forcing its executives to take the Fifth Amendment, and releasing embarrassing White House e-mails. I looked it up: every single Republican on that committee who was in office in 2005 voted for the loan guarantee program that they are now so gleefully condemning." Read The New York Times, Hooray for Federal Loans!

Did you know "that Solyndra was cleared to participate in this loan-guarantee program by President George W. Bush’s administration [and] that the legislation creating the loan-guarantee program, approved by the Republican-controlled Congress in 2005, received yes votes from — wait for it — DeMint, Hatch and McConnell. . .

Bush’s Energy Department apparently adjusted its regulations to make sure that Solyndra would be eligible for the guarantees. It hadn’t originally contemplated including the photovoltaic-panel manufacturing that Solyndra did but changed the regulation before it was finalized. The only project that benefited was Solyndra’s."

Read the Washington Post, The birthing of Solyndra, which notes that the Obama "administration gave the company the loan guarantee, deserves the black eye that Republicans have given him over the half a billion dollars squandered on the company. But the Republican paternity of the program that birthed Solyndra suggests some skepticism is in order when many of those same Republicans use Solyndra as an example of all that is wrong with Obama’s governance."

Local Republi-CON Voted Twice for FL Septic Tank Inspections Before He Voted Against Them

"A campaign ad for Sen. Don Gaetz touches on jobs, education and septic tanks.

Florida’s next Senate president is telling voters in a new campaign ad that he fought to overturn a "fast one" pulled by Tallahassee lawmakers.

"When Tallahassee pulled a fast one on septic tanks, Gaetz fought back," a TV advertisement says.

That’s partially true.

But Sen. Don Gaetz, a loquacious Republican from the Panhandle, is leaving something out when he discusses a never-enforced and now largely repealed measure requiring septic tank inspections every five years.

He voted for the inspections. Twice."

Read In TV ad, PolitiFact Florida, Don Gaetz distorts debate over septic tank inspections.

All That Talk About the Federal Deficit and Debt Is Just a Republi-CON CON Game

UPDATE V:  Congresses action regarding the looming taxmageddon will be prof that all that hysteria about the federal defisit and debt is just a Republi-con con game. 

"Taxmageddon is the popular nickname given to a series of policies set to lapse or take effect in January, immediately slicing more than $500 billion out of next year’s federal budget deficit. While it includes about $100 billion in spending cuts, most of the changes involve higher taxes for every American taxpayer, primarily from the expiration of President Obama’s payroll tax holiday and broad tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush."

Read the Washington Post, CBO: Taxmageddon would bring tax pain but debt relief and The budget outlook in one graphic, with this graph:

 

The article notes:

"Remember: The 'extended baseline scenario' means we let the Bush tax cuts expire, the spending sequester take effect, etc. The 'alternative' scenario means we extend everything.

In the 'extended baseline scenario,' which is the one currently written into law, we don’t have a debt problem, but we have much higher taxes and, in the short-term, a likely recession. In the 'alternative' scenario, we’ve got a huge debt problem, but lower taxes and less short-term austerity. "

UPDATE IV:  Even Obamney recently admitted that balancing the federal budget would throw the U.S. "into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course."  Read the Washington Post, Mitt Romney, Keynesian, which references this comment by Jon Chait: "'Romney says this as if it’s completely obvious that reducing the deficit in the short term would throw the economy back into recession, even though he and his party have been arguing the opposite case with hysterical fervor.'"

Even Republi-cons don't believe their own lies about the myth of expansionary austerity. 

UPDATE III: More proof that the Republi-cons are all talk when it comes to the deficit, they're all hiding from Paul Ryan's latest budget plan.

Read the Washington Post, Paul Ryan’s budget is bad politics. Just ask Republicans.


UPDATE II: Republi-cons have never been concerned with merits of thier proposals, only the 'political possibilities.' As a result, "the budget deficit rose to 6 percent of gross domestic product in 1983 from 2.7 percent in 1980" under Reagan. Since he won re-election in 1984, Republi-cons have never been concerned about deficits, "only tax cuts mattered for political success." Read The New York Times, The Origin of Modern Republican Fiscal Policy.


UPDATE: "[A]s Republicans yell about Obama’s deficits and cry that we’re turning into Greece, Greece I tell you, all of them, all of them, propose making the deficit bigger.

And for what? For reverse Robin-Hoodism, taking from the poor and the middle class to lavish huge tax cuts on the rich.

And I believe that all of them know this, too. It’s pure hypocrisy – and it’s all in the service of class warfare waged on behalf of the top 0.1 or 0.01 percent of the income distribution."

Read The New York Times, Four Fiscal Phonies, which includes this graph showing "debt as a percentage of GDP in 2021 (using the OMB numbers (pdf) for Obama and CRFB for the others):"

"The national debt is likely to balloon under tax policies championed by three of the four major Republican candidates for president, according to an independent analysis of tax and spending proposals so far offered by the candidates.

The lone exception is Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who would pair a big reduction in tax rates with even bigger cuts in government services, slicing about $2 trillion from future borrowing.

According to the report — set for release Thursday by U.S. Budget Watch, a project of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget — former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum and former House speaker Newt Gingrich would do the most damage to the nation’s finances, offering tax and spending policies likely to require trillions of dollars in fresh borrowing.

Both men have proposed to sharply cut taxes but have not identified spending cuts sufficient to make up for the lost cash, the report said. By 2021, the debt would rise by about $4.5 trillion under Santorum’s policies and by about $7 trillion under those advocated by Gingrich, pushing the portion of the debt held by outside investors to well over 100 percent of the nation’s economy."

Read the Washington Post, Debt will swell under top GOP hopefuls’ tax plans.

As I've said for years now, the Republi-CONs conned the tea party, there will be no balanced budget, there won't even be a $100 billion budget cut as promised in 2010. So let's admit the obvious, the Republi-CONs are not serious about deficits.

The Republi-CON Continue to Try to Tank the Economy

UPDATE II:  "The aversion to government spending, and government activity generally, which animates many Americans isn’t actually based on economics, or logic: it is an emotionally driven belief system, founded upon a cockeyed view of American history and buttressed by a variety of right-wing shibboleths.

In the real world that rarely intrudes upon conservative economists and voters, both parties (and all Presidents) are Keynesians. Whenever the economy falters and private-sector spending declines, they use the tax-and-spending system to inject more demand into the economy. In 1981, Ronald Reagan did precisely this, slashing taxes and increasing defense spending. Between 2001 and 2003, George W. Bush followed the same script, introducing three sets of tax cuts and starting two wars. In February, 2009, Barack Obama introduced his stimulus. The real policy debate isn’t about Keynesianism versus the free market, it is about magnitudes and techniques: How much stimulus is necessary? And how should it be divided between government spending and tax cuts?

On both questions, Obama took the middle ground. His $800 billion stimulus program was smaller than many Keynesians, such as Christine Romer and Paul Krugman, wanted. (Romer reportedly pushed first for a $1.8 trillion package, then for $1.2 trillion.) Concentrated over a three-year period, it amounted to 1.1 per cent of G.D.P. in 2009, 2.4 per cent of G.D.P. in 2010, and 1.2 per cent of G.D.P. in 2011. So far, some $750 billion in stimulus money has been paid out: about $300 billion went to tax breaks for individuals and firms; roughly $235 billion was dispersed in the form of government contracts, grants, and loans; and another $225 billion was spent on entitlements—unemployment benefits, Medicaid, food stamps, and so on.

And what impact did the stimulus have? Without rehashing the entire debate—we’ve got another five months for that—here are three things to keep in mind.

1. It gave a much-needed boost to spending and growth. . .

2. The rise in federal spending under Obama was pretty modest. . .

3. Paul Krugman is right. To some extent, we already have a Republican economy. With the flow of stimulus money having all but dried up, and with continuing budget cutbacks at the state and local levels, government spending on many goods and services—the government spending that directly impacts G.D.P.—is falling.

You don’t believe it? Take a look at Table 1 in the Commerce Department’s latest report on G.D.P., and focus upon the section labelled “Government consumption expenditures and gross investment.” In 2011, you will notice, these expenditures declined at an annual rate of 2.1 per cent. In the first three months of this year, the rate of decline accelerated—to 3.9 per cent. The cutbacks have extended to all the major areas of government. Federal non-defense spending fell at an annual rate of 0.8 per cent in the first quarter; federal defense spending declined at an annual rate of 8.3 per cent, a shocking figure; state and local spending fell at a rate of 2.5 per cent.

It is a central tenet of Keynesian economics that when the government sector cuts back its expenditures in an economy with slack resources, worried households, and cautious business enterprises, output and growth will stall. That, of course, is precisely what has happened. In a saner world, we would be talking about what should be done right now, rather than after November, to rectify the situation."

Read The New Yorker, Reagan, Bush, and Obama: We Are All Still Keynesians.  

Read also, The Myth of Expansionary Austerity.  

UPDATE:  "[T]he best argument against Republicans’ claims that they can fix the economy. The fact is that we have already seen the Republican economic future — and it doesn’t work."  Read The New York Times, This Republican Economy.  

Republi-cons well know that any good news for the economy is bad news for their election hopes.

Their attacks on the Federal Reserve are "an effort to bully the Fed into doing exactly the wrong thing. The attackers want the Fed to slam on the brakes when it should be stepping on the gas; they want the Fed to choke off recovery when it should be doing much more to accelerate recovery. Fundamentally, the right wants the Fed to obsess over inflation, when the truth is that we’d be better off if the Fed paid less attention to inflation and more attention to unemployment. Indeed, a bit more inflation would be a good thing, not a bad thing."

Read The New York Times, Not Enough Inflation.

Since Obama was elected, Republi-cons have shown their willingness to sacrifice workers to appease their imaginary inflation god.

But there is not need to fear 'the invisible Republi-CON bond vigilantes'.

SoS Donald Trump and the Gullible Obanmey

If Obanmey is elected president, Donald Trump expects to be Secretary of State.  Read the Washington Post, Romney plays his Trump card, which goes on to note, and I quote at length:

"Romney thinks that Trump actually has the Romney campaign’s best interests in mind? Really? If so, one has to wonder whether Romney is too gullible to be president.

The idea that Trump cares about anything bigger than Trump is absurd. In his mind, from all evidence, there is nothing bigger than Trump.

If Trump really wanted Romney to win, he wouldn’t have done an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that deserves a prominent place in the annals of lunacy. Trump begins by slamming a taped introduction as 'totally inappropriate' and 'actually very dishonest' because it focused on the birther nonsense. He goes on to tell Blitzer that Obama 'uses reverse psychology' and pretends nonchalance about discussions of his origins when actually 'it’s not an issue that he likes talking about.'

I should interject that, back here on Planet Earth, the Obama campaign did all it could this week to focus attention on Trump and birtherism. The mood of top advisers seemed to approach unrestrained glee.

Poor Blitzer notes that Hawaii has formally certified Obama’s birth certificate. Trump contends that 'many people' do not believe the document is authentic.

'Like who?' Blitzer asks.

'There are many people,' says Trump.

'Give me a name of somebody,' demands Blitzer.

'There are many people,' says Trump. 'I don’t give names.'

Indeed, Trump refuses to violate the Super-Secret Birther Code of Silence by naming a single person who doubts the facts of Obama’s birth. He does pin himself down, however, when Blitzer asks whether 'the conspiracy' is supposed to have begun in 1961, when announcements of Obama’s birth were published in two Honolulu newspapers.

'That’s right,' Trump says.  'And many people put those announcements in because they wanted to get the benefit of being so-called born in this country. Many people did it. It was something that was done by many people, even if they weren’t born in the country. You know it, and so do I, and so do a lot of your viewers.'

This is transparently crazy — and also stupid. It is a bald-faced lie that 'many people' — or any people, far as I can tell — ever published fake birth announcements in hopes of establishing citizenship.

Moreover, Obama has to be a U.S. citizen, even if he were born on the moon, because of his mother’s citizenship. Trump needs to hire some writers to come up with better material.

As for Romney, he needs to decide whether Trump is the sort of person on whom he wants to rely for support and advice — if he’s one of the 'good people' Romney would be proud to have at his side if he becomes president.

Oh, sorry. Looks as if that choice has already been made."

SUA, SUA! Are You a Ronmey Amercian?

"Mitt Romney’s digital team debuted 'With Mitt,' an app that lets supporters share their support for the Republican presidential hopeful, on Tuesday. At first, the app received little fanfare.

By Tuesday night, however, the app’s users had drawn attention to one glaring mistake: one of the 14 text overlays available within the app stated that Romney is for 'A Better Amercia.' Yes, you read that right: 'Amercia.'"

Read Mashable, Amercia the Meme: Why Romney’s Gaffe Won’t Die


You too can join Amercia is with Mitt!

And of course, as Colbert noted, the "innovative iPhone app doubles his presidential odds" and "There's definitely no proof Obama was born in 'Amercia'.  Watch the Colbert Report, starting at the 3:36 mark:

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The Republi-CON Modus Operandi: Barefaced Lies

UPDATE III:  The Republi-con Party, aka The Just Make Stuff Up Party. 

Read the Washington Post, Romney’s unsubstantiated quote from union leader. 

UPDATE II:  The Chevrolet Volt, the European Car of the Year, is another subject of repeated Republi-con lies.

First, "the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had given the Volt its highest crash-safety rating. . ."

[Next, w]hat is the connection between President Obama and the Volt? There is none. The car was the brainchild of Bob Lutz, a legendary auto executive who is about as liberal as the Koch brothers. The tax credit — which is part of the reason conservatives hate the car — became law during the Bush administration.

'It's nuts,” said Lutz, when I spoke to him earlier in the week. 'This is a significant achievement in the auto industry. There are so many legitimate things to criticize Obama about. It is inexplicable that the right would feel the need to tell lies about the Volt to attack the president.'

In his regular blog at Forbes, Lutz has tried to counter what he has called the 'rabid, sadly misinformed right.' But he has largely given up. The last straw came when his conservative intellectual hero, Charles Krauthammer, described the Volt as 'flammable.' Krauthammer, Lutz felt, had to know better. Although he remains deeply conservative, Lutz told me that he has become disenchanted with the right’s willingness to spread lies to aid the cause. . .

Not to worry, though. With seven months to go before the election, Cavuto and his Fox News brethren will have plenty of opportunities to denigrate an innovative car, employing American technology and creating American jobs, in order to besmirch a president who had nothing to do with it.

It is, after all, what they do."

Read The New York Times, The Right Flames the Volt.



UPDATE:  "Mitt Romney is developing a Mirlande Wilson problem.

Wilson, for those not acquainted with the name, is the Maryland woman who claimed to have a winning lottery ticket worth $218 million. She had agreed to buy lottery tickets with money pooled from her co-workers at McDonald's, but then she claimed that the winning ticket was one she bought separately. As the New York Daily News has documented, she has since claimed she's not sure she won, she hasn't checked the ticket, the ticket is at her home, the ticket is hidden at McDonald's, the ticket is secreted away somewhere else, and now she can't find it.

On Wednesday, she called a news conference, only for her lawyer to tell reporters to 'go home.'

This was developing, by chance, on the same day I watched Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, give a speech in Washington. Like Wilson and her golden ticket, Romney was having some trouble getting out the facts. . .

No fewer than three Romney claims in that one speech merited PolitiFact's 'Pants on Fire' rating: that Obama led 'a government takeover of health care,' has been 'apologizing for America abroad' and is ending 'Medicare as we know it.' Romney's assertions that Obama 'is the only president to ever cut $500 billion from Medicare' and that eliminating Obamacare saves 'about $100 billion' were rated false.

That Romney resorts to such gratuitous falsehoods discredits his leadership more than his opponent's."

Read the Washington Post, The facts vs. Mitt Romney.

 
A barefaced lie "is one that is obviously a lie to those hearing it."

Watch Santorum "pull one out of his [bare] ass," at the Colbert Report, Rick Santorum Speaks from His Heart - California Colleges:

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All part of the Republi-CON "not intended to be a factual statement" and "misinformation" propaganda industry

Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows

Proving that Republi-CON politics is 'weird, and creepy, and . . . lacks even the loosest attachment to anything like reality," The Great Lecherer endorses Obamney, .  From the Colbert Report, Newt Gingrich & Mitt Romney Alliance Analogies: 

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Obamney, Poor Little Rich Bully

Read the New Yorker piece by Edmund White, who was about seven years ahead of Mitt Romney at Cranbrook Schools outside Detroit, "about Romney and his bullying of a student who was perceived as gay (forcefully cutting off his long, bleached-blond hair), a familiar picture emerges. Romney was not a good student nor was he athletic; he was the manager of one of the school teams, a sort of default position for boys who wanted to be athletic and cool and popular—a water boy, in essence. He was considered a class clown, always up to rather cruel pranks. I can picture his situation, though it’s only speculation on my part (I’ve never known any of his friends, though one of his older brothers was a classmate). On the one hand he had an embarrassingly famous father, the governor of Michigan, whom he idolized as the youngest child. On the other he was the sole Mormon, a member of what was definitely seen as a creepy, stigmatized cult in that world of bland Episcopalian Wasps (we had Episcopalian services at chapel three mornings a week). When his father was president of American Motors, he lived at home and was a day student, an envied status. When his father was elected governor and moved to the state capital of Lansing, he became a boarder. Suddenly he was surrounded by other Cranbrook students and the strict “masters,” 24/7. He no longer had the constant support of his tight-knit family. Now he had to win approval from the other boys."

Read The New Yorker,  Cranbrook and Romney.

Success Has Many Fathers

Even flip-flopping fathers who denied you before.

From the Washington Post, So was the auto bailout Romney’s idea or not?

"Mitt Romney, Feb 4, 2012:

'The president tells us that without his intervention things in Detroit would be worse. I believe that without his intervention things there would be better.'

Eric Fehrnstrom, senior adviser to the Romney campaign, April 30, 2012:

Romney’s 'position on the bailout was exactly what President Obama followed. I know it infuriates them to hear that. The only economic success that President Obama has had is because he followed Mitt Romney’s advice.'"

The State of Abortabama

If you use drugs while pregnant in Alabama, you best get an abortion quick.  Read The New York Times,

The Criminalization of Bad Mothers.

The 'Love Child Father' Who Could Have Been President

UPDATE V:  "Beware the extreme narcissist. Although he may radiate a seductive confidence, he can justify and forgive himself for just about anything, given his belief in his own exalted purpose. He’ll lose sense of the line between boldness and recklessness. And he’ll quit the stage reluctantly, because he can’t bear not to occupy the very center of it.

What once drew so many people to Edwards and to Gingrich? Both men had an exaggerated and infectious certainty about them. In Gingrich’s withering sneer and Edwards’s shampoo-commercial smile, there was a seeming estrangement from any and all doubt. It is the kind of thing that assuages a voter’s anxieties."

Read The New york Times, A Shared State of Defeat.  

UPDATE IV:  "A man who seemed headed for the Oval Office may be headed to jail, raising the eternal question: Why is the flesh always weak?"  Read The New York Times, Brutality of Servility, which notes "[i]t's a trial without heroes, just liars and an abhorrent trio of selfish people trying to spin the story their own way."

Reminds me of that once upon a time, fairy tale president, with who Edwards was often compared.

UPDATE III: "The Justice Department reportedly plans to accuse John Edwards of misusing presidential campaign funds to cover up an affair." Read The New York Times, Edwards to Face Criminal Charges.


UPDATE II: The story gets uglier. Read ABC News, Ex-Edwards Aide: $1 Million Spent to Cover Up Pregnant Mistress.

If Edwards knew of this he needs to go to jail, and it is hard to see how he wouldn't have known.


UPDATE: Are we blinded by celebrity? Read the Washington Post, From John Edwards, lessons on celebrity and politics.

Is lying about a 'love child' an impeachable offense? Read CBS News, What if John Edwards Were President?

Just another narcissistic politician. (Yes, I know, another tautology.)

BTW, the National Enquirer plans to enter the paper's work on the John Edwards scandal for a Pulitzer Prize. If it wins the National Enquirer would have one more Pulitzer than Hedgehog News.

Red States Better Hope Austerity Just Continues To Be a Republi-CON Con Game

Red states are to the U.S. what the PIIGS are to the European Union, and "austerity might be no more welcome here than it is in Europe."  Read The New York Times, How Richer States Finance Poorer Ones, which references "an interactive map that shows the incidence of government benefits by county, in total and broken down by type of program. One can click on a county to discover the amount of transfer income per capita in the county and the fraction of the county’s income represented by transfer payments. It appears that there are quite a few Greeces within the American borders."

Can you say oink oink NW Florida.

The Myth of Expansionary Austerity

UPDATE XI:  "[W]e’re now living in a world of zombie economic policies — policies that should have been killed by the evidence that all of their premises are wrong, but which keep shambling along nonetheless. And it’s anyone’s guess when this reign of error will end."  Read The New York Times,  Death of a Fairy Tale. 

UPDATE X:  The chart says it all.  From the Washington Post, The consequences of austerity in one chart?:

The article, quoting Joe Weisenthal, notes that the "UK was recovering on a fine trajectory right up until early 2010, at which point UK growth hit a brick wall. What happened in 2010? That’s when conservative David Cameron came to power with an agenda of reigning in the debt."

As I said before, and before,Obama should call the Republi-CON bluff.

UPDATE IX: Just ask the PIIGGS, "austerity policies have been an utter failure." Read The New York Times, Pain Without Gain.


UPDATE VIII: "Despite meeting terms for bailout money [i.e. austerity measures], Portugal is going deeper into debt because its economy is shrinking." Read The New York Times, Portugal’s Debt Efforts May Be Warning for Greece.

So much for expansionary austerity.


UPDATE VII: "Look at Britain [or Italy or Spain] to see the tragic effects of a very bad idea." Read The New York Times, The Austerity Debacle.

UPDATE VI: "Once again, when politicians and policy makers decided to focus on deficits, not jobs, they proved Keynes right about a slump being the wrong time for austerity. " Read The New York Times, Keynes Was Right.


UPDATE V: From The New York Times, The Hijacked Crisis:

[The markets are] "signaling, as clearly as anyone could ask, that unemployment rather than deficits is our biggest problem. Bear in mind that deficit hawks have been warning for years that interest rates on U.S. government debt would soar any day now; the threat from the bond market was supposed to be the reason that we must slash the deficit now now now. But that threat keeps not materializing. And, this week, on the heels of a downgrade that was supposed to scare bond investors, those interest rates actually plunged to record lows.

What the market was saying — almost shouting — was, 'We’re not worried about the deficit! We’re worried about the weak economy!' For a weak economy means both low interest rates and a lack of business opportunities, which, in turn, means that government bonds become an attractive investment even at very low yields. If the downgrade of U.S. debt had any effect at all, it was to reinforce fears of austerity policies that will make the economy even weaker.

So how did Washington discourse come to be dominated by the wrong issue?

Hard-line Republicans have, of course, played a role. Although they don’t seem to truly care about deficits — try suggesting any rise in taxes on the rich — they have found harping on deficits a useful way to attack government programs.

But our discourse wouldn’t have gone so far off-track if other influential people hadn’t been eager to change the subject away from jobs, even in the face of 9 percent unemployment, and to hijack the crisis on behalf of their pre-existing agendas."

UPDATE IV: We are in a 'Great Contraction,' and problem No. 1 is too much debt.

"Until we find ways to restructure and forgive some of these debts from consumers, firms, banks and governments, spending to drive growth is not going to come back at the scale we need.

Our challenge now, therefore, is to deleverage the economy as fast as possible, while, at the same time, getting back to investing as much as possible in our real pillars of growth so our recovery is built on sustainable businesses and real jobs and not just on another round of credit injections"

Read The New York Times, Win Together or Lose Together, which quotes:

"Kenneth Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard, who argued in an essay last week for Project Syndicate that we are not in a Great Recession but in a Great (Credit) Contraction: 'Why is everyone still referring to the recent financial crisis as the ‘Great Recession?' ' asked Rogoff. 'The phrase ‘Great Recession’ creates the impression that the economy is following the contours of a typical recession, only more severe — something like a really bad cold. ... But the real problem is that the global economy is badly overleveraged, and there is no quick escape without a scheme to transfer wealth from creditors to debtors, either through defaults, financial repression, or inflation.'

Re-read 'The Great Stagnation' about our broken political system.


UPDATE II: We are not suffering through a normal "business-cycle recession, in which the drop is quick, and the recovery is usually similarly swift. That is not what we’re in. That is not what financial crises are. And mistaking one for the other has, in his opinion, cost us a fortune.

Financial crises are not about the business cycle falling out of whack. They’re about debt. Lots of it. And that’s why they’re so resistant to efforts to speed a recovery. Whereas you normally get out of a recession by lowering interest rates and persuading consumers to spend, the period after a financial crisis is marked by consumers trying to dig out from under a mountain of borrowed money. You can accelerate that process, but it’s hard to do. But first you must correctly diagnose the problem. . .

'Debt de-leveraging takes about seven years. That’s the essence,' [Carmen Reinhart, now of the Peterson Institute for International Economics] says. 'And in the decade following severe financial crises, you tend to grow by 1 to 1.5 percentage points less than in the decade before, because the decade before was fueled by a boom in private borrowing, and not all of that growth was real. The unemployment figures in advanced economies after falls are also very dark. Unemployment remains anchored about five percentage points above what it was in the decade before.'"

Read the Washington Post, Double dip, or just one big economic dive?

But whether it is a Republi-con double-dip recession or not, there is no argument that Republi-cons want Obama to fail, the American economy is just acceptable collateral damage to achieve that goal.


UPDATE: As I first stated in 2008, the economy is deleveraging. From The New York Times, We’re Spent:

"We are feeling the deferred pain from 25 years of excess, as people try to rebuild their depleted savings. This pattern is a classic one. The definitive book about financial crises has become 'This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly,' published in 2009 with exquisite timing, by Carmen M. Reinhart, now of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and Kenneth S. Rogoff, of Harvard.

Surveying hundreds of years of crises around the world, Ms. Reinhart and Mr. Rogoff conclude that debt is the primary cause and that the aftermath is 'deep and prolonged,' with 'profound declines in output and employment.' On average, a modern financial crisis has caused the unemployment rate to rise for more than four years and by 7 percentage points. (We’re now at almost four years and 5 percentage points.) The recovery takes many years more."

And the article warns of the risk of austerity measures now:

"The easy thing now might be to proclaim that debt is evil and ask everyone — consumers, the federal government, state governments — to get thrifty. The pithiest version of that strategy comes from Andrew W. Mellon, the Treasury secretary when the Depression began: 'Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,' Mellon said, according to his boss, President Herbert Hoover. 'It will purge the rottenness out of the system.'

History, however, has a different verdict. If governments stop spending at the same time that consumers do, the economy can enter a vicious cycle, as it did in Hoover’s day."

Of course, Republi-cons don't want an economic recovery just yet, even if unemployment remains high. It doesn't benefit their plans for the 2012 election, just as Bush couldn't admit the Iraq strategy failure until after the 2006 elections, even as soldiers died.

Another warning about the myth of expansionary austerity.

"The Irish, British and, soon, Greeks have bought into a misguided belief in austerity — that they can somehow cut their way to growth. In the United States, we have seen states and municipalities slashing head counts of teachers, cops and firemen. The “paradox of thrift” has morphed into a misguided economics of austerity. Hence, even when the private sector manages to create some jobs, its offset by public-sector job cuts." Read the Washington Post, Wall Street analysts and economists have this recession recovery wrong, which notes the economic downturn was caused by a credit-crisis, not an ordinary run-of-the-mill recession, "far rarer, more protracted and much more painful [and] different from other cycles" and bubbles.

Obama is President, OBL is Dead, GM is Alive, But What If Obamney Was President?

UPDATE:  Buy the bumper sticker at The NoBullU store:

OBL is alive, GM is dead, re-elect Romney!
A what might have been from NoBullU.com.

make custom gifts at Zazzle

GM would be dead, and OBL would be alive.  And how could Obamney claim otherwise, because as he said in 2007, "[i]t's not worth moving heaven and earth, spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person."

Read the Washington Post, Obama campaign implies that Mitt Romney would not have killed Osama bin Laden.

Just one example of how old Obamney will haunt new Obamney in the next six months.

He won't be able to etch a sketch his way out of this one.

WWJC ('What Would Jesus Cut?')

UPDATE IV:  The "Ryan budget, passed by the House, 'fails to meet' the moral criteria of the Church, namely its view that any budget should help 'the least of these' as the Christian Bible requires: the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the jobless. 'A just spending bill cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor and vulnerable persons,' the bishops wrote.

In fact, Ryan would cut spending on the least of these by about $5 trillion over 10 years — from Medicaid, food stamps, welfare and the like — and then turn around and award some $4 trillion in tax cuts to the most of these. To their credit, Catholic leaders were not about to let Ryan claim to be serving God when in fact he was serving mammon.
'Your budget,' a group of Jesuit scholars and other Georgetown University faculty members wrote to Ryan last week, 'appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Her call to selfishness and her antagonism toward religion are antithetical to the Gospel values of compassion and love.'"

Read the Washington Post, A faith-based lesson for Paul Ryan.

UPDATE III:  Would Jesus 'crucify the poor' to pay for military spending and tax cuts for the wealthy?  Read thew Washington Post, The Gospel according to Paul Ryan.

UPDATE II: It has been asserted "that compassion is 'best fulfilled through Christian charity and spiritual counseling, not government programs.' If this is an affirmation that religious charities have unique advantages over public bureaucracies, it is noncontroversial. If this is an assertion that charity and counseling can replace public programs that provide school meals, AIDS treatment or health care for the poor, it is dangerously oblivious to the real world. The scale of private efforts is not sufficient to meet the demands of public justice — which gives government an important role." So says Michael Gerson, Bush's chief speechwriter. Read the Washington Post, Two parties pray to the same God, but different economists.


UPDATE: Christians should to "emulate the life of Jesus — especially his concern for the poor and oppressed — and confront social ills like racial oppression and environmental pollution." Read The New York Times, Evangelicals Without Blowhards.

"The poor is hated even of his own neighbour: but the rich hath many friends." -- Proverbs 14:20, King James Version

Read the Washington Post, Obama is urged by Christian groups to protect poor in debt limit fight.

Our Resident Pastor-to-the-Dictators (AKA Pastor Truthiness (formerly known as Pastor Poppins)) has waged a campaign of fear, anger and hatred by hosting professional purveyors of hate. But I wonder why he never talks of the poor.

Did you know that the "Bible contains more than 300 verses on the poor, social justice, and God's deep concern for both"?

Is the Answer Conservative Economic and Liberal Social Policies

"Amid all the grim economic news from Europe, it’s worth noting that there are also some success stories. Well, of course, you say: Germany. Okay. But there’s another conspicuous candidate, and it might seem surprising: Sweden. To many Americans, Sweden is a bloated, inefficient welfare state. But the reality and the stereotype don’t match."

Read the Washington Post, The Swedish model for economic recovery.

Watch Hedgehog News, Be Dumber Than the Ill-Informed

UPDATE II:  Here is Colbert's take on the silver spoon lie: where "Obama makes a cowardly statement about Mitt Romney's wealth, made all the more cowardly by the fact that he never said it." Watch The Colbert Report, Steve Doocy's Silver Spoon Subtext Reporting:

 

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

UPDATE:  The ignorance is due to all the Hedgehog News lies in the service to their Republi-con overlords.  Read the Washington Post, Fox News, Steve Doocy and the 'silver spoon' smirk. 

People who watch Hedgehog News, "the most popular of the 24-hour cable news networks, are 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government than those who watch no news at all (after controlling for other news sources, partisanship, education and other demographic factors). [Hedgehog] News watchers are also 6-points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government than those who watch no news." Read the reports of the Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind Poll, Some News Leaves People Knowing Less and Many think US is bailing out Greece; NPR, Jon Stewart Out-Fox Cable News.

The first report quotes Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson and an analyst for the PublicMind Poll, who says that "the results show us that there is something about watching. [Hedgehog] News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all."

Obama in 2012?, Another Forecast Model

UPDATE:  Don't put too much faith in predictive models based on older election results, says one commentator, because of the changed nature of the party coalitions.

"Today the party coalitions are much more stable, and the battle is fought almost entirely between the 45-yard lines of the field. We have not seen anybody win less than 45 percent in terms of two-party presidential vote in twenty years, and it has only happened once in the House vote (to the GOP in 2008). This means that both sides have secured a solid base of 45 percent, and the range from cycle-to-cycle in terms of two-party vote share is now half of what it once was: the average difference in two-party vote share from 1948 through 1984 was 10.9 percent; since 1988 it has only been 5.8 percent. What’s more, between 2000 and 2008 a total of 10 states voted Republican and Democratic for president at least once, but between 1964 and 1972 forty-three states voted for both sides at least once.

(In Congress, this transition from regional to ideological parties has created the polarization that Beltway pundits regularly bemoan. Really, it is just a consequence of 'Democratic' now meaning 'liberal' and 'Republican' meaning 'conservative.' Fifty years ago, that was not necessarily true.) . . .

This is a lesson not just for the wonky backwaters of predictive modeling, but a good lesson for moving forward through this presidential cycle. If the only real swath of persuable voters amounts to maybe 10 percent of the electorate, then we need to be careful in how we look at the horse race. After all, we are talking about a group of people that have virtually no partisan or ideological attachments, pay very little attention to politics, and often create the crazy swings we see in the horse race polls during the course of the cycle. They are at the least fickle and at the worst maddening, as they regularly tell pollsters they have settled opinions when in fact they do not!"

Read The Weekly Standard, 90 Percent of the Electorate Is Probably Locked In.

"Political scientists have long known that you can predict most of what will happen in a presidential election with just a few key pieces of information: how the economy does, for instance, and the incumbent’s approval ratings in the summer. If you have those two numbers — even before you know the opponent, the campaign strategies or the issues — you can usually call the winner.

What these models suggest, in other words, is that the ephemera of elections aren’t that important. Not that this stuff doesn’t matter at all: Elections are often close, and a few percentage points can mean the difference between defeat and victory. But these micro-scandals mostly serve to distract us from the things that really do matter. And I don’t want to spend the next seven months distracted."

Read the Washington Post, 'Scandals' don’t predict election results. But this formula might., which includes a forecast model that "uses just three pieces of information that have been found to be particularly predictive: economic growth in the year of the election, as measured by the change in gross domestic product during the first three quarters; the president’s approval rating in June; and whether one of the candidates is the incumbent.

And compare the results with The New Times forecast model discussed previously.

The Republi-CON Etch A Sketch Candidate

UPDATE VI:  Another move to middle, this one by a potential VP, "defending U.S. involvement in crises abroad," and admiting Obama's not doing such a bad job on foreign policy.  Read the Washington Post, Marco Rubio delivers foreign policy address with bipartisan tone at Brookings Institution.  

UPDATE V:  Shakin it up and makin that move to the middle:

First, a gay senior adviser, for the gay vote.  Read the Washington Post, Mitt Romney adviser Richard Grenell faces backlash over tweets, sexual orientation. 

Next, Obamney, "who vowed to veto the Dream Act, went on the campaign trail Monday with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who favors some legal status for those who would be covered by the act. Romney’s campaign says his claim during a primary debate that the Arizona law was a “model” for the nation referred only to the electronic verification of immigration status. (Alas for Romney, he endorsed the Arizona law more than once.) His campaign also tried recently to disown Kris Kobach, an immigration hard-liner, before admitting that the Kansas secretary of state is an 'informal adviser.'"  Read the Washington Post, Romney won’t be able to shake immigration debate, which notes that "[a]ficionados of the Etch a Sketch will recall a certain flaw in the toy: If you use it often, some of the lines drawn no longer disappear when you shake the device, instead leaving an indelible trace of where you have been."

UPDATE IV:  The latest etch a sketch moment, appointment of a gay spokesman.  Read Mediaite, Anti-Gay Radio Host And Log Cabin Republican Argue Over Romney’s Appointment Of Gay Spokesman.

UPDATE III:  "Perceptions of ideological extremism are one of the few factors that influence voter perceptions of challengers, as George McGovern and Barry Goldwater discovered. So Romney persumably wants to move to the center on as many issues as possible, including the ones Democrats are pushing. And yet this isn’t easy, because Romney doesn’t want a civil war to break out in the GOP.

Dems are currently pushing votes on no less than three major issues, all of which are designed to force Romney to make difficult choices."

Read the Washington Post, The trap Democrats are laying for Mitt Romney.
UPDATE II:  It being general election Etch A Sketch time, watch Ann Romney become pro-choice as she says that politicians "need to respect choices women make." See The Daily Show, Mitt Needs Moms - Motherhood Is Hard, starting at the 1:15 mark.

And at the 1:50 mark, watch Obamney say just three months ago said that mothers should work.

UPDATE:  What will Obamney's position be on immigration, health care, global warming, abortion, foreign policy, or even stay-at-home mothers?  It depends.  Read the Washington Post, Which Mitt will we get?, which notes that "[t]he presidential debates shouldn’t be much of a chore for Obama this fall. He can just stand by while Romney argues with himself."

"In a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece on Thursday, the veteran conservative journalist Fred Barnes offered Mitt Romney some advice for improving his campaign, including the sensible (and one might also say humane) suggestion that on immigration, the presumptive nominee 'would be wise to move away from his harsh position in the primaries.'

Then Barnes included this fascinating sentence: 'According to a Romney adviser, his private view of immigration isn’t as anti-immigrant as he often sounded.'"

Read the Washington Post, Tell us more about Romney's 'private' views.


I'm sure this post will be updated regularly with more of Obamney's 'private' views.

Voters Can't Handle the Truth And the Candidates Know It

Will "campaign rhetoric make it impossible for [Obama or Obamney] to be effective if elected president?"  You betcha!  Read CNN, Campaign rhetoric may tie next president's hands. 

So "[t]o corral unexcited base voters, both campaigns must rely less on positive messaging (what can they say?) and much more on galvanizing dislike and antipathy of 'the other side.' The dueling dog stories do that job perfectly. Which is why you'll keep hearing about them through the long weeks of electioneering ahead."  Read CNN, Why Obama vs. Romney is becoming a dogfight.

150 Years Later

UPDATE VI:  One hundred and fifty years ago [April 24-25, 1862], "Admiral Farragut's momentous, and surprisingly bloodless, conquest of the Big Easy."  Read The New York Times, The Fall of New Orleans.

UPDATE V: Read also The New York Times, The Meaning of Bull Run.


UPDATE IV: One hundred and fifty years ago today [July 21, 1861] "the first major battle of the Civil War." Read the play-by-play of Bull Run at The New York Times, Where Ignorant Armies Clash.


UPDATE III: The South seceded over states' rights you say? Wrong. "Confederate states did claim the right to secede, but no state claimed to be seceding for that right. In fact, Confederates opposed states' rights -- that is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery. " Read the Washington Post, Five myths about why the South seceded.


UPDATE II: One hundred and fifty years ago today [January 5, 1861] "armed secessionist insurgents from Mobile" overtook "Fort Gaines on the outer reaches of Mobile Bay." Read The New York Times, The Precarious Position of Lt. Reese, which notes that several months later, "as Charleston Harbor was lighted up during the bombardment of Fort Sumter, [Reese] was en route to Pensacola, part of a 500-man expedition headed to relieve Fort Pickens, which guarded the entrance to Pensacola Harbor and sat just 40 miles east of his previous post. The tiny garrison at Fort Pickens was one of the few forts to resist Confederate demands to surrender; with the timely arrival of Reese and the rest of the reinforcements, it managed to avoid the fate of Fort Gaines."


UPDATE: "One hundred and fifty years ago today [December 20, 1860] South Carolina declared its independence from the United States." For more on the intricate legal history that connected slavery to states’ rights — and how it led to secession, read The New York Times, Disunion: States’ Rights, but to What?

From November until April, follow the Civil War Sesquicentennial.

The Washington Post "commemorates the Civil War's 150th anniversary with commentary from experts, sesquicentennial news and an updating event calendar."

And The New York Times "revisits and reconsiders America's most perilous period -- using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded."

The Question Isn't Whether to Raise Taxes, It's Whose Taxes Will Be Raised

"Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Republicans are not against all tax increases. Rep. Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader, thinks poor people might need a tax hike. . .

At the Politico event, Mr. Cantor was asked if broadening the base means tax increases for the poor. 'I'm saying that, just in a macro way of looking at it, you’ve got to discuss that issue,' he said. 'I've never believed that you go raise taxes on those that have been successful, that are paying in, taking away from them, so that you just hand out and give to someone else.'

There are many things wrong with this nonsense, but I’ll just point out one: Mr. Cantor and other Republicans who push this line have it exactly backwards. The problem is not that so many Americans don’t pay taxes. It’s that so many Americans are too poor to pay taxes."

Read The New York Times, A Dastardly Plot to Avoid Taxes.

Economic Mess for Non-Dummies

UPDATE VI:  As noted many times before, the Great Recession, AKA Lesser Depression, was caused by credit default swaps, deregulation and lack of government oversight.  Watch the special FRONTLINE four-part series, Money, Power and Wall Street.

"FRONTLINE finds plenty of blame to go around (Goldman Sachs and CEO Lloyd Blankfein take a particular bruising), but is most devastating in its dissection of the chummy collusion between bankers and the government leaders who should have been watch-dogging them," just as I have been saying for years.

UPDATE V: Despite Republi-con myths to the contrary, "[t]he 2008 financial crisis was . . . caused by widespread failures in government regulation, corporate mismanagement and heedless risk-taking by Wall Street . . . permitting a calamitous concoction: shoddy mortgage lending, the excessive packaging and sale of loans to investors, and risky bets on securities backed by the loans." Read The New York Tiems, Financial Meltdown Was 'Avoidable,' Inquiry Concludes


UPDATE IV: Is it the best documentary of 2010. Watch the preview:




UPDATE III: "Wall St. moguls, Washington polls, government regulators, rating agencies, unscrupulous lenders, or unqualified borrowers—who is free from blame.

There were those who were outright crooks. There were those who failed to do due diligence. There were those who were simply greedy. There were those who were too dumb to see what was going on. What McLean and Nocera have written is an indictment of all the devils involved, and everyone involved smells of the sulfurous pit. "

Read All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis.


UPDATE II: For other reviews of the movie, read:

San Fransico Chronicle, Who was responsible for the global financial collapse? Filmmaker Charles Ferguson finds out in "Inside Job"

Huffington Post, Will Inside Job Start a Popular Rebellion?

The movie is the economic horror film of 2010.


UPDATE: And still having a hard time understanding the economic mess. Then "you haven't seen "Inside Job," the new documentary about how our economic crisis evolved." Read the Washington Post, The economic crisis was an 'inside job'.

After watching the documentary, the writer concludes "trying to assign blame to either Democrats or Republicans is pointless. Everyone is culpable. From the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan deregulated banks, through the two Bushes, Bill Clinton and now Barack Obama, each administration has endorsed -- and each Congress has helped tweak -- laws and rules that made systemic abuses and the meltdown not only possible but, looking back, inevitable."

Still having a hard time understanding the economic mess. My previous post, Economic Mess for Dummies, not challenging enough. Then read Charles I. Jones, A Supplement to Macroeconomics (W.W. Norton, 2008), The Global Financial Crisis of 2007–20??.

Also still wondering who's to blame. Read, NPR, Planet Money, He Blames Greenspan.

The Republi-CON 'Media Bias' Myth AKA 'Reporting Something I Don’t Like'

How did we get to the point that even Republi-cons are now complaining about the bias of right-wing media outlets like Fox News and National Review?

Last week in Delaware, The Great Lecherer told a "Tea Party crowd that 'CNN is less biased than Fox.' By deploying the media-bias charge against an institution developed to combat it, Gingrich [and others have] demonstrated just how meaningless the indictment has become."

Read The New York Times, The Boys Who Cried Fox.

A Republican Meteorologist on Republi-CON Truthiness About Global Warming

"Climate science shows that over a long period of time, the statistics have changed. Things that used to happen a lot, like consistent winter snow cover, are happening less reliably. Things that happened every now and then, like droughts and wildfires, are happening more reliably. And things that almost never happened -- such as the 15,000 new U.S. temperature records in March -- sometimes now do occur. And they can’t be explained with purely meteorological reasoning.

The changes we’re seeing, far more than I can list here, seem like an accumulation of coincidences. Pieced together, reveal the full puzzle: There’s more heat and moisture in the atmosphere, and our emissions are largely responsible for keeping it there.

The millennium’s first decade was the warmest on record and included nine of the 10 hottest years. Greenhouse gas levels are at their highest in 800,000 years. Less heat is escaping the top of the atmosphere in the wavelengths of greenhouse gases. For the first time, scientists have recorded both hemispheres are warming – and the global temperature spike can’t be linked to an astronomical trigger, such as solar variability. Great Lakes peak ice has seen a 71 percent drop since 1973. Winters are shorter. Lakes melt earlier. Plants are moving north.

Worldwide, 95% of land-based glaciers are losing mass. September Arctic sea ice has lost 10 percent of its area every decade. Sea levels are rising. Oceans are 30 percent more acidic. Flooding and extreme storms are spiking in frequency and intensity. Last winter was the 4th warmest on record, despite the cooling influence of a La Nina phase in the Pacific.

Extremes are becoming more extreme. And none of it has anything to do with Al Gore. . .

How did so much of the Republican Party enter perpetual denial? We’ve turned climate science into a bizarre litmus test for conservatism. To pretend that heat-trapping gases can be waved away with a nod and a smirk is political fairytale. No harm. No foul. Keep drilling.

I’m a Christian and ultimately come to Christ through faith. With climate change no faith is required. There is a large and growing body of evidence. The way nature works applies the same to Republican and Democrat, Christian and Muslim, animal, tree and stone. Why do people who profess to love and follow God roll their eyes? Luke 16:2 says "Man has been appointed as a steward for the management of God’s property, and ultimately he will give account for his stewardship."

Read Bloomberg Businessweek, Climate Change Has Nothing to Do With Al Gore.

And then explain what happens to 35 gigatons of CO2 each year.  

The Republi-CON 'We Are Better Than Europe' Myth

UPDATE:  We are the New Old Europe.

"Many countries have higher tax rates — and the United States has had higher tax rates — without stifling growth or encouraging the concentration of income in the hands of the very rich.

'In a way, the United States is becoming like Old Europe, which is very strange in historical perspective,' Mr. Piketty said. 'The United States used to be very egalitarian, not just in spirit but in actuality. Inequality of wealth and income used to be much larger in France. And very high taxes on the very rich — that was invented in the United States,' he said."

Read The New York Times, For Two Economists, the Buffett Rule Is Just a Start, which include this graph:

"The complexity of our tax code allows us to believe that we’re not a welfare state, but that’s false. . .

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently calculated how much each affluent country spends on social programs. When you include both direct spending and tax expenditures, the U.S. has one of the biggest welfare states in the world. We rank behind Sweden and ahead of Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland and Canada. Social spending in the U.S. is far above the organization’s average."

Read The New York Times, America Is Europe.

Where's All the Republi-CON Self-Righteous Indignation Now

 "Rush Limbaugh's 'slut' comment is only the tip of the iceberg."

Now an important Romney supporter "on team Mitt" is threatening Obama and calling Democratic women brain-dead, soulless idiots and varmints.

Read the Washington Post, Mitt Romney should denounce Ted Nugent, for women's sake. 

Make Your Own Tax Code

UPDATE:  Businesses make changes to the tax code all the time, it's called lobbying.  Read the Washington Post, Want lower tax rates? Hire a lobbyist., which notes that there is no direct "evidence linking the lobbying to the lower tax rates. But it would be fairly odd if they were spending all that money and getting nothing." 

So much for the the Republi-con 'it'll be easy to balance the budget' myth

 Just in time for tax day, read the Washington Post, Make your own tax code, which states:

"Think you could writer a better tax code than the one we've got? Here's your chance: The fine folks at Splitwise have a very cool interactive tax graphic where you can change the marginal rates on different income groups and eliminate various deductions and see the effect on the deficit. Go nuts."

A Palin What Might Have Been

"Would Sarah Palin have given Mitt Romney a tougher fight than Rick Santorum did?"  Read The New York Times, The Palin Counterfactual. 

In any case, it sure would have been a gift to comedians.  Read The New York Times, Come Back, Sarah Palin!

The Republi-CON 'It'll Be Easy to Balance the Budget' Myth

UPDATE:  Here is another example by a local Republi-cons

"Two projects totaling $3.5 million proposed by state Sen. Don Gaetz for Escambia County have been listed as 'budget turkeys' by Florida TaxWatch.

Those projects are:

» Port of Pensacola: $2 million for bulkhead repairs and other port improvements to make the port competitive in securing job-creating businesses.

» Baptist Health Care Lakeview Center: $1.5 million to provide graduate and under graduate training in caring for mental illness and substance abuse in rural and underserved areas of Northwest Florida."

Read the Pensacola News Journal, Florida TaxWatch labels three local projects labeled as 'budget turkeys'.

As I say each show, I'm waiting, where's the balanced budget. But don't hold you breath because the Republi-CONs conned the Tea Party, there'll be no $100 billion budget cut, and let's admit the obvious, the Republi-CONs are not serious about deficits.

Here are two examples, one local (our local elected officials are all Republi-cons), the other national, read the:

Pensacola News Journal, Library budget solution delayed, which discussed the effort of our local County Commission to cut the West Florida Public Library System's budget by 72 percent, and

Washington Post, GAO warns Congress again about Postal Service, which notes that the "Postal Service is losing billions of dollars annually amid declining mail volume and increasing labor costs . . . [but Congress has] delay[ed] the Postal Service’s move to a five-day delivery schedule by two years and [requiring] the agency to downsize, rather than close, its processing facilities."

More on That Fundamentalist Subculture of Ignorance

As noted before, there exists in the country a fundamentalist subculture of ignorance that embraces 'discredited, ridiculous and even dangerous ideas'. Many are Republi-cons. Case on point, from the Washington Post, Tennessee Republicans throw a wrench:

"Republican Gov. Bill Haslam has allowed the Republican legislature's creationism bill — also known as the 'monkey bill,' after the famous 1925 Scopes Trial, also in Tennessee — to become law.  The new law allows schools to teach creationism and to point out 'flaws' in  such a  widely held scientific consensus that global warming is occurring and is man-made."

Next up for the Republi-cons, the theory of gravity.

Republi-CON Fear, Anger and Hatred Payback Time

Here are two good stories to start ya off, read :

U.S. News & World Report, "Dogs Against Romney" Upset Again, which notes:

"Dogs Against Romney, a grassroots organization formed after founder Scott Crider discovered Romney once strapped the family Irish Setter, Seamus, to the roof of a station wagon for 12 hours, says the GOP front-runner can't seem to avoid associating himself with animal cruelty. [See a collection of political cartoons on the Republican party.]

"I don't think Mitt Romney is purposefully trying to do that, but I think he should more careful about who he aligns himself with," Crider says.

Romney will earn donations at a lavish campaign fundraiser Monday hosted by campaign donors Fred and Marlene Malek. Mr. Malek, the president of Marriott Hotels and former finance committee co-chair of John McCain's presidential bid, was once affiliated with a gruesome animal cruelty case.

A 2006 story in the Washington Post detailed how in 1959, Malek was one of five men arrested for killing and barbecuing a dog in a Peoria, Ill. Park."

And Time, The Story Behind Lawrence O’Donnell’s Apology to Mormons, which explores claims that "Mormonism was created by a guy in upstate New York in 1830 when he got caught having sex with the maid and explained to his wife that God told him to do it. Forty-eight wives later, Joseph Smith’s lifestyle was completely sanctified in the religion he invented to go with it, which Mitt Romney says he believes."

As noted before many times before, fear, anger, and hatred is a great campaign strategy.

The Health Care Debate in One Comic Strip

From This Modern World, Health Care Reform, A Brief Glossary of Terms: