From Media Matters for America -- September 30, 2011:
Lies, Damn Lies, And Statistics (Planned Parenthood Edition)
In a Washington Times op-ed, Denise Burke of the anti-abortion group Americans United for Life called Planned Parenthood of Indiana an "abortion-saturated" organization and suggested "women's health care isn't [Planned Parenthood's] cause -- it's abortion." However, only about 3.5 percent of Planned Parenthood of Indiana's total services in FY 2010 were abortions.
Wash. Times Op-Ed Pushes Falsehood That Planned Parenthood Primarily Provides Abortions
Wash. Times Op-Ed: Planned Parenthood Is "America's Abortion Mega-Provider" And "Deceptively Attempts To Position Itself As A Critical Provider Of Basic Health Care." From a September 29 Washington Times op-ed titled "American women don't need Planned Parenthood: Women's health care isn't their cause -- it's abortion":
The controversy over Indiana's 2011 law prohibiting all health care contracts with and grants to Planned Parenthood provides an instructive case study. Faced with the loss of millions of dollars in Medicaid and other government funding, Planned Parenthood made the calculated decision to divert attention from its record in the state and instead accuse Indiana officials of conspiring to deny women access to basic health care. Specifically, Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards claimed the law would "take away health care from thousands of women."
Inherent in this ploy is a disingenuous effort to position the organization as an irreplaceable provider of well-woman exams, Pap smears, sexually transmitted disease (STD) tests and other basic care to women. Unfortunately for Planned Parenthood, the facts tell a very different story.
According to its own statistics, Planned Parenthood clinics in Indiana serve less than 1 percent of the state's Medicaid patients while providing more than 50 percent of the state's abortions. Obviously, the overwhelming majority of Indiana women are getting their basic health care elsewhere and avoiding the abortion-saturated Planned Parenthood.
Moreover, recognizing that 70 percent of American taxpayers do not want their tax dollars paying for or subsidizing abortions, Planned Parenthood is determined to present a different (and demonstrably false) image to the American public. The organization's self-serving propaganda cannot overcome the facts: It is not "America's health care provider." It is America's abortion mega-provider. And American women don't need Planned Parenthood. [The Washington Times, 9/29/11]
Majority Of Planned Parenthood's Services Are Non-Abortion Medical Treatments
Abortions Accounted For 3.56 Percent Of Planned Parenthood Of Indiana's Total Services In FY 2010. Planned Parenthood of Indiana reported that it performed 5,580 abortions out of 156,547 total "procedures provided" in FY 2010, meaning that 3.56 percent of its procedures were abortions.
Nationwide, Planned Parenthood Health Centers "Focus On Prevention" Of Unintended Pregnancies
Planned Parenthood Nationwide: "Three Percent Of All Planned Parenthood Health Services Are Abortion Services." From Planned Parenthood's website:
Our Work
Planned Parenthood health centers focus on prevention: 83 percent of our clients receive services to prevent unintended pregnancy.
Planned Parenthood services help prevent more than 612,000 unintended pregnancies each year.
Planned Parenthood provides nearly one million Pap tests and more than 830,000 breast exams each year, critical services in detecting cancer.
Planned Parenthood provides nearly four million tests and treatments for sexually transmitted infections, including HIV.
Three percent of all Planned Parenthood health services are abortion services.
Planned Parenthood affiliates provide educational programs to nearly 1.2 million young people and adults each year. [PlannedParenthood.org, accessed 9/30/2011, emphasis original]
Washington Times Has A History Of False Attacks On Planned Parenthood
Wash. Times Has Repeatedly Falsely Equated Planned Parenthood's Use Of Emergency Contraception With Abortion. A January 22, 2010, Washington Times article claimed that, after Hurricane Katrina, "Planned Parenthood offered free emergency contraception ... to terminate pregnancies." On January 26, 2010, the Times published the assertion that the "number of abortions" in FY 2008 could rise "[i]f we include emergency contraception kits." However, health experts noted that "emergency contraception ... has no effect once a pregnancy has been established." [Media Matters, 1/26/10]
The Washington Times editorial pages repeatedly hyped the hoax videos put out by Lila Rose and her group Live Action that allegedly exposed a "cover-up of child sex trafficking" by Planned Parenthood.
Wash. Times Op-Ed: Video Is "Cold, Hard Evidence Of...The Lengths To Which Planned Parenthood Will Go To Sell Abortions To Women -- And Girls -- Of Any Age." In a February 2 op-ed in The Washington Times, Steven Ertelt, editor of the anti-choice website LifeNews.com, wrote that the videos depict "cold, hard evidence of the mentality behind the abortion industry and the lengths to which Planned Parenthood will go to sell abortions to women -- and girls -- of any age." [Media Matters, 2/4/11]
Wash. Times Op-Ed: GOP Must "Hold The Funding Bill Hostage Rather Than See Money Go To The Nation's Largest Consortium Of Child Killers." In a February 22 Washington Times op-ed, anti-choice activist Randall Terry hyped Live Action's hoax videos and advocated for defunding Planned Parenthood by using the political battle over government funding bills "as a 'teaching moment' to expose the evils of Planned Parenthood (such as protecting pedophiles and pimps) as well as highlighting the warped ethics of the senators who support Planned Parenthood." [The Washington Times, 2/22/11]
Wash. Times: Planned Parenthood "Facilitate[s]" Child Abuse And Does Not "Fulfill Their Obligation To Report" Abuse To Authorities. [The Washington Times, 3/2/11]
Wash. Times: Politicians Who Do Not Vote To Defund Planned Parenthood "Have Betrayed The Unborn." In a March 10 Washington Times op-ed, Randall Terry told GOP politicians: "We expect you to defund this criminal syndicate, and to not pass a Continuing Resolution unless it completely defunds Planned Parenthood and all child killing in Obamacare."[The Washington Times, 3/10/11]
Friday, September 30, 2011
Desperate Right-Wing Media Quacks Now Attack Michelle Obama for Shopping at Target
From Media Matters for America -- September 30, 2011:
Latest Attack On Michelle Obama: She Went To Target
Right-wing media have attacked Michelle Obama for going shopping at Target, claiming she went " 'incognito,' Lady Gaga-style" and asking, "Who does she think she's fooling?" Right-wing media have previously attacked the first lady for everything from promoting health initiaitves to wearing a red dress at a state dinner.
Michelle Obama Visits Target ...
Washington Post: "Hey Isn't That...? Michelle Obama At Target." From a September 29 post on The Washington Post's Reliable Sources blog:
Michelle Obama shopping at Target Thursday. An AP photographer (small world!) happened upon the first lady at the Alexandria store, pushing a cart and carrying bags.
... And The Right-Wing Media Attack
Limbaugh: "It Has Gotten So Bad, They Had To Send Moochelle Out There In A Lady Gaga-Type Getup. She Went Shopping At Target." During the September 30 edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Rush Limbaugh Show, Limbaugh said: "It has gotten so bad, they had to send Moochelle out there in a Lady Gaga-type getup. She went shopping at Target." [Premiere Radio Networks, The Rush Limbaugh Show, 9/30/11, via Media Matters]
Malkin: Obama Went To Target "About As 'Incognito' As Lady Gaga." In a September 29 blog post, Michelle Malkin attacked Obama for shopping at Target, writing that Obama was "about as 'incognito' as Lady Gaga's outfit at her younger sister's graduation." Malkin went on to call the first lady "the glamour queen" and further stated that Obama's Target visit was "[t]o counter the negative diva buzz" and that it "[l]ooks like she left the bling at home." [MichelleMalkin.com, 9/29/11, via Media Matters]
The Blaze: "What Luck!" Obama "Wasn't Snapped Without Make-Up, With Messy Hair Wearing Sweatpants To Do Her 'Everywoman' Shopping." A September 30 post on The Blaze stated:
Our First Lady has sooome luck. Not only is her hubby the leader of the free world, but just as the Obama camps [sic] is desperately looking for a way to relate to America's Average Joes, a staff photographer with the Associated Press just so happened to be there to document her recent Target shopping jaunt.
What luck! Obama also wasn't snapped without make-up, with messy hair wearing sweatpants to do her "everywoman" shopping... like some of us who will remain nameless.
Exit question: I could see a quick stop in at the local Target store as something that might happen out on the campaign trail. But who really believes Michelle Obama left the White House to pop in at the Alexandria, Va., Target because the East Wing ran out of paper towels? [The Blaze, 9/30/11, emphasis in original]
Weasel Zippers: "Honestly, Who Does She Think She's Fooling?" A September 29 Weasel Zippers post titled, "Pic of the Day," stated, "See, Mooch is just like us!" and showed a photograph of the first lady at Target. The post went on to ask, "Honestly, who does she think she's fooling?" [Weasel Zippers, 9/29/11]
Beck And Co-Hosts Mock Obama For Going To Target. On his September 30 radio program, Glenn Beck and his co-hosts mocked Obama for going to Target and asked, "Did you see the agonizing photos of Michelle Obama as a Target shopper?" [Premiere Radio Networks, The Glenn Beck Program, 9/30/11]
Latest Attack On Michelle Obama: She Went To Target
Right-wing media have attacked Michelle Obama for going shopping at Target, claiming she went " 'incognito,' Lady Gaga-style" and asking, "Who does she think she's fooling?" Right-wing media have previously attacked the first lady for everything from promoting health initiaitves to wearing a red dress at a state dinner.
Michelle Obama Visits Target ...
Washington Post: "Hey Isn't That...? Michelle Obama At Target." From a September 29 post on The Washington Post's Reliable Sources blog:
Michelle Obama shopping at Target Thursday. An AP photographer (small world!) happened upon the first lady at the Alexandria store, pushing a cart and carrying bags.
... And The Right-Wing Media Attack
Limbaugh: "It Has Gotten So Bad, They Had To Send Moochelle Out There In A Lady Gaga-Type Getup. She Went Shopping At Target." During the September 30 edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Rush Limbaugh Show, Limbaugh said: "It has gotten so bad, they had to send Moochelle out there in a Lady Gaga-type getup. She went shopping at Target." [Premiere Radio Networks, The Rush Limbaugh Show, 9/30/11, via Media Matters]
Malkin: Obama Went To Target "About As 'Incognito' As Lady Gaga." In a September 29 blog post, Michelle Malkin attacked Obama for shopping at Target, writing that Obama was "about as 'incognito' as Lady Gaga's outfit at her younger sister's graduation." Malkin went on to call the first lady "the glamour queen" and further stated that Obama's Target visit was "[t]o counter the negative diva buzz" and that it "[l]ooks like she left the bling at home." [MichelleMalkin.com, 9/29/11, via Media Matters]
The Blaze: "What Luck!" Obama "Wasn't Snapped Without Make-Up, With Messy Hair Wearing Sweatpants To Do Her 'Everywoman' Shopping." A September 30 post on The Blaze stated:
Our First Lady has sooome luck. Not only is her hubby the leader of the free world, but just as the Obama camps [sic] is desperately looking for a way to relate to America's Average Joes, a staff photographer with the Associated Press just so happened to be there to document her recent Target shopping jaunt.
What luck! Obama also wasn't snapped without make-up, with messy hair wearing sweatpants to do her "everywoman" shopping... like some of us who will remain nameless.
Exit question: I could see a quick stop in at the local Target store as something that might happen out on the campaign trail. But who really believes Michelle Obama left the White House to pop in at the Alexandria, Va., Target because the East Wing ran out of paper towels? [The Blaze, 9/30/11, emphasis in original]
Weasel Zippers: "Honestly, Who Does She Think She's Fooling?" A September 29 Weasel Zippers post titled, "Pic of the Day," stated, "See, Mooch is just like us!" and showed a photograph of the first lady at Target. The post went on to ask, "Honestly, who does she think she's fooling?" [Weasel Zippers, 9/29/11]
Beck And Co-Hosts Mock Obama For Going To Target. On his September 30 radio program, Glenn Beck and his co-hosts mocked Obama for going to Target and asked, "Did you see the agonizing photos of Michelle Obama as a Target shopper?" [Premiere Radio Networks, The Glenn Beck Program, 9/30/11]
Rep. Allen West and All the Other Tea Party "Anti-Government" Hypocrites
From The Daily Beast -- Sept. 29, 2011
Tea Party Hypocrisy?
Despite his calls to shrink government and cut spending, Republican Allen West appealed to two federal agencies this summer for money, letters obtained by The Daily Beast show.
Freshman Rep. Allen West, a Tea Party favorite, electrifies the conservative base with his impassioned arguments to cut federal spending. Just last week, the Florida Republican was lamenting on Fox News the Obama administration’s decision to spend billions on green energy, declaring, “We already have a question mark on some of these green energy programs,” and “That’s not the place where American taxpayer dollars should be.”
But letters obtained by The Daily Beast show West has appealed to two different agencies in his first months in office for federal largesse for renewable energy and transportation projects in his home state of Florida.
Last month, West wrote to Energy Secretary Steven Chu asking for funding under the Energy Department’s Sunshot Initiative Rooftop Solar Challenge, a program created by the Obama administration in the spring to “make solar energy cost competitive with other forms of energy by the end of the decade.”
West, writing with three other members from the Florida delegation, said the funding would “reduce fragmentation” and “upgrade the rooftop solar market” in Broward County, part of which is in Florida’s 22nd congressional district that West represents.
“If funded by the Department of Energy, this innovative program will benefit residents, small commercial establishments, the local economy, and environment for many years to come,” West and his colleagues wrote. “We are proud to support solar power as a smart choice for commercial and residential property owners, as well as the development of new and innovative strategies to reduce market barriers and costs.”
Upgrading the solar energy market in the area would bring considerable benefit to solar manufacturing and installation companies in the region. Some energy executives supported West in his election. For instance, employees at Hypower Inc., an energy and consulting company with its headquarters just outside of West’s district, donated $11,500 to West’s 2010 campaign. A spokesperson for the company was not immediately available for comment Thursday night.
West was not in office when Congress approved the 2009 American Recovery Act, which contained $987 billion in stimulus spending on infrastructure, education and health care. But while in office, he has publicly opposed the Obama’s administration’s policies of federal investments.
“When you hear people talk about investment coming out of Washington, D.C. that is so counter to what this country has really prospered on,” West said in a radio interview earlier this week on Florida’s 950 AM.
Rep. Allen West speaks with others on a panel to conservative activists in what organizers called the "first Tea Party town hall" on Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2011 at the National Press Club in Washington D.C., Jeff Malet / NEWSCOM
Yet less than three months earlier, West wrote to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood seeking federal funds to improve a traffic corridor in West Palm Beach. West said that the funds were needed to improve the safety, flood readiness and the environmental landscape of the area known as North Flagler Drive. Like most of America, the region had been hard hit by budget cuts, but still enjoys one of the highest income rates per household, $49,660—nearly 25 percent higher than the national average. Residents of West Palm Beach collectively donated nearly $250,000 to West’s 2010 election campaign, nearly a third of all donations.
When confronted about the appeals for federal money he publicly opposed, West’s office said that the funding requests were consistent with the congressman’s stated positions.
“Congressman West will support competitive grant requests of merit on behalf of municipalities and local organizations from his congressional district,” spokeswoman Angela Sachitano said in a written statement. Sachitano also said that West consistently votes to reduce the size of government and she reaffirmed West’s frequent statement that “job creation comes from the private sector and not from spending more of the American taxpayers' money.”
West said the funding would “reduce fragmentation” and “upgrade the rooftop solar market” in Broward County.
West has been confronted before about his anti-government spending advocacy and the federal dollars spent in his home district. In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that West had taken credit for a new runway at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. The project was funded by a $21 million federal grant through the government’s Airport Improvement Program.
West, a former Army commander who led troops in Iraq before retiring in 2004, was swept to office in the Tea Party wave last year that gave Republicans the House majority. Despite being a junior member of Congress, West appears on national television often and has tangled with senior Democrats.
In one of the most high-profile episodes, he wrote a letter to Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, calling her the “most vile, unprofessional, and despicable member of the U.S. House of Representatives.” When pressed publicly by Democrats, he declined to offer an apology.
Tea Party Hypocrisy?
Despite his calls to shrink government and cut spending, Republican Allen West appealed to two federal agencies this summer for money, letters obtained by The Daily Beast show.
Freshman Rep. Allen West, a Tea Party favorite, electrifies the conservative base with his impassioned arguments to cut federal spending. Just last week, the Florida Republican was lamenting on Fox News the Obama administration’s decision to spend billions on green energy, declaring, “We already have a question mark on some of these green energy programs,” and “That’s not the place where American taxpayer dollars should be.”
But letters obtained by The Daily Beast show West has appealed to two different agencies in his first months in office for federal largesse for renewable energy and transportation projects in his home state of Florida.
Last month, West wrote to Energy Secretary Steven Chu asking for funding under the Energy Department’s Sunshot Initiative Rooftop Solar Challenge, a program created by the Obama administration in the spring to “make solar energy cost competitive with other forms of energy by the end of the decade.”
West, writing with three other members from the Florida delegation, said the funding would “reduce fragmentation” and “upgrade the rooftop solar market” in Broward County, part of which is in Florida’s 22nd congressional district that West represents.
“If funded by the Department of Energy, this innovative program will benefit residents, small commercial establishments, the local economy, and environment for many years to come,” West and his colleagues wrote. “We are proud to support solar power as a smart choice for commercial and residential property owners, as well as the development of new and innovative strategies to reduce market barriers and costs.”
Upgrading the solar energy market in the area would bring considerable benefit to solar manufacturing and installation companies in the region. Some energy executives supported West in his election. For instance, employees at Hypower Inc., an energy and consulting company with its headquarters just outside of West’s district, donated $11,500 to West’s 2010 campaign. A spokesperson for the company was not immediately available for comment Thursday night.
West was not in office when Congress approved the 2009 American Recovery Act, which contained $987 billion in stimulus spending on infrastructure, education and health care. But while in office, he has publicly opposed the Obama’s administration’s policies of federal investments.
“When you hear people talk about investment coming out of Washington, D.C. that is so counter to what this country has really prospered on,” West said in a radio interview earlier this week on Florida’s 950 AM.
Rep. Allen West speaks with others on a panel to conservative activists in what organizers called the "first Tea Party town hall" on Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2011 at the National Press Club in Washington D.C., Jeff Malet / NEWSCOM
Yet less than three months earlier, West wrote to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood seeking federal funds to improve a traffic corridor in West Palm Beach. West said that the funds were needed to improve the safety, flood readiness and the environmental landscape of the area known as North Flagler Drive. Like most of America, the region had been hard hit by budget cuts, but still enjoys one of the highest income rates per household, $49,660—nearly 25 percent higher than the national average. Residents of West Palm Beach collectively donated nearly $250,000 to West’s 2010 election campaign, nearly a third of all donations.
When confronted about the appeals for federal money he publicly opposed, West’s office said that the funding requests were consistent with the congressman’s stated positions.
“Congressman West will support competitive grant requests of merit on behalf of municipalities and local organizations from his congressional district,” spokeswoman Angela Sachitano said in a written statement. Sachitano also said that West consistently votes to reduce the size of government and she reaffirmed West’s frequent statement that “job creation comes from the private sector and not from spending more of the American taxpayers' money.”
West said the funding would “reduce fragmentation” and “upgrade the rooftop solar market” in Broward County.
West has been confronted before about his anti-government spending advocacy and the federal dollars spent in his home district. In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that West had taken credit for a new runway at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. The project was funded by a $21 million federal grant through the government’s Airport Improvement Program.
West, a former Army commander who led troops in Iraq before retiring in 2004, was swept to office in the Tea Party wave last year that gave Republicans the House majority. Despite being a junior member of Congress, West appears on national television often and has tangled with senior Democrats.
In one of the most high-profile episodes, he wrote a letter to Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, calling her the “most vile, unprofessional, and despicable member of the U.S. House of Representatives.” When pressed publicly by Democrats, he declined to offer an apology.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Conservatives Are America's World-Champion Olympic Gold Crown Liars --- By a Mile!
From Media Matters for America -- September 29, 2011:
Right-Wing Media Play With Numbers, Claim DOE Loan Guarantees Will Cost "$23 Million Per Job"
An Investor's Business Daily article claimed that nine Department of Energy loan guarantees are going create jobs at a cost of $23 million per job, and the right-wing media have run with that claim. However, this figure assumes that all the loans will default and that the government will have to cover every penny of their cost. Economists have called these types of calculations "bogus" and "bad math."
IBD: Federal Loan Guarantees Will Cost "Nearly $23 Million Per Job"
IBD: Number Is "A Drop In The Bucket Toward The Five Million Green Jobs President Obama Promised As A Candidate." From a September 27 Investor's Business Daily article by Sean Higgins:
The Department of Energy is set this week to announce whether nine federal loan guarantees amounting to $6.5 billion for green energy projects will get final approval.
The number of full-time, permanent jobs they would create? According to the DOE's own figures, a grand total of 283. That is nearly $23 million per job.
It's also a drop in the bucket toward the five million green jobs President Obama promised as a candidate in 2008. [Investor's Business Daily, 9/27/11]
IBD "Update" Reports That DOE Approved Two Loan Guarantees At Cost Of "About $20 Million Per Permanent Job." From the IBD article:
Update: The Energy Department on Wednesday approved federal loan guarantees for two green energy projects totaling more than $1 billion. It approved $337 million for a Mesquite Solar project in Arizona and $737 million for a Solar Reserve project in Nevada. The projects would create a total of 52-55 permanent jobs, according to earlier DOE figures and company statements. That's about $20 million per permanent job. [Investor's Business Daily, 9/27/11]
Right-Wing Media Echo IBD Report
Limbaugh: IBD Article Shows Green Jobs Are A "Slush Fund." As part of his assertion that federal money to facilitate "this solar energy stuff" is "a series of Democrat party slush funds," Rush Limbaugh noted that "Investors.com, the old Investor's Business Daily, has their own version of the story: 'Department of Energy mulls green energy loans at $23 million per job.' " [Premiere Radio Networks, The Rush Limbaugh Show, 9/29/11]
Hot Air Uses Article To Call For Ending "All Subsidies And Favors For Energy Production." Hot Air blogger Ed Morrissey linked to the IBD article, commenting, "We should end all subsidies and favors for energy production -- and many of the barriers to it as well -- and let the market and investors demonstrate what technologies work best to provide the energy security our economy requires." [Hot Air, 9/28/11]
Fox Nation Links To IBD Report. Fox Nation linked to the IBD report under the headline "$23 Million Per 'Green Job.' " [Fox Nation, 9/28/11]
NRO Cites IBD Article To Claim Obama Jobs Act Is A "Bargain" By Comparison. A post by Mark Stiles at National Review Online's blog The Corner claimed that President Obama's American Jobs Act "works out to a little more than $1.6 million for every job 'kept or added.' " Linking to the IBD article, Stiles added, "On the plus side, that's a bargain compared to the $23 million-per-job the Department of Energy has 'invested' as part of the loans program that helped finance Solyndra." [National Review Online, The Corner, 9/28/11]
JunkScience.com: "What Is The Word For 'Fiasco Times 4'?" JunkScience.com linked to the IBD article, adding, "We called Obama's $5 million jobs a 'fiasco.' What is the word for 'fiasco times 4'?" [JunkScience.com, 9/28/11]
IBD's "Bad Math" Baselessly Assumes All Loan Guarantees Will Default
Government Responsible For Loan If Borrower Defaults. Investopedia defines a guaranteed loan this way: "A loan guaranteed by a third party in the event that the borrower defaults. The loan is quite often guaranteed by a government agency which will purchase the debt from the lending financial institution and take on responsibility for the loan." [Investopedia.com, accessed 9/29/11]
National Journal: Congress Set Aside $2.4 Billion To Cover Bad Loans. National Journal reported: "Under the Recovery Act that Obama signed in February 2009, Congress appropriated $6 billion for the Energy Department to provide insurance in case a renewable-energy company receiving a loan guarantee failed. The figure was later reduced to $2.4 billion." [National Journal, 9/21/11]
Economist Jared Bernstein: Dividing Loan Guarantee Amounts By Job Numbers Is "Bad Math." From a blog post by former White House economist Jared Bernstein, which discussed a Washington Post article that similarly promoted a cost-per-job number that came from dividing loan guarantee amounts by promised jobs:
The WaPo features a critical piece today on the job creation associated with the "$38.6 billion loan guarantee program" that was part of the Recovery Act.
On the front page of their website, thepiece was summarized thusly:
"U.S. government says a loan guarantee program that has created 3,545 new permanent jobs is on track to save or create 60,000 jobs. If goal is reached, it would work out to about $640,000 in loan guarantees for each job."
OK, that's bad math. The piece is justly critical in other ways, but that part's way off. They've divided the full loan volume -- the sum of all loan amounts -- by the number of jobs. The correct numerator is the "credit subsidy" -- the amount for which tax payers will be on the hook if the loans fail.
That's likely to be well under $5 billion, which gets you into a much more reasonable neighborhood re bang-for-buck.
The article does point this out: "If the companies do well, they won't need to draw on the guarantees and won't cost the government anything." But their emphasis on this $640K/job number assumes every loan defaults, which is implausible (the piece is partly motivated by the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a solar panel producer that received a $535 million loan from the program). [JaredBernsteinBlog.com 9/15/11]
Right-Wing Media Regularly Promote Misleading Cost-Per-Job Numbers
Wash. Post: DOE Would Spend "$640,000 In Loan Guarantees For Every Job Created Or Saved." The Post wrote that the Department of Energy's "$38.6 billion loan guarantee program" has directly created "3,545 new, permanent jobs after giving out almost half the allocated amount." The article went on to state that if DOE's target of 60,000 jobs "is reached, it would work out to about $640,000 in loan guarantees for every job created or saved." [The Washington Post, 9/14/11]
Conservative Media Touted Wash. Post's Misleading Number. Among those touting the Post's misleading number were Fox News' Stuart Varney and right-wing blogger Jim Hoft. [Media Matters, 9/15/11]
Fox Pushes Misleading Cost-Per-Jobs Math To Attack Jobs Bill. Fox & Friends pushed the claim that the jobs created by President Obama's jobs bill would cost $200,000 per job, with co-host Brian Kilmeade asking, "Is it worth it to get a job that's going to cost the government $200,000?" [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 9/27/11, via Media Matters]
Economist Christina Romer: Cost-Per-Job Calculation Is "Attention-Getting, But It's Misleading." In a September 24 New York Times op-ed, Christina Romer, former chair of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers and economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, called the claim that the jobs bill would cost $200,000 per job "attention-getting" but "misleading" because, in part, "the program wouldn't just create jobs. Consider the proposed $140 billion for roads, bridges, school repair and teachers. Jobs are, in a sense, a side benefit. What we're really getting is better infrastructure and more education for our children." [The New York Times, 9/24/11]
Similar Claims That Stimulus Jobs Cost At Least $200,000 Have Been Called "Bogus," "False"
Doocy Pushes "Bogus" Cost-Per-Job Math To Attack Stimulus. Fox News' Steve Doocy has repeatedly recycled the right-wing attack that the stimulus cost taxpayers between $200,000 and $278,000 per job. [Media Matters, 8/5/11]
PolitiFact Texas: Claim That "Stimulus Cost $278K Per Job" Is "False." In a July 20 post, PolitiFact Texas rated the claim that "Obama's own economists say the stimulus cost $278K per job 'created' " as "False." [PolitiFact.com, 7/20/11]
Krugman Called Claim That Stimulus Would Cost $275,000 Per Job "Bogus." In a January 25, 2009, New York Times column, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman called the claim that the stimulus would cost $275,000 per job "bogus":
There's the bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created. Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of a plan that will extend over several years, creating millions of jobs each year, and dividing it by the jobs created in just one of those years. [The New York Times, 1/25/09]
Right-Wing Media Play With Numbers, Claim DOE Loan Guarantees Will Cost "$23 Million Per Job"
An Investor's Business Daily article claimed that nine Department of Energy loan guarantees are going create jobs at a cost of $23 million per job, and the right-wing media have run with that claim. However, this figure assumes that all the loans will default and that the government will have to cover every penny of their cost. Economists have called these types of calculations "bogus" and "bad math."
IBD: Federal Loan Guarantees Will Cost "Nearly $23 Million Per Job"
IBD: Number Is "A Drop In The Bucket Toward The Five Million Green Jobs President Obama Promised As A Candidate." From a September 27 Investor's Business Daily article by Sean Higgins:
The Department of Energy is set this week to announce whether nine federal loan guarantees amounting to $6.5 billion for green energy projects will get final approval.
The number of full-time, permanent jobs they would create? According to the DOE's own figures, a grand total of 283. That is nearly $23 million per job.
It's also a drop in the bucket toward the five million green jobs President Obama promised as a candidate in 2008. [Investor's Business Daily, 9/27/11]
IBD "Update" Reports That DOE Approved Two Loan Guarantees At Cost Of "About $20 Million Per Permanent Job." From the IBD article:
Update: The Energy Department on Wednesday approved federal loan guarantees for two green energy projects totaling more than $1 billion. It approved $337 million for a Mesquite Solar project in Arizona and $737 million for a Solar Reserve project in Nevada. The projects would create a total of 52-55 permanent jobs, according to earlier DOE figures and company statements. That's about $20 million per permanent job. [Investor's Business Daily, 9/27/11]
Right-Wing Media Echo IBD Report
Limbaugh: IBD Article Shows Green Jobs Are A "Slush Fund." As part of his assertion that federal money to facilitate "this solar energy stuff" is "a series of Democrat party slush funds," Rush Limbaugh noted that "Investors.com, the old Investor's Business Daily, has their own version of the story: 'Department of Energy mulls green energy loans at $23 million per job.' " [Premiere Radio Networks, The Rush Limbaugh Show, 9/29/11]
Hot Air Uses Article To Call For Ending "All Subsidies And Favors For Energy Production." Hot Air blogger Ed Morrissey linked to the IBD article, commenting, "We should end all subsidies and favors for energy production -- and many of the barriers to it as well -- and let the market and investors demonstrate what technologies work best to provide the energy security our economy requires." [Hot Air, 9/28/11]
Fox Nation Links To IBD Report. Fox Nation linked to the IBD report under the headline "$23 Million Per 'Green Job.' " [Fox Nation, 9/28/11]
NRO Cites IBD Article To Claim Obama Jobs Act Is A "Bargain" By Comparison. A post by Mark Stiles at National Review Online's blog The Corner claimed that President Obama's American Jobs Act "works out to a little more than $1.6 million for every job 'kept or added.' " Linking to the IBD article, Stiles added, "On the plus side, that's a bargain compared to the $23 million-per-job the Department of Energy has 'invested' as part of the loans program that helped finance Solyndra." [National Review Online, The Corner, 9/28/11]
JunkScience.com: "What Is The Word For 'Fiasco Times 4'?" JunkScience.com linked to the IBD article, adding, "We called Obama's $5 million jobs a 'fiasco.' What is the word for 'fiasco times 4'?" [JunkScience.com, 9/28/11]
IBD's "Bad Math" Baselessly Assumes All Loan Guarantees Will Default
Government Responsible For Loan If Borrower Defaults. Investopedia defines a guaranteed loan this way: "A loan guaranteed by a third party in the event that the borrower defaults. The loan is quite often guaranteed by a government agency which will purchase the debt from the lending financial institution and take on responsibility for the loan." [Investopedia.com, accessed 9/29/11]
National Journal: Congress Set Aside $2.4 Billion To Cover Bad Loans. National Journal reported: "Under the Recovery Act that Obama signed in February 2009, Congress appropriated $6 billion for the Energy Department to provide insurance in case a renewable-energy company receiving a loan guarantee failed. The figure was later reduced to $2.4 billion." [National Journal, 9/21/11]
Economist Jared Bernstein: Dividing Loan Guarantee Amounts By Job Numbers Is "Bad Math." From a blog post by former White House economist Jared Bernstein, which discussed a Washington Post article that similarly promoted a cost-per-job number that came from dividing loan guarantee amounts by promised jobs:
The WaPo features a critical piece today on the job creation associated with the "$38.6 billion loan guarantee program" that was part of the Recovery Act.
On the front page of their website, thepiece was summarized thusly:
"U.S. government says a loan guarantee program that has created 3,545 new permanent jobs is on track to save or create 60,000 jobs. If goal is reached, it would work out to about $640,000 in loan guarantees for each job."
OK, that's bad math. The piece is justly critical in other ways, but that part's way off. They've divided the full loan volume -- the sum of all loan amounts -- by the number of jobs. The correct numerator is the "credit subsidy" -- the amount for which tax payers will be on the hook if the loans fail.
That's likely to be well under $5 billion, which gets you into a much more reasonable neighborhood re bang-for-buck.
The article does point this out: "If the companies do well, they won't need to draw on the guarantees and won't cost the government anything." But their emphasis on this $640K/job number assumes every loan defaults, which is implausible (the piece is partly motivated by the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a solar panel producer that received a $535 million loan from the program). [JaredBernsteinBlog.com 9/15/11]
Right-Wing Media Regularly Promote Misleading Cost-Per-Job Numbers
Wash. Post: DOE Would Spend "$640,000 In Loan Guarantees For Every Job Created Or Saved." The Post wrote that the Department of Energy's "$38.6 billion loan guarantee program" has directly created "3,545 new, permanent jobs after giving out almost half the allocated amount." The article went on to state that if DOE's target of 60,000 jobs "is reached, it would work out to about $640,000 in loan guarantees for every job created or saved." [The Washington Post, 9/14/11]
Conservative Media Touted Wash. Post's Misleading Number. Among those touting the Post's misleading number were Fox News' Stuart Varney and right-wing blogger Jim Hoft. [Media Matters, 9/15/11]
Fox Pushes Misleading Cost-Per-Jobs Math To Attack Jobs Bill. Fox & Friends pushed the claim that the jobs created by President Obama's jobs bill would cost $200,000 per job, with co-host Brian Kilmeade asking, "Is it worth it to get a job that's going to cost the government $200,000?" [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 9/27/11, via Media Matters]
Economist Christina Romer: Cost-Per-Job Calculation Is "Attention-Getting, But It's Misleading." In a September 24 New York Times op-ed, Christina Romer, former chair of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers and economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, called the claim that the jobs bill would cost $200,000 per job "attention-getting" but "misleading" because, in part, "the program wouldn't just create jobs. Consider the proposed $140 billion for roads, bridges, school repair and teachers. Jobs are, in a sense, a side benefit. What we're really getting is better infrastructure and more education for our children." [The New York Times, 9/24/11]
Similar Claims That Stimulus Jobs Cost At Least $200,000 Have Been Called "Bogus," "False"
Doocy Pushes "Bogus" Cost-Per-Job Math To Attack Stimulus. Fox News' Steve Doocy has repeatedly recycled the right-wing attack that the stimulus cost taxpayers between $200,000 and $278,000 per job. [Media Matters, 8/5/11]
PolitiFact Texas: Claim That "Stimulus Cost $278K Per Job" Is "False." In a July 20 post, PolitiFact Texas rated the claim that "Obama's own economists say the stimulus cost $278K per job 'created' " as "False." [PolitiFact.com, 7/20/11]
Krugman Called Claim That Stimulus Would Cost $275,000 Per Job "Bogus." In a January 25, 2009, New York Times column, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman called the claim that the stimulus would cost $275,000 per job "bogus":
There's the bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created. Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of a plan that will extend over several years, creating millions of jobs each year, and dividing it by the jobs created in just one of those years. [The New York Times, 1/25/09]
No New Taxes for Billionaires Means No New Jobs for Americans -- Thank You, Republicans
From The Washington Post -- September 28, 2011:
Why Conservatives Hate Warren Buffett
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Maybe only a really, really rich guy can credibly make the case for why the wealthy should be asked to pay more in taxes. You can’t accuse a big capitalist of “class warfare.” That’s why the right wing despises Warren Buffett and is trying so hard to shut him up.
Militant conservatives are effective because they are absolutely shameless. Many of the same people who think the rich should be free to spend unlimited sums influencing our politics without having to disclose anything are now asking Buffett to make his tax returns public. I guess if you’re indifferent to consistency, you have a lot of freedom of action.
Buffett has outraged conservatives by saying that he pays taxes at a lower rate than his secretary. He’s said this for years, but he’s a target now because President Obama is using his comment to make the case for higher taxes on millionaires.
Thus did the Wall Street Journal editorial page call on Buffett to “let everyone else in on his secrets of tax avoidance by releasing his tax returns.”
Somehow, the Journal did not think to ask its friends who battle vigorously for low taxes on capital gains to release their tax returns, too. But aren’t they just as engaged in this argument as Buffett? Shouldn’t accountability go both ways? Nor did the Journal suggest that the Koch brothers could serve the public interest by releasing a full accounting of all their political spending.
Buffett’s sin is that he spoke a truth that conservatives want to keep covered up: Taxing capital gains at 15 percent means that people who make their money from investments pay taxes at a much lower marginal rate than those who earn more than $34,500 a year from their labor. That’s when the income tax rate goes up to 25 percent. (For joint filers, the 25 percent rate kicks in at $69,000.) For singles, the 28 percent bracket starts at $83,600, the 33 percent bracket at $174,400.
So if an investor such as Buffett pockets, say, $100 million of his income in capital gains, he pays only a 15 percent tax on all that money. For everyday working people, the 15 percent rate applies only to earnings between $8,500 and $34,500. After that, they’re paying a higher marginal rate than the multimillionaire pays on gains from investments. Oh, yes, and before Obama temporarily cut it by two points, the payroll tax added another 6.2 percent to the burden on middle-class workers. That levy doesn’t apply to capital gains or to income above $106,800, so it hits low- and middle-income workers much harder than it does the wealthy.
No wonder partisans of low taxes on wealthy investors hate Warren Buffett. He has forced a national conversation on (1) the bias of the tax system against labor; (2) the fact that, in comparison with middle- or upper-middle-class people, the really wealthy pay a remarkably low percentage of their income in taxes; and (3) the deeply regressive nature of the payroll tax.
(Because this column appears in The Post, I should note that Buffett heads a company that owns a substantial minority share in The Washington Post Co. and for many years held a seat on the company’s board of directors.)
It’s worth noticing that while conservatives who talk about religion get a lot of coverage — and I will always defend their freedom to speak of faith in the public square — what really get the juices flowing on the right these days are tax rates. I’m not sure that a politician who renounced the Almighty would get nearly the attention Buffett has received for his renunciation of low capital gains taxes.
Advocates of higher taxes on the wealthy do not want to “punish” the successful. Buffett and Doug Edwards, a millionaire who asked Obama at a recent town hall event in California to raise his taxes, are saying that none of us succeeds solely because of personal effort. We are all lucky to have been born in — or, for immigrants, admitted to — a country where the rule of law is strong, where property is safe, where a vast infrastructure has been built over generations, where our colleges and universities are the envy of the world, and where government protects our liberties.
Wealthy people, by definition, have done better within this system than other people have. They ought to be willing to join Buffett and Edwards in arguing that for this reason alone, it is common sense, not class jealousy, to ask the most fortunate to pay taxes at higher tax rates than other people do. It is for this heresy that Buffett is being harassed.
Why Conservatives Hate Warren Buffett
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Maybe only a really, really rich guy can credibly make the case for why the wealthy should be asked to pay more in taxes. You can’t accuse a big capitalist of “class warfare.” That’s why the right wing despises Warren Buffett and is trying so hard to shut him up.
Militant conservatives are effective because they are absolutely shameless. Many of the same people who think the rich should be free to spend unlimited sums influencing our politics without having to disclose anything are now asking Buffett to make his tax returns public. I guess if you’re indifferent to consistency, you have a lot of freedom of action.
Buffett has outraged conservatives by saying that he pays taxes at a lower rate than his secretary. He’s said this for years, but he’s a target now because President Obama is using his comment to make the case for higher taxes on millionaires.
Thus did the Wall Street Journal editorial page call on Buffett to “let everyone else in on his secrets of tax avoidance by releasing his tax returns.”
Somehow, the Journal did not think to ask its friends who battle vigorously for low taxes on capital gains to release their tax returns, too. But aren’t they just as engaged in this argument as Buffett? Shouldn’t accountability go both ways? Nor did the Journal suggest that the Koch brothers could serve the public interest by releasing a full accounting of all their political spending.
Buffett’s sin is that he spoke a truth that conservatives want to keep covered up: Taxing capital gains at 15 percent means that people who make their money from investments pay taxes at a much lower marginal rate than those who earn more than $34,500 a year from their labor. That’s when the income tax rate goes up to 25 percent. (For joint filers, the 25 percent rate kicks in at $69,000.) For singles, the 28 percent bracket starts at $83,600, the 33 percent bracket at $174,400.
So if an investor such as Buffett pockets, say, $100 million of his income in capital gains, he pays only a 15 percent tax on all that money. For everyday working people, the 15 percent rate applies only to earnings between $8,500 and $34,500. After that, they’re paying a higher marginal rate than the multimillionaire pays on gains from investments. Oh, yes, and before Obama temporarily cut it by two points, the payroll tax added another 6.2 percent to the burden on middle-class workers. That levy doesn’t apply to capital gains or to income above $106,800, so it hits low- and middle-income workers much harder than it does the wealthy.
No wonder partisans of low taxes on wealthy investors hate Warren Buffett. He has forced a national conversation on (1) the bias of the tax system against labor; (2) the fact that, in comparison with middle- or upper-middle-class people, the really wealthy pay a remarkably low percentage of their income in taxes; and (3) the deeply regressive nature of the payroll tax.
(Because this column appears in The Post, I should note that Buffett heads a company that owns a substantial minority share in The Washington Post Co. and for many years held a seat on the company’s board of directors.)
It’s worth noticing that while conservatives who talk about religion get a lot of coverage — and I will always defend their freedom to speak of faith in the public square — what really get the juices flowing on the right these days are tax rates. I’m not sure that a politician who renounced the Almighty would get nearly the attention Buffett has received for his renunciation of low capital gains taxes.
Advocates of higher taxes on the wealthy do not want to “punish” the successful. Buffett and Doug Edwards, a millionaire who asked Obama at a recent town hall event in California to raise his taxes, are saying that none of us succeeds solely because of personal effort. We are all lucky to have been born in — or, for immigrants, admitted to — a country where the rule of law is strong, where property is safe, where a vast infrastructure has been built over generations, where our colleges and universities are the envy of the world, and where government protects our liberties.
Wealthy people, by definition, have done better within this system than other people have. They ought to be willing to join Buffett and Edwards in arguing that for this reason alone, it is common sense, not class jealousy, to ask the most fortunate to pay taxes at higher tax rates than other people do. It is for this heresy that Buffett is being harassed.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Alan Grayson on the Republican Gibberish Code Jargon of 2011, Courtesy of GOP Puppet Master Frank Luntz
From Alan Grayson -- September 27, 1022:
If you have been hearing the term “job creators” a lot lately, it’s because Frank Luntz wanted you to.
As PBS put it, Luntz’s expertise is “testing language and finding words that will help his clients sell their products, or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate.” In other words, propaganda.
Here are some actual examples of Luntz’s fine work:
Don’t say “oil drilling.” Say “energy exploration.”
Don’t say “inheritance tax.” Say “death tax.”
Don’t say “global warming.” Say “climate change.”
Don’t say “healthcare reform.” Say “government takeover.”
And don’t say “greedy, soulless multinational corporations who don’t give a damn about you.” Say “job creators.”
Luntz is like a serial killer of the English language.
We are not Luntz-puppets. Support our campaign, because we are not fooled by Luntz word games.
As soon as I heard the term “job creators,” I said to myself, “that sounds like Frank Luntz talking.” And sure enough, it’s right in there in Frank Luntz’s latest book, Win: The Key Principles to Take Your Business from Ordinary to Extraordinary. Here are Luntz’s exact words: “You don’t create jobs by making life difficult for job creators.” That’s under the heading “The Ten Rules for 2012: What Americans Really Want to Hear from Their Representatives.”
Here is Luntz’s list of what we all “really” want to hear in 2012:
I will never accept the status quo.
I will never apologize for America.
I will find at least one penny of waste to cut from every dollar of spending.
I will never raise taxes in a recession.
You don’t work for me. I work for you.
I will fight for the public’s right to know the cost and consequences of every piece of legislation and regulation.
I will always prioritize American rights over the rights of those who wish to do us harm.
I will work with anyone who will work with me.
I will always support freedom.
I still believe in the American principle: of the people, by the people, for the people.
Note the absence of anything even resembling a policy, a program, or a solution to anyone’s problems. So, for instance, the Luntzified Republican Party’s health care plan really is, “don’t get sick.”
If you are sick and tired of government by cliché, you’re not the only one. Contribute to our campaign, and send Frank Luntz a message – in plain English.
And leaving Ron Paul aside, doesn’t that Luntz list sound like every single Republican candidate for President? And almost every Republican Governor? And almost every Republican Senator? And, of course, Sarah Palin?
Which suggests this startling possibility: If they all read Luntz’s book, then they all know how to read.
But that’s all they ever need to do. It must be so easy to be a Republican elected official. You never have to think at all. You just let Frank Luntz do all your thinking for you.
If you have been hearing the term “job creators” a lot lately, it’s because Frank Luntz wanted you to.
As PBS put it, Luntz’s expertise is “testing language and finding words that will help his clients sell their products, or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate.” In other words, propaganda.
Here are some actual examples of Luntz’s fine work:
Don’t say “oil drilling.” Say “energy exploration.”
Don’t say “inheritance tax.” Say “death tax.”
Don’t say “global warming.” Say “climate change.”
Don’t say “healthcare reform.” Say “government takeover.”
And don’t say “greedy, soulless multinational corporations who don’t give a damn about you.” Say “job creators.”
Luntz is like a serial killer of the English language.
We are not Luntz-puppets. Support our campaign, because we are not fooled by Luntz word games.
As soon as I heard the term “job creators,” I said to myself, “that sounds like Frank Luntz talking.” And sure enough, it’s right in there in Frank Luntz’s latest book, Win: The Key Principles to Take Your Business from Ordinary to Extraordinary. Here are Luntz’s exact words: “You don’t create jobs by making life difficult for job creators.” That’s under the heading “The Ten Rules for 2012: What Americans Really Want to Hear from Their Representatives.”
Here is Luntz’s list of what we all “really” want to hear in 2012:
I will never accept the status quo.
I will never apologize for America.
I will find at least one penny of waste to cut from every dollar of spending.
I will never raise taxes in a recession.
You don’t work for me. I work for you.
I will fight for the public’s right to know the cost and consequences of every piece of legislation and regulation.
I will always prioritize American rights over the rights of those who wish to do us harm.
I will work with anyone who will work with me.
I will always support freedom.
I still believe in the American principle: of the people, by the people, for the people.
Note the absence of anything even resembling a policy, a program, or a solution to anyone’s problems. So, for instance, the Luntzified Republican Party’s health care plan really is, “don’t get sick.”
If you are sick and tired of government by cliché, you’re not the only one. Contribute to our campaign, and send Frank Luntz a message – in plain English.
And leaving Ron Paul aside, doesn’t that Luntz list sound like every single Republican candidate for President? And almost every Republican Governor? And almost every Republican Senator? And, of course, Sarah Palin?
Which suggests this startling possibility: If they all read Luntz’s book, then they all know how to read.
But that’s all they ever need to do. It must be so easy to be a Republican elected official. You never have to think at all. You just let Frank Luntz do all your thinking for you.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Al Quaeda Declares: "Mission Accomplished" -- the GOP Is Completing the Job of Destroying America
From The Daily Beast -- Sept. 26, 2011:
The GOP’s Purity Test
The party now punishes any deviation from conservative orthodoxy in the presidential primaries. Howard Kurtz on why some candidates are running from their records.
If you assembled a Republican primary candidate in a laboratory, it would be hard to build a more breathtakingly conservative specimen than Rick Perry.
Social Security is unconstitutional? Check. Evolution is suspect? Check. Being gay is a choice, like being an alcoholic? Check.
But wait—bzzt! There’s one malfunction here. Perry opposes illegal immigration, to be sure, but believes the children of such immigrants—often brought here at a young age—ought to get in-state tuition breaks so they can go to college and not be a burden on society.
And with that, he has flunked the Purity Test.
It is a test being imposed on everyone who wants the GOP nomination, and it has never been more stringent or located farther to the right—a sign of the stranglehold the Tea Party has on the process.
Never mind that a position was perfectly acceptable for a Republican in 2008; if it fails the Purity Test now, it must be explained away, preferably with an apology. George W. Bush and John McCain would be laughed off the stage these days for the positions they took on immigration.
No one in the GOP wants to hear about “compassionate conservatism,” not when debate audiences are booing a gay soldier and cheering the death of a hypothetical emergency-room patient without insurance. Obamacare is so thoroughly loathed that nobody bothers to ask these candidates what they would do about the 50 million uninsured Americans if it were repealed—including young people under 26 who are now covered by their parents’ policies.
Occasionally Republican candidates choose to defend their apostasies, as Perry has with the passage of the Texas DREAM Act (doubling down by saying those who oppose it “don’t have a heart”). But mostly, they cut and run. They deeply regret it. They have evolved. They screwed up but promise not to do it again.
Thus we have the curious spectacle of Perry and Mitt Romney quoting from each other’s books, trying to get the other to disavow some past position now deemed toxic to the primary electorate—and thus implicitly admitting the charge of flip-flopping.
Romney has the longest list of offenses, of course, having once been in favor of abortion rights, gay rights, and an activist approach to health care, as evidenced by the Massachusetts plan he now labors to distinguish from Obamacare. That was then, this is now.
When Newt Gingrich, on Meet the Press, acknowledged his support for a health-care mandate and dismissed the GOP plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program as “right-wing social engineering,” it took him all of one day to furiously backtrack.
Governors generally have the hardest time with the Purity Test because they have to live in the messy world of legislative compromise. Tim Pawlenty, before he was driven from the race, routinely said it was a “mistake” for him to have backed the “cap and trade” approach to pollution as governor—one that was also embraced by Jon Huntsman.
Governors generally have the hardest time with the Purity Test because they have to live in the messy world of legislative compromise, where budgets by law must be balanced, taxes must occasionally be raised, and deals must be cut with Democrats. Perry governs in a border state with large numbers of immigrants, so for him the issue is not a cheap applause line; he actually had to figure out what to do with untold thousands of Mexican kids whose parents came here illegally.
The Purity Test is so unyielding that we have the amazing sight of all the candidates raising their hands to affirm that they wouldn’t accept a dollar in tax increases even in exchange for 10 dollars of spending cuts—no matter how good a deal that might seem to a fiscally conservative lawmaker not running for president. Michele Bachmann went a step further in last week’s Fox News debate, saying taxpayers should be able to keep every dollar they earn. “When people make money, it’s their money,” she said, before allowing that we might have to contribute something to keep the government’s lights on.
The Republicans have taken the purity concept to new heights in the 2012 cycle, forcing the candidates, whatever their previous records, to pledge allegiance to the new orthodoxy.
At the moment the conservative media establishment has soured on Perry, with Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol calling Perry’s Fox debate performance “almost disqualifying.” Kristol, like many other Republicans, yearns for Chris Christie, and has already come up with a slogan for the weight-challenged New Jersey governor: “A big man for a big job.”
But if Christie actually jumped into the race—that is, if he could explain why he spent so many months insisting he’s not “ready” to be president—he, too, would fail the Purity Test. He believes, for instance, that “climate change is real” and “human activity plays a role in these changes.” And when critics savaged him for nominating as a judge a Muslim who defended suspects after the 9/11 attacks—they were later cleared—Christie said he was “tired of dealing with the crazies” and that “this Sharia law business is crap.”
For a Republican to take a stance that breaks with party orthodoxy—whether toward illegal immigrants, uninsured patients, or Muslims—could attract swing voters in a general election. But first the candidate has to win the nomination, and in that arena, being impure remains a cardinal offense.
The GOP’s Purity Test
The party now punishes any deviation from conservative orthodoxy in the presidential primaries. Howard Kurtz on why some candidates are running from their records.
If you assembled a Republican primary candidate in a laboratory, it would be hard to build a more breathtakingly conservative specimen than Rick Perry.
Social Security is unconstitutional? Check. Evolution is suspect? Check. Being gay is a choice, like being an alcoholic? Check.
But wait—bzzt! There’s one malfunction here. Perry opposes illegal immigration, to be sure, but believes the children of such immigrants—often brought here at a young age—ought to get in-state tuition breaks so they can go to college and not be a burden on society.
And with that, he has flunked the Purity Test.
It is a test being imposed on everyone who wants the GOP nomination, and it has never been more stringent or located farther to the right—a sign of the stranglehold the Tea Party has on the process.
Never mind that a position was perfectly acceptable for a Republican in 2008; if it fails the Purity Test now, it must be explained away, preferably with an apology. George W. Bush and John McCain would be laughed off the stage these days for the positions they took on immigration.
No one in the GOP wants to hear about “compassionate conservatism,” not when debate audiences are booing a gay soldier and cheering the death of a hypothetical emergency-room patient without insurance. Obamacare is so thoroughly loathed that nobody bothers to ask these candidates what they would do about the 50 million uninsured Americans if it were repealed—including young people under 26 who are now covered by their parents’ policies.
Occasionally Republican candidates choose to defend their apostasies, as Perry has with the passage of the Texas DREAM Act (doubling down by saying those who oppose it “don’t have a heart”). But mostly, they cut and run. They deeply regret it. They have evolved. They screwed up but promise not to do it again.
Thus we have the curious spectacle of Perry and Mitt Romney quoting from each other’s books, trying to get the other to disavow some past position now deemed toxic to the primary electorate—and thus implicitly admitting the charge of flip-flopping.
Romney has the longest list of offenses, of course, having once been in favor of abortion rights, gay rights, and an activist approach to health care, as evidenced by the Massachusetts plan he now labors to distinguish from Obamacare. That was then, this is now.
When Newt Gingrich, on Meet the Press, acknowledged his support for a health-care mandate and dismissed the GOP plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program as “right-wing social engineering,” it took him all of one day to furiously backtrack.
Governors generally have the hardest time with the Purity Test because they have to live in the messy world of legislative compromise. Tim Pawlenty, before he was driven from the race, routinely said it was a “mistake” for him to have backed the “cap and trade” approach to pollution as governor—one that was also embraced by Jon Huntsman.
Governors generally have the hardest time with the Purity Test because they have to live in the messy world of legislative compromise, where budgets by law must be balanced, taxes must occasionally be raised, and deals must be cut with Democrats. Perry governs in a border state with large numbers of immigrants, so for him the issue is not a cheap applause line; he actually had to figure out what to do with untold thousands of Mexican kids whose parents came here illegally.
The Purity Test is so unyielding that we have the amazing sight of all the candidates raising their hands to affirm that they wouldn’t accept a dollar in tax increases even in exchange for 10 dollars of spending cuts—no matter how good a deal that might seem to a fiscally conservative lawmaker not running for president. Michele Bachmann went a step further in last week’s Fox News debate, saying taxpayers should be able to keep every dollar they earn. “When people make money, it’s their money,” she said, before allowing that we might have to contribute something to keep the government’s lights on.
The Republicans have taken the purity concept to new heights in the 2012 cycle, forcing the candidates, whatever their previous records, to pledge allegiance to the new orthodoxy.
At the moment the conservative media establishment has soured on Perry, with Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol calling Perry’s Fox debate performance “almost disqualifying.” Kristol, like many other Republicans, yearns for Chris Christie, and has already come up with a slogan for the weight-challenged New Jersey governor: “A big man for a big job.”
But if Christie actually jumped into the race—that is, if he could explain why he spent so many months insisting he’s not “ready” to be president—he, too, would fail the Purity Test. He believes, for instance, that “climate change is real” and “human activity plays a role in these changes.” And when critics savaged him for nominating as a judge a Muslim who defended suspects after the 9/11 attacks—they were later cleared—Christie said he was “tired of dealing with the crazies” and that “this Sharia law business is crap.”
For a Republican to take a stance that breaks with party orthodoxy—whether toward illegal immigrants, uninsured patients, or Muslims—could attract swing voters in a general election. But first the candidate has to win the nomination, and in that arena, being impure remains a cardinal offense.
More Republican Lies That Are Destroying America
From Media Matters For America -- September 27, 2011:
Fox Pushes Misleading Cost-Per-Jobs Math To Attack Jobs Bill
Fox & Friends pushed the claim that the jobs created by President Obama's jobs bill would cost $200,000 per job, with co-host Brian Kilmeade asking, "Is it worth it to get a job that's going to cost the government $200,000?" But former Council of Economic Advisers chair Christina Romer has called this calculation "misleading," and similar claims about jobs created by the stimulus have been described as "bogus."
Fox's Kilmeade: "Is It Worth It To Get A Job That's Going To Cost The Government $200,000?"
Kilmeade: "Is It Worth It To Get A Job That's Going To Cost The Government $200,000?" On the September 27 broadcast of Fox News' Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade stated that "the president's jobs plan estimated to cost nearly $200,000 per job" and later asked, "Is it worth it to get a job that's going to cost the government $200,000." From the broadcast:
KILMEADE: The economy still in the tank, but are we in the middle of a double-dip recession or about to enter one? Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was asked that question. Let's watch:
DAVID MUIR (ABC News): Can you assure us that we're not in another recession already?
GEITHNER: Well, I think for most Americans, they feel like we've still -- we've been in a recession the entire time, and it still feels very, very hard. And this is still a really, really tough economy.
MUIR: But as you sit here today, can you assure me we're not in a double-dip recession already?
GEITHNER: The economy is still growing. It's just not growing fast enough.
KILMEADE: Two different conversations. But with the president's jobs plan estimated to cost nearly $200,000 per job, are they right or even on the right track to fixing the economy? For more, we turn to Fox Business senior correspondent Charles Gasparino. Charles, Timothy Geithner did not even answer the question. Is it worth it to get a job that's going to cost the government $200,000?
GASPARINO: You do wonder why he's still Treasury secretary. I mean, this is a guy who has made one mistake after another, led the most anemic economic recovery. By the way, when markets go down, economies go down very steep, they're supposed to bounce up steeply. It's supposed to be a V shape. We've had nothing but a V shape. We've had kind of a U shape, I guess is the best way to put it and, you know, listen, it's jobs -- creating jobs is not supposed to cost the American taxpayer money. It's supposed to put money back into the -- back into the federal payroll. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 9/27/11]
Romer: Cost-Per-Jobs Calculation Is "Misleading"
Romer: Cost-Per-Job Calculation Is "Attention-Getting, But It's Misleading." In a September 24 New York Times op-ed, Christina Romer, former chair of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers and economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, called the claim that the jobs bill would cost $200,000 per job "attention getting" but "misleading." From the op-ed:
A BATTLE is brewing over President Obama's $447 billion jobs plan. It's a sound proposal, but you might not know that listening to some of the arguments against it. They may sound plausible, but they don't stand up to scrutiny. Here are four of them.
THE COST PER JOB IS TOO HIGH Martin Feldstein, the Harvard economist, recently combined private estimates that the president's plan would raise employment by about two million in 2012, with its cost of about $450 billion. His conclusion was startling: each job produced by the plan would cost about $200,000.
This calculation is attention-getting, but it's misleading. First, many of the jobs would be in 2012, but not all. Infrastructure spending, for example, would be spread out over several years, so the total number of years of employment created over the life of the program would most likely be substantially larger than two million.
More fundamentally, the program wouldn't just create jobs. Consider the proposed $140 billion for roads, bridges, school repair and teachers. Jobs are, in a sense, a side benefit. What we're really getting is better infrastructure and more education for our children.
Then there's the $245 billion in tax cuts. That money doesn't disappear. It goes to households that can spend it on goods and services, and to businesses that can spend it on research and development and new machines. That added consumption and investment is a benefit, along with the jobs created.
The bottom line here is that we should be discussing which policies are likely to generate the most jobs while being valuable in other ways. We need to try to quantify the benefits of different government investments, and compare them with the benefits of private consumption and investment. [The New York Times, 9/24/11, emphasis in original]
Similar Claims That Stimulus Jobs Cost At Least $200,000 Have Been Called "Bogus," "False"
PolitiFact Texas: Claim That "Stimulus Cost $278K Per Job" Is "False." In a July 20 post, PolitiFact Texas rated the claim that "Obama's own economists say the stimulus cost $278K per job 'created' " as "False." [PolitiFact.com, 7/20/11]
Krugman Called Claim That Stimulus Would Cost $275,000 Per Job "Bogus." In a January 25, 2009, New York Times column, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman called the claim that the stimulus would cost $275,000 per job "bogus":
There's the bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created. Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of a plan that will extend over several years, creating millions of jobs each year, and dividing it by the jobs created in just one of those years.
Fox Pushes Misleading Cost-Per-Jobs Math To Attack Jobs Bill
Fox & Friends pushed the claim that the jobs created by President Obama's jobs bill would cost $200,000 per job, with co-host Brian Kilmeade asking, "Is it worth it to get a job that's going to cost the government $200,000?" But former Council of Economic Advisers chair Christina Romer has called this calculation "misleading," and similar claims about jobs created by the stimulus have been described as "bogus."
Fox's Kilmeade: "Is It Worth It To Get A Job That's Going To Cost The Government $200,000?"
Kilmeade: "Is It Worth It To Get A Job That's Going To Cost The Government $200,000?" On the September 27 broadcast of Fox News' Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade stated that "the president's jobs plan estimated to cost nearly $200,000 per job" and later asked, "Is it worth it to get a job that's going to cost the government $200,000." From the broadcast:
KILMEADE: The economy still in the tank, but are we in the middle of a double-dip recession or about to enter one? Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was asked that question. Let's watch:
DAVID MUIR (ABC News): Can you assure us that we're not in another recession already?
GEITHNER: Well, I think for most Americans, they feel like we've still -- we've been in a recession the entire time, and it still feels very, very hard. And this is still a really, really tough economy.
MUIR: But as you sit here today, can you assure me we're not in a double-dip recession already?
GEITHNER: The economy is still growing. It's just not growing fast enough.
KILMEADE: Two different conversations. But with the president's jobs plan estimated to cost nearly $200,000 per job, are they right or even on the right track to fixing the economy? For more, we turn to Fox Business senior correspondent Charles Gasparino. Charles, Timothy Geithner did not even answer the question. Is it worth it to get a job that's going to cost the government $200,000?
GASPARINO: You do wonder why he's still Treasury secretary. I mean, this is a guy who has made one mistake after another, led the most anemic economic recovery. By the way, when markets go down, economies go down very steep, they're supposed to bounce up steeply. It's supposed to be a V shape. We've had nothing but a V shape. We've had kind of a U shape, I guess is the best way to put it and, you know, listen, it's jobs -- creating jobs is not supposed to cost the American taxpayer money. It's supposed to put money back into the -- back into the federal payroll. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 9/27/11]
Romer: Cost-Per-Jobs Calculation Is "Misleading"
Romer: Cost-Per-Job Calculation Is "Attention-Getting, But It's Misleading." In a September 24 New York Times op-ed, Christina Romer, former chair of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers and economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, called the claim that the jobs bill would cost $200,000 per job "attention getting" but "misleading." From the op-ed:
A BATTLE is brewing over President Obama's $447 billion jobs plan. It's a sound proposal, but you might not know that listening to some of the arguments against it. They may sound plausible, but they don't stand up to scrutiny. Here are four of them.
THE COST PER JOB IS TOO HIGH Martin Feldstein, the Harvard economist, recently combined private estimates that the president's plan would raise employment by about two million in 2012, with its cost of about $450 billion. His conclusion was startling: each job produced by the plan would cost about $200,000.
This calculation is attention-getting, but it's misleading. First, many of the jobs would be in 2012, but not all. Infrastructure spending, for example, would be spread out over several years, so the total number of years of employment created over the life of the program would most likely be substantially larger than two million.
More fundamentally, the program wouldn't just create jobs. Consider the proposed $140 billion for roads, bridges, school repair and teachers. Jobs are, in a sense, a side benefit. What we're really getting is better infrastructure and more education for our children.
Then there's the $245 billion in tax cuts. That money doesn't disappear. It goes to households that can spend it on goods and services, and to businesses that can spend it on research and development and new machines. That added consumption and investment is a benefit, along with the jobs created.
The bottom line here is that we should be discussing which policies are likely to generate the most jobs while being valuable in other ways. We need to try to quantify the benefits of different government investments, and compare them with the benefits of private consumption and investment. [The New York Times, 9/24/11, emphasis in original]
Similar Claims That Stimulus Jobs Cost At Least $200,000 Have Been Called "Bogus," "False"
PolitiFact Texas: Claim That "Stimulus Cost $278K Per Job" Is "False." In a July 20 post, PolitiFact Texas rated the claim that "Obama's own economists say the stimulus cost $278K per job 'created' " as "False." [PolitiFact.com, 7/20/11]
Krugman Called Claim That Stimulus Would Cost $275,000 Per Job "Bogus." In a January 25, 2009, New York Times column, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman called the claim that the stimulus would cost $275,000 per job "bogus":
There's the bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created. Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of a plan that will extend over several years, creating millions of jobs each year, and dividing it by the jobs created in just one of those years.
How Low Can The Wretched Tea Party Go?
From The Washington Post -- September 26, 2011:
The lovable Rick Perry
By Richard Cohen
Iam beginning to feel about Rick Perry the way Fay Wray felt about King Kong. The big ape is starting to grow on me. First I was shocked and then I was scared but now, the more he gets attacked by those on his right (imagine!), the more a certain sympathy stirs in me. Here and there, the big lug is downright lovable.
A touch of sympathy swells within me when I see him on some debate platform, squinting hard to explain to a conservative audience how, on occasion, he has let his feelings get the better of him. He unaccountably felt a need to protect teenage girls from cervical cancer, and he wanted the children of illegal immigrants to get a good education.
He vainly tried to explain his compassion. But his audience remained cold. His biggest crowd-pleaser came in the Sept. 7 Republican debate when he took credit for 234 executions — “more than any other governor in modern times,” moderator Brian Williams said. The audience cheered.
It was downhill after that. Perry reeled, disoriented, chained to some of the more reckless actions he has taken in his three terms as Texas governor. He was pummeled for wanting to inoculate prepubescent girls against the human papillomavirus. This was the smart, sensible, humane thing to do, since about 6 million Americans get infected every year, and an estimated 12,000 of them will get cervical cancer. Of those, more than 4,000 will die from it.
Perry looked dazed. He virtually pounded his chest and proclaimed his hate for cancer. He acknowledged that he had erred — hatred of cancer can do that to an hombre — and should have left the good fight about HPV to the state legislature, which wouldn’t have passed it anyway. He had been slow to appreciate how conservatives felt that such vaccinations were the immunological equivalent of rape. They believe that vaccinating sixth-graders will somehow make these girls sexually promiscuous. As seventh-grade boys can tell you, there is no evidence for this.
Next came immigration. Once again, the party turned on him for lacking ideological purity. What was happening? All he had done was treat the children of illegal immigrants as ordinary students, but he was excoriated by his fellow Republican presidential candidates. Even Mitt Romney, a virtual Bolshie by GOP standards, came down on Perry as, in effect, . . . not conservative enough. Perry squinted. He smiled. What in Sam Hill was going on?
Rick Perry was being hogtied by a bunch of conservative Lilliputians. He was being lectured by the high-living Newt Gingrich, who was most definitely not still married to his high school sweetheart. He was being pummeled by the shifty Romney. Jon Huntsman was snippy, Rick Santorum was sanctimonious, Herman Cain was verbose, and Ron Paul — well, Paul is beyond adjectives. Michele Bachmann, who sometimes goes days without lying, kept referring to “innocent little 12-year-old girls,” making Perry seem like a guy in a raincoat. My God, what has happened to American conservatism?
Perry stood on the stage and tried to get words out. They clotted in his throat. They came out like spit teeth. His conservatism was being questioned! How was that possible? He had stood his ground on global warming: The science was lousy. Human beings were not responsible. Lots of scientists said so. He’d get the names.
He stood his ground on evolution. It was a theory, sort of like Keynesian economics. He rued the ratification of the 16th and 17th Amendments to the Constitution — the former permitting the federal income tax, the latter calling for the direct election of senators. How can you get more conservative than that? Repeal of both amendments would bring Washington to its knees. And these are not new debating positions. They are laid out — actually, sketched out — in Perry’s book “Fed Up!” It must have taken days to write.
Then came the Florida straw poll and Perry lost to . . . Herman Cain. He almost got beat by Romney. He was being mocked by the pundits, scorned by party activists (who had booed a gay soldier) — and held responsible for taking some principled positions. He was right about the HPV inoculation and he was right about the kids of illegal immigrants, and he was being attacked for the sheer decency of his positions. I felt sorry for him. The big lug may not have much of a brain, but he sure has a heart.
The lovable Rick Perry
By Richard Cohen
Iam beginning to feel about Rick Perry the way Fay Wray felt about King Kong. The big ape is starting to grow on me. First I was shocked and then I was scared but now, the more he gets attacked by those on his right (imagine!), the more a certain sympathy stirs in me. Here and there, the big lug is downright lovable.
A touch of sympathy swells within me when I see him on some debate platform, squinting hard to explain to a conservative audience how, on occasion, he has let his feelings get the better of him. He unaccountably felt a need to protect teenage girls from cervical cancer, and he wanted the children of illegal immigrants to get a good education.
He vainly tried to explain his compassion. But his audience remained cold. His biggest crowd-pleaser came in the Sept. 7 Republican debate when he took credit for 234 executions — “more than any other governor in modern times,” moderator Brian Williams said. The audience cheered.
It was downhill after that. Perry reeled, disoriented, chained to some of the more reckless actions he has taken in his three terms as Texas governor. He was pummeled for wanting to inoculate prepubescent girls against the human papillomavirus. This was the smart, sensible, humane thing to do, since about 6 million Americans get infected every year, and an estimated 12,000 of them will get cervical cancer. Of those, more than 4,000 will die from it.
Perry looked dazed. He virtually pounded his chest and proclaimed his hate for cancer. He acknowledged that he had erred — hatred of cancer can do that to an hombre — and should have left the good fight about HPV to the state legislature, which wouldn’t have passed it anyway. He had been slow to appreciate how conservatives felt that such vaccinations were the immunological equivalent of rape. They believe that vaccinating sixth-graders will somehow make these girls sexually promiscuous. As seventh-grade boys can tell you, there is no evidence for this.
Next came immigration. Once again, the party turned on him for lacking ideological purity. What was happening? All he had done was treat the children of illegal immigrants as ordinary students, but he was excoriated by his fellow Republican presidential candidates. Even Mitt Romney, a virtual Bolshie by GOP standards, came down on Perry as, in effect, . . . not conservative enough. Perry squinted. He smiled. What in Sam Hill was going on?
Rick Perry was being hogtied by a bunch of conservative Lilliputians. He was being lectured by the high-living Newt Gingrich, who was most definitely not still married to his high school sweetheart. He was being pummeled by the shifty Romney. Jon Huntsman was snippy, Rick Santorum was sanctimonious, Herman Cain was verbose, and Ron Paul — well, Paul is beyond adjectives. Michele Bachmann, who sometimes goes days without lying, kept referring to “innocent little 12-year-old girls,” making Perry seem like a guy in a raincoat. My God, what has happened to American conservatism?
Perry stood on the stage and tried to get words out. They clotted in his throat. They came out like spit teeth. His conservatism was being questioned! How was that possible? He had stood his ground on global warming: The science was lousy. Human beings were not responsible. Lots of scientists said so. He’d get the names.
He stood his ground on evolution. It was a theory, sort of like Keynesian economics. He rued the ratification of the 16th and 17th Amendments to the Constitution — the former permitting the federal income tax, the latter calling for the direct election of senators. How can you get more conservative than that? Repeal of both amendments would bring Washington to its knees. And these are not new debating positions. They are laid out — actually, sketched out — in Perry’s book “Fed Up!” It must have taken days to write.
Then came the Florida straw poll and Perry lost to . . . Herman Cain. He almost got beat by Romney. He was being mocked by the pundits, scorned by party activists (who had booed a gay soldier) — and held responsible for taking some principled positions. He was right about the HPV inoculation and he was right about the kids of illegal immigrants, and he was being attacked for the sheer decency of his positions. I felt sorry for him. The big lug may not have much of a brain, but he sure has a heart.
"Patriotic Millionaires for Higher Taxes" Confronts the Un-Patriotic, Un-American Koch Brothers, Karl Rove and Tea Party Republicans
From The Washington Post -- September 26, 2011:
Obama gets a feel-good moment on jobs package
By David Nakamura,
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Finally, an unemployed American whom President Obama was happy to hear from.
During a town-hall style event here at the Computer History Museum, Obama was answering tough questions about his $447 billion American Jobs Act when he called on a man in sitting in the back row of the audience.
President Barack Obama appeared at a town hall-style event hosted by the career-focused social networking site LinkedIn to pitch his nearly $450 billion jobs proposal as he travels through California scooping up campaign cash. (Sept. 26)
Video
A heckler shouting about Jesus Christ interrupted President Barack Obama at a fundraiser in Hollywood before security dragged him out.
The man, balding and wearing glasses, stood to explain he was unemployed. Uh-oh. But, the man continued, he was no longer working because he had made a lot of money in a start-up company down the road in Silicon Valley.
“My question is would you please raise my taxes?” the man deadpanned, to immediate laughter and applause. “I would like very much to have the country to continue to invest in things like Pell Grants and infrastructure and job-training programs that made it possible for me to get to where I am. And it kills me to see Congress not supporting the expiration of the tax cuts that have been benefiting so many of us for so long. I think that needs to change, and I hope that you will stay strong in doing that.”
If Obama, who has been barnstorming the country, was searching for someone – aside from billionaire investor Warren Buffett – to be the populist face of his jobs package, this was a moment that could not have been scripted better.
Unemployment is at 9.1 percent, and Obama has been battered in public opinion polls, his job approval rating plummeting below 40 percent. In response, Obama has proposed the “Buffett rule” that would raise taxes on Americans who earn more than $1 million a year to help pay for an ambitious $3 trillion deficit reduction plan. But congressional Republicans, including House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), along with some Democrats, have denounced the proposal as a non-starter as they propose instead to cut more spending.
The man was later identified in news reports as Doug Edwards, a former Google employee who told reporters he is part of a group called “Patriotic Millionaires for Higher Taxes.”
In response to Edwards, Obama laid out his vision that wealthier Americans benefited from many factors in society and should be willing to pay back a little bit more of the money they have earned to benefit others.
“At some point, money makes a difference,” the president said. “And, right now, we’ve got the lowest tax rates we’ve had since the 1950s. And some of the Republican proposals would take it back — as a percentage of GDP — back to where we were back in the 1920s. You can’t have a modern industrial economy like that.
“So I appreciate your sentiment,” Obama concluded. “I appreciate the fact that you recognize we’re in this thing together. We’re not on our own. And those of us who’ve been successful, we’ve always got to remember that.”
Republicans on Capitol Hill quickly pointed out that it might not be easy for a man who is no longer receiving a paycheck to pay income taxes, even if he wants to pay higher rates.
But for Obama, it was a rare moment of good feeling in what has been a tough several months. In selling the jobs package on trips to several states, Obama has made the case that his mix of tax cuts and infrastructure investments would create more than a million jobs over the next several years.
Realistically, however, his legislative package has little chance of passing the Republican-controlled House and both sides are jockeying to win public support in the political debate that could help shape the 2012 presidential election.
The town-hall event is the centerpiece of a three-day West Coast swing in which Obama is also appearing at seven fundraisers and touring a high school in Denver Tuesday to highlight his proposed $25 billion investment in renovating school buildings across the country.
LinkedIn, a social networking service for business professionals that features 120 million users, co-sponsored the gathering, which the White House titled “Putting Americans Back to Work.”
Most of the questions focused on the economy and jobs, with several people telling the president that they or their relatives had lost their jobs and were worried about their future. One woman said her mother, recently unemployed, feared that Social Security and Medicare would be ended.
“I’m not going to do what the Republicans propose, which is voucherize the Medicare system,” Obama said. “We are going to be pushing back against that kind of proposal.”
At the end of the event, Obama said: “People are just looking for common sense . . . The problem is not outside of Washington but the problem is everything has become so ideological and everyone is just focused on the next election and putting party before country that we’re not able to solve our problems.”
Obama gets a feel-good moment on jobs package
By David Nakamura,
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Finally, an unemployed American whom President Obama was happy to hear from.
During a town-hall style event here at the Computer History Museum, Obama was answering tough questions about his $447 billion American Jobs Act when he called on a man in sitting in the back row of the audience.
President Barack Obama appeared at a town hall-style event hosted by the career-focused social networking site LinkedIn to pitch his nearly $450 billion jobs proposal as he travels through California scooping up campaign cash. (Sept. 26)
Video
A heckler shouting about Jesus Christ interrupted President Barack Obama at a fundraiser in Hollywood before security dragged him out.
The man, balding and wearing glasses, stood to explain he was unemployed. Uh-oh. But, the man continued, he was no longer working because he had made a lot of money in a start-up company down the road in Silicon Valley.
“My question is would you please raise my taxes?” the man deadpanned, to immediate laughter and applause. “I would like very much to have the country to continue to invest in things like Pell Grants and infrastructure and job-training programs that made it possible for me to get to where I am. And it kills me to see Congress not supporting the expiration of the tax cuts that have been benefiting so many of us for so long. I think that needs to change, and I hope that you will stay strong in doing that.”
If Obama, who has been barnstorming the country, was searching for someone – aside from billionaire investor Warren Buffett – to be the populist face of his jobs package, this was a moment that could not have been scripted better.
Unemployment is at 9.1 percent, and Obama has been battered in public opinion polls, his job approval rating plummeting below 40 percent. In response, Obama has proposed the “Buffett rule” that would raise taxes on Americans who earn more than $1 million a year to help pay for an ambitious $3 trillion deficit reduction plan. But congressional Republicans, including House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), along with some Democrats, have denounced the proposal as a non-starter as they propose instead to cut more spending.
The man was later identified in news reports as Doug Edwards, a former Google employee who told reporters he is part of a group called “Patriotic Millionaires for Higher Taxes.”
In response to Edwards, Obama laid out his vision that wealthier Americans benefited from many factors in society and should be willing to pay back a little bit more of the money they have earned to benefit others.
“At some point, money makes a difference,” the president said. “And, right now, we’ve got the lowest tax rates we’ve had since the 1950s. And some of the Republican proposals would take it back — as a percentage of GDP — back to where we were back in the 1920s. You can’t have a modern industrial economy like that.
“So I appreciate your sentiment,” Obama concluded. “I appreciate the fact that you recognize we’re in this thing together. We’re not on our own. And those of us who’ve been successful, we’ve always got to remember that.”
Republicans on Capitol Hill quickly pointed out that it might not be easy for a man who is no longer receiving a paycheck to pay income taxes, even if he wants to pay higher rates.
But for Obama, it was a rare moment of good feeling in what has been a tough several months. In selling the jobs package on trips to several states, Obama has made the case that his mix of tax cuts and infrastructure investments would create more than a million jobs over the next several years.
Realistically, however, his legislative package has little chance of passing the Republican-controlled House and both sides are jockeying to win public support in the political debate that could help shape the 2012 presidential election.
The town-hall event is the centerpiece of a three-day West Coast swing in which Obama is also appearing at seven fundraisers and touring a high school in Denver Tuesday to highlight his proposed $25 billion investment in renovating school buildings across the country.
LinkedIn, a social networking service for business professionals that features 120 million users, co-sponsored the gathering, which the White House titled “Putting Americans Back to Work.”
Most of the questions focused on the economy and jobs, with several people telling the president that they or their relatives had lost their jobs and were worried about their future. One woman said her mother, recently unemployed, feared that Social Security and Medicare would be ended.
“I’m not going to do what the Republicans propose, which is voucherize the Medicare system,” Obama said. “We are going to be pushing back against that kind of proposal.”
At the end of the event, Obama said: “People are just looking for common sense . . . The problem is not outside of Washington but the problem is everything has become so ideological and everyone is just focused on the next election and putting party before country that we’re not able to solve our problems.”
Monday, September 26, 2011
How The Koch Brothers and The Tea Party are Bankrupting America
From Common Dreams -- September 26, 2011:
A Billionaires' Coup in the US
The debt deal will hurt the poorest Americans, convinced by Fox and the Tea Party to act against their own welfare
by George Monbiot
There are two ways of cutting a deficit: raising taxes or reducing spending. Raising taxes means taking money from the rich. Cutting spending means taking money from the poor. Not in all cases of course: some taxation is regressive; some state spending takes money from ordinary citizens and gives it to banks, arms companies, oil barons and farmers. But in most cases the state transfers wealth from rich to poor, while tax cuts shift it from poor to rich.
So the rich, in a nominal democracy, have a struggle on their hands. Somehow they must persuade the other 99% to vote against their own interests: to shrink the state, supporting spending cuts rather than tax rises. In the US they appear to be succeeding.
Partly as a result of the Bush tax cuts of 2001, 2003 and 2005 (shamefully extended by Barack Obama), taxation of the wealthy, in Obama's words, "is at its lowest level in half a century". The consequence of such regressive policies is a level of inequality unknown in other developed nations. As the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz points out, in the past 10 years the income of the top 1% has risen by 18%, while that of blue-collar male workers has fallen by 12%.
The deal being thrashed out in Congress as this article goes to press seeks only to cut state spending. As the former Republican senator Alan Simpson says: "The little guy is going to be cremated." That means more economic decline, which means a bigger deficit. It's insane. But how did it happen?
The immediate reason is that Republican members of Congress supported by the Tea Party movement won't budge. But this explains nothing. The Tea Party movement mostly consists of people who have been harmed by tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for the poor and middle. Why would they mobilise against their own welfare? You can understand what is happening in Washington only if you remember what everyone seems to have forgotten: how this movement began.
On Sunday the Observer claimed that "the Tea Party rose out of anger over the scale of federal spending, and in particular in bailing out the banks". This is what its members claim. It's nonsense.
The movement started with Rick Santelli's call on CNBC for a tea party of city traders to dump securities in Lake Michigan, in protest at Obama's plan to "subsidise the losers". In other words, it was a demand for a financiers' mobilisation against the bailout of their victims: people losing their homes. On the same day, a group called Americans for Prosperity (AFP) set up a Tea Party Facebook page and started organising Tea Party events. The movement, whose programme is still lavishly supported by AFP, took off from there.
So who or what is Americans for Prosperity? It was founded and is funded by Charles and David Koch. They run what they call "the biggest company you've never heard of", and between them they are worth $43bn. Koch Industries is a massive oil, gas, minerals, timber and chemicals company. In the past 15 years the brothers have poured at least $85m into lobby groups arguing for lower taxes for the rich and weaker regulations for industry. The groups and politicians the Kochs fund also lobby to destroy collective bargaining, to stop laws reducing carbon emissions, to stymie healthcare reform and to hobble attempts to control the banks. During the 2010 election cycle, AFP spent $45m supporting its favoured candidates.
But the Kochs' greatest political triumph is the creation of the Tea Party movement. Taki Oldham's film (Astro)Turf Wars shows Tea Party organisers reporting back to David Koch at their 2009 Defending the Dream summit, explaining the events and protests they've started with AFP help. "Five years ago," he tells them, "my brother Charles and I provided the funds to start Americans for Prosperity. It's beyond my wildest dreams how AFP has grown into this enormous organisation."
AFP mobilised the anger of people who found their conditions of life declining, and channelled it into a campaign to make them worse. Tea Party campaigners take to the streets to demand less tax for billionaires and worse health, education and social insurance for themselves.
Are they stupid? No. They have been misled by another instrument of corporate power: the media. The movement has been relentlessly promoted by Fox News, which belongs to a more familiar billionaire. Like the Kochs, Rupert Murdoch aims to misrepresent the democratic choices we face, in order to persuade us to vote against our own interests and in favor of his.
What's taking place in Congress right now is a kind of political coup. A handful of billionaires have shoved a spanner into the legislative process. Through the candidates they have bought and the movement that supports them, they are now breaking and reshaping the system to serve their interests. We knew this once, but now we've forgotten. What hope do we have of resisting a force we won't even see?
A Billionaires' Coup in the US
The debt deal will hurt the poorest Americans, convinced by Fox and the Tea Party to act against their own welfare
by George Monbiot
There are two ways of cutting a deficit: raising taxes or reducing spending. Raising taxes means taking money from the rich. Cutting spending means taking money from the poor. Not in all cases of course: some taxation is regressive; some state spending takes money from ordinary citizens and gives it to banks, arms companies, oil barons and farmers. But in most cases the state transfers wealth from rich to poor, while tax cuts shift it from poor to rich.
So the rich, in a nominal democracy, have a struggle on their hands. Somehow they must persuade the other 99% to vote against their own interests: to shrink the state, supporting spending cuts rather than tax rises. In the US they appear to be succeeding.
Partly as a result of the Bush tax cuts of 2001, 2003 and 2005 (shamefully extended by Barack Obama), taxation of the wealthy, in Obama's words, "is at its lowest level in half a century". The consequence of such regressive policies is a level of inequality unknown in other developed nations. As the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz points out, in the past 10 years the income of the top 1% has risen by 18%, while that of blue-collar male workers has fallen by 12%.
The deal being thrashed out in Congress as this article goes to press seeks only to cut state spending. As the former Republican senator Alan Simpson says: "The little guy is going to be cremated." That means more economic decline, which means a bigger deficit. It's insane. But how did it happen?
The immediate reason is that Republican members of Congress supported by the Tea Party movement won't budge. But this explains nothing. The Tea Party movement mostly consists of people who have been harmed by tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for the poor and middle. Why would they mobilise against their own welfare? You can understand what is happening in Washington only if you remember what everyone seems to have forgotten: how this movement began.
On Sunday the Observer claimed that "the Tea Party rose out of anger over the scale of federal spending, and in particular in bailing out the banks". This is what its members claim. It's nonsense.
The movement started with Rick Santelli's call on CNBC for a tea party of city traders to dump securities in Lake Michigan, in protest at Obama's plan to "subsidise the losers". In other words, it was a demand for a financiers' mobilisation against the bailout of their victims: people losing their homes. On the same day, a group called Americans for Prosperity (AFP) set up a Tea Party Facebook page and started organising Tea Party events. The movement, whose programme is still lavishly supported by AFP, took off from there.
So who or what is Americans for Prosperity? It was founded and is funded by Charles and David Koch. They run what they call "the biggest company you've never heard of", and between them they are worth $43bn. Koch Industries is a massive oil, gas, minerals, timber and chemicals company. In the past 15 years the brothers have poured at least $85m into lobby groups arguing for lower taxes for the rich and weaker regulations for industry. The groups and politicians the Kochs fund also lobby to destroy collective bargaining, to stop laws reducing carbon emissions, to stymie healthcare reform and to hobble attempts to control the banks. During the 2010 election cycle, AFP spent $45m supporting its favoured candidates.
But the Kochs' greatest political triumph is the creation of the Tea Party movement. Taki Oldham's film (Astro)Turf Wars shows Tea Party organisers reporting back to David Koch at their 2009 Defending the Dream summit, explaining the events and protests they've started with AFP help. "Five years ago," he tells them, "my brother Charles and I provided the funds to start Americans for Prosperity. It's beyond my wildest dreams how AFP has grown into this enormous organisation."
AFP mobilised the anger of people who found their conditions of life declining, and channelled it into a campaign to make them worse. Tea Party campaigners take to the streets to demand less tax for billionaires and worse health, education and social insurance for themselves.
Are they stupid? No. They have been misled by another instrument of corporate power: the media. The movement has been relentlessly promoted by Fox News, which belongs to a more familiar billionaire. Like the Kochs, Rupert Murdoch aims to misrepresent the democratic choices we face, in order to persuade us to vote against our own interests and in favor of his.
What's taking place in Congress right now is a kind of political coup. A handful of billionaires have shoved a spanner into the legislative process. Through the candidates they have bought and the movement that supports them, they are now breaking and reshaping the system to serve their interests. We knew this once, but now we've forgotten. What hope do we have of resisting a force we won't even see?
Sunday, September 25, 2011
The Un-American Cowardly Chickens of the Republican Tea Party
From The Daily Beast -- September 24, 2011:
Jeers for a Gay Soldier
By John Avlon
At the recent GOP debate, an active-duty soldier was booed because he's gay—and none of the candidates said a word. John Avlon on the unprecedented new level of right-wing hate.
The GOP presidential debate in Orlando produced a profile in courage and nine profiles in cowardice.
The profile in courage came courtesy of the brave active-duty solider named Stephen Hill serving in Iraq who chose the Republican debate as the opportunity to come out to his fellow servicemen and the nation via video. He was, of course, marking the newfound freedom to do so granted by the repeal of "don’t ask, don’t tell." And he was greeted with a chorus of boos from people in the conservative crowd who don’t like his kind.
The profiles in cowardice came from the nine presidential candidates on stage who chose to stand through the insult to a military man serving in a war zone, struck dumb by their political calculations. This was an opportunity to speak out in favor of civil rights, to condemn a basic lack of kindness in the crowd, to stand up for our fighting men and women serving in harm’s way. It could have been a defining moment for a candidate with the courage and decency to buck the base.
But instead, there was the awkward silence of a political pitch going by—an acquiescence to some of the ugliest impulses in society combined with a lack of moral clarity. And the reason was simple fear—fear of alienating the base and fear of being called a RINO for being in favor of gay rights. It was not a proud moment for the Party of Lincoln.
In the wake of the debate, libertarian Gary Johnson and centrist Jon Huntsman at least had the decency to condemn the crowds’ reaction, but that was after the fact. Perhaps not coincidentally, they are two of the few candidates running who do not favor a federal marriage law, which would roll back the gay civil-rights movement sweeping the states in favor of a constitutional amendment. Their positions of principled independence in a conservative populist year have them so far mired in single digits. And, to his credit, even the socially conservative Rick Santorum eventually got the message and condemned the boos.
Active-duty solider Stephen Hill, came out to the country and his fellow service men via video during the Republican debate in Orlando. He was booed by members of the audience., youtube.com
But the two frontrunners—Rick Perry and Mitt Romney—have so far been shamefully silent on the moment in the debate, going so far as to refuse further comment through spokesmen. This lack of courage will look bad in the eyes of history and takes a further chunk out of any claims they will make about how they can be a moral leader of the nation in the White House.
The lack of condemnation speaks to a growing problem in the GOP—evidence that the inmates are coming close to running the asylum.
Take a moment to see the crowd’s eruption in a larger context of this year’s presidential debates. Draw a mental line between the cheers that greeted Rick Perry’s proud claim that he hadn’t lost any sleep over the 234 (now 235) executions he has presided over as governor in Texas and the giddy applause that greeted Wolf Blitzer’s question about whether an uninsured 30-year-old in a catastrophic car crash should be allowed to die or given treatment and, finally, the booing of soldier Stephen Hill.
They are all flashes of an ugly impulse we have seen periodically in our politics—when conservative populism meets with a mob mentality. These are the forces that H. L. Mencken wrote about when he covered the Scopes "Monkey Trial" and what Richard Hofstadter wrote about in The Paranoid Style in American Politics. It is resurgent again in a party that has allowed the fringe to blur with the base, to the extent that otherwise responsible presidential candidates are afraid to condemn it because of the potential political fallout in closed partisan primaries.
The point is not that those boos—or the execution applause—characterizes the entire debate crowd, let alone the conservative movement or even the Republican Party. Let’s say, giving the benefit of the doubt, that it was just a very vocal minority, hijacking the debate. Nonetheless, the lack of condemnation speaks to a growing problem in the GOP—evidence that the inmates are coming close to running the asylum, enabled by a cowardice that comes from the pressure to ideologically conform.
Conservative populism is usually, almost by definition, on the wrong side of history. But it has always been a powerful force in American politics. When it is combined with a mob mentality that cheers executions or reinforces bigotry, bad things can happen.
Right now, responsible Republicans are needed to stand up and condemn the extremes on their side of the aisle. In doing so, they can have the comfort in the knowledge that they are following the example of William F. Buckley, who condemned the John Birch Society’s paranoid delusions in the 1960s. If they have the courage to state that their belief in individual freedom extends to gays and lesbians, they can do so in the knowledge that conservative icon Barry Goldwater backed gays in the military decades ago, famously saying that "you don’t have to be straight to shoot straight." And they will know that they are doing their part to redeem the reputation of the Party of Lincoln.
But if the GOP presidential candidates continue to pander to the lowest common denominator in our politics, standing silent when the mob mentality rears its head, they only provide more evidence of the current field’s weakness.
Jeers for a Gay Soldier
By John Avlon
At the recent GOP debate, an active-duty soldier was booed because he's gay—and none of the candidates said a word. John Avlon on the unprecedented new level of right-wing hate.
The GOP presidential debate in Orlando produced a profile in courage and nine profiles in cowardice.
The profile in courage came courtesy of the brave active-duty solider named Stephen Hill serving in Iraq who chose the Republican debate as the opportunity to come out to his fellow servicemen and the nation via video. He was, of course, marking the newfound freedom to do so granted by the repeal of "don’t ask, don’t tell." And he was greeted with a chorus of boos from people in the conservative crowd who don’t like his kind.
The profiles in cowardice came from the nine presidential candidates on stage who chose to stand through the insult to a military man serving in a war zone, struck dumb by their political calculations. This was an opportunity to speak out in favor of civil rights, to condemn a basic lack of kindness in the crowd, to stand up for our fighting men and women serving in harm’s way. It could have been a defining moment for a candidate with the courage and decency to buck the base.
But instead, there was the awkward silence of a political pitch going by—an acquiescence to some of the ugliest impulses in society combined with a lack of moral clarity. And the reason was simple fear—fear of alienating the base and fear of being called a RINO for being in favor of gay rights. It was not a proud moment for the Party of Lincoln.
In the wake of the debate, libertarian Gary Johnson and centrist Jon Huntsman at least had the decency to condemn the crowds’ reaction, but that was after the fact. Perhaps not coincidentally, they are two of the few candidates running who do not favor a federal marriage law, which would roll back the gay civil-rights movement sweeping the states in favor of a constitutional amendment. Their positions of principled independence in a conservative populist year have them so far mired in single digits. And, to his credit, even the socially conservative Rick Santorum eventually got the message and condemned the boos.
Active-duty solider Stephen Hill, came out to the country and his fellow service men via video during the Republican debate in Orlando. He was booed by members of the audience., youtube.com
But the two frontrunners—Rick Perry and Mitt Romney—have so far been shamefully silent on the moment in the debate, going so far as to refuse further comment through spokesmen. This lack of courage will look bad in the eyes of history and takes a further chunk out of any claims they will make about how they can be a moral leader of the nation in the White House.
The lack of condemnation speaks to a growing problem in the GOP—evidence that the inmates are coming close to running the asylum.
Take a moment to see the crowd’s eruption in a larger context of this year’s presidential debates. Draw a mental line between the cheers that greeted Rick Perry’s proud claim that he hadn’t lost any sleep over the 234 (now 235) executions he has presided over as governor in Texas and the giddy applause that greeted Wolf Blitzer’s question about whether an uninsured 30-year-old in a catastrophic car crash should be allowed to die or given treatment and, finally, the booing of soldier Stephen Hill.
They are all flashes of an ugly impulse we have seen periodically in our politics—when conservative populism meets with a mob mentality. These are the forces that H. L. Mencken wrote about when he covered the Scopes "Monkey Trial" and what Richard Hofstadter wrote about in The Paranoid Style in American Politics. It is resurgent again in a party that has allowed the fringe to blur with the base, to the extent that otherwise responsible presidential candidates are afraid to condemn it because of the potential political fallout in closed partisan primaries.
The point is not that those boos—or the execution applause—characterizes the entire debate crowd, let alone the conservative movement or even the Republican Party. Let’s say, giving the benefit of the doubt, that it was just a very vocal minority, hijacking the debate. Nonetheless, the lack of condemnation speaks to a growing problem in the GOP—evidence that the inmates are coming close to running the asylum, enabled by a cowardice that comes from the pressure to ideologically conform.
Conservative populism is usually, almost by definition, on the wrong side of history. But it has always been a powerful force in American politics. When it is combined with a mob mentality that cheers executions or reinforces bigotry, bad things can happen.
Right now, responsible Republicans are needed to stand up and condemn the extremes on their side of the aisle. In doing so, they can have the comfort in the knowledge that they are following the example of William F. Buckley, who condemned the John Birch Society’s paranoid delusions in the 1960s. If they have the courage to state that their belief in individual freedom extends to gays and lesbians, they can do so in the knowledge that conservative icon Barry Goldwater backed gays in the military decades ago, famously saying that "you don’t have to be straight to shoot straight." And they will know that they are doing their part to redeem the reputation of the Party of Lincoln.
But if the GOP presidential candidates continue to pander to the lowest common denominator in our politics, standing silent when the mob mentality rears its head, they only provide more evidence of the current field’s weakness.
Monday, September 12, 2011
It's a Fight to the Death Between Obama and the "New" Republican Party with the Survival of America at Stake
From The Washington Post -- September 11, 2011:
How much has Obama learned?
E. J. Dionne, Jr.
Our political system is not accustomed to the kind of battle going on now. President Obama has been slow to adjust to it. The voters are understandably mystified and frustrated by it. In the meantime, the economy sits on the edge of stagnation and something worse.
The president’s speech to Congress and the Republican presidential debate last week should have taught us that we are no longer in the world of civics textbooks in which our political parties split their differences and arrive at imperfect but reasonably satisfactory solutions.
Now we face a fundamental divide over the most basic questions: Is government good or bad? Can public action make the private economy work better, or are all efforts to alter the market’s course — by Congress, the president, the Federal Reserve — doomed to failure?
When politicians and their supporters believe the other side is pursuing policies that would destroy all they cherish, compromise becomes not a desirable expedient but “almost treasonous,” to use the phrase tossed about by Gov. Rick Perry of Texas.
Under these circumstances, taking enormous risks with the country’s well-being, as House Republicans did in the debt-ceiling rumble, is no longer out of bounds. It’s a form of patriotism. When your adversaries’ ideas are so dastardly, it’s better to court chaos, win the fight and pick up the pieces later.
And to make matters worse — and more confusing — the two sides are not equally distant from the political center. We are in an age of asymmetric polarization.
Precisely because they believe in both government and the marketplace, Democrats are always more ready to compromise. Obama’s economic address last Thursday was seen as tough and firm because he finally called out Republicans in Congress. Progressives liked the new fortitude, and also the relatively large sums Obama would mobilize to jolt the economy back to vibrancy.
But there was nothing remotely radical (or even particularly liberal) about Obama’s ideas: tax cuts, many of them business-friendly, and new spending for such exotic projects as, well, schools and roads. As the president said, his proposals have all drawn Republican support in the past.
He was, however, talking about a Republican Party that existed before it was taken over by a new sensibility linking radical individualism with a loathing for government that would shock Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln and, for goodness’ sake, Robert Taft.
Thus the GOP sees the solution to the crisis in the measures its right wing has always favored: gutting regulation; keeping taxes on the affluent low; cutting government programs; and stopping Ben Bernanke and the Fed from doing anything to put the unemployed back to work that might risk the tiniest bit of inflation and thus dilute, even momentarily, the wealth of the already wealthy.
Last week’s Republican debate was instructive in showing how deeply this new orthodoxy has penetrated. Bashing Bernanke and the government was in. Perry joined in the doctrinaire foolishness his rivals displayed in an earlier debate. He echoed them in saying he would reject a budget deal based on $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases. (A colleague of mine suggested the candidates should have been asked how they felt about ratios of 20-to-1 or 50-to-1.)
Up to this point, Obama has acted as if nothing much had happened in the Republican Party. He kept talking about bipartisanship and tried not once but twice to make a big deficit deal with John Boehner. Quite predictably, both efforts blew up in his face.
The president seems to have awoken to the danger he faces. In his speech to Congress, he pointedly addressed those who believe “that the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everybody’s money, and let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own.” He added: “That’s not who we are. That’s not the story of America.”
But that is precisely who most of the Republican Party now thinks we are.
The president has offered eloquent defenses of the role of government in the past, only to revert to bipartisan fantasies that, in the end, always make him look weaker. The central question — for his jobs plan and his future — is whether this time he sticks with an analysis of the nature of our political fight that sees it as it is, not as he wishes it were.
How much has Obama learned?
E. J. Dionne, Jr.
Our political system is not accustomed to the kind of battle going on now. President Obama has been slow to adjust to it. The voters are understandably mystified and frustrated by it. In the meantime, the economy sits on the edge of stagnation and something worse.
The president’s speech to Congress and the Republican presidential debate last week should have taught us that we are no longer in the world of civics textbooks in which our political parties split their differences and arrive at imperfect but reasonably satisfactory solutions.
Now we face a fundamental divide over the most basic questions: Is government good or bad? Can public action make the private economy work better, or are all efforts to alter the market’s course — by Congress, the president, the Federal Reserve — doomed to failure?
When politicians and their supporters believe the other side is pursuing policies that would destroy all they cherish, compromise becomes not a desirable expedient but “almost treasonous,” to use the phrase tossed about by Gov. Rick Perry of Texas.
Under these circumstances, taking enormous risks with the country’s well-being, as House Republicans did in the debt-ceiling rumble, is no longer out of bounds. It’s a form of patriotism. When your adversaries’ ideas are so dastardly, it’s better to court chaos, win the fight and pick up the pieces later.
And to make matters worse — and more confusing — the two sides are not equally distant from the political center. We are in an age of asymmetric polarization.
Precisely because they believe in both government and the marketplace, Democrats are always more ready to compromise. Obama’s economic address last Thursday was seen as tough and firm because he finally called out Republicans in Congress. Progressives liked the new fortitude, and also the relatively large sums Obama would mobilize to jolt the economy back to vibrancy.
But there was nothing remotely radical (or even particularly liberal) about Obama’s ideas: tax cuts, many of them business-friendly, and new spending for such exotic projects as, well, schools and roads. As the president said, his proposals have all drawn Republican support in the past.
He was, however, talking about a Republican Party that existed before it was taken over by a new sensibility linking radical individualism with a loathing for government that would shock Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln and, for goodness’ sake, Robert Taft.
Thus the GOP sees the solution to the crisis in the measures its right wing has always favored: gutting regulation; keeping taxes on the affluent low; cutting government programs; and stopping Ben Bernanke and the Fed from doing anything to put the unemployed back to work that might risk the tiniest bit of inflation and thus dilute, even momentarily, the wealth of the already wealthy.
Last week’s Republican debate was instructive in showing how deeply this new orthodoxy has penetrated. Bashing Bernanke and the government was in. Perry joined in the doctrinaire foolishness his rivals displayed in an earlier debate. He echoed them in saying he would reject a budget deal based on $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases. (A colleague of mine suggested the candidates should have been asked how they felt about ratios of 20-to-1 or 50-to-1.)
Up to this point, Obama has acted as if nothing much had happened in the Republican Party. He kept talking about bipartisanship and tried not once but twice to make a big deficit deal with John Boehner. Quite predictably, both efforts blew up in his face.
The president seems to have awoken to the danger he faces. In his speech to Congress, he pointedly addressed those who believe “that the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everybody’s money, and let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own.” He added: “That’s not who we are. That’s not the story of America.”
But that is precisely who most of the Republican Party now thinks we are.
The president has offered eloquent defenses of the role of government in the past, only to revert to bipartisan fantasies that, in the end, always make him look weaker. The central question — for his jobs plan and his future — is whether this time he sticks with an analysis of the nature of our political fight that sees it as it is, not as he wishes it were.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Dick Cheney -- America's Worst Vice-President Ever
From The Daily Beast -- Sept. 11, 2011:
Cheney's Love Letter to Himself
By Paul Begala
Don’t let Dick Cheney’s gruff, arrogant attitude fool you, says Paul Begala. His memoir can’t hide the fact that he was one of the most destructive public officials of our time.
Dick Cheney calls his memoir In My Time. This is, apparently, Cheney's time; we all just live in it. From the title on, Cheney the author seems hopelessly, blindly, foolishly, sloppily in love with his subject. Condoleezza Rice may be teary and weak; Colin Powell may be timid and meek; even George W. Bush has a wobbly streak. But not our Dick. Cheney has written a 576-page love letter to himself.
It ought to be a 576-page apology. Few people have strutted and fretted upon the stage longer, or done more damage, than Dick Cheney. And yet I am glad he has written his memoir, because it allows us to have a much-needed debate about Cheney's policies. And yet Cheney's side of the debate is neither full nor candid. Perhaps even more telling than what he puts into his book are the things Cheney leaves out. Here is a brief compendium of other parts of the record that Cheney either ignores entirely or glosses over:
Cheney ignored the al Qaeda threat until it was too late. For all of the interesting experiences and important assignments in Cheney's long tenure of government service, he will forever be defined by the attacks of September 11, 2001. The hard truth is the attacks could have been prevented; America should have been protected. Cheney bears some responsibility for this, no doubt. But he does not address his malign neglect of the al Qaeda threat—nonfeasance that proved deadly.
Tellingly, Richard Nixon appears more often in Cheney's book than Osama bin Laden. Cheney mentions the 9/11 attacks again and again, although ten years later, the talismanic effect has largely worn off. Instead, you see a desperate old man seeking to distract history from his own catastrophic failure to prevent the attacks before they occurred, or kill bin Laden after.
But for Aaron Burr, who committed treason and killed Alexander Hamilton, Dick Cheney would be the worst vice president in American history.
Although he boasts of receiving a more detailed President's Daily Brief (PDB) than his boss, Cheney does not discuss the infamous PDB of August 6, 2001, entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Richard Clarke, the White House's top terrorism official, who had served four presidents and whose desperate efforts to warn the Bush-Cheney White House about the impending attack have been well-documented, is not mentioned at all.
And when Cheney writes about the task force on terrorism he was ordered to lead four months before the 9/11 attacks, he makes himself sound as busy as the proverbial beaver. Less self-interested observers say the Cheney task force did little or nothing. The Washington Post said "Neither Cheney's review nor Bush's took place." The Washington Monthly wrote: "Cheney's security task force did nothing for four months, lurching into action only after terrorists actually attacked America on September 11."
And the attacks came. And Cheney wants all knowledge of his dereliction of duty tossed down the memory hole.
The Bush-Cheney team allowed Osama bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora. In the first months of the war in Afghanistan, we had bin Laden pinned down. According to the official report of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he was trapped like the rat he was in a collection of caves and tunnels in a part of eastern Afghanistan called Tora Bora. Bin Laden was so certain he was about to be killed he wrote his last will and testament. The United States had tens of thousands of troops in Afghanistan, but, according to the Senate report, "The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines." And bin Laden escaped. Nowhere in his book does Cheney discuss this historic blunder.
"Deficits don't matter." When Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill became alarmed that the Bush-Cheney economic policies would explode the deficit, he turned to his old friend Dick Cheney. After all, Cheney had recruited him for the job and had served with him in the Ford Administration. But when O'Neill began to express his concerns, Cheney blew him off. "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter," he said. "We won the midterms. This is our due." And a month later O'Neill was history. We know all this because of O'Neill's candor. But Cheney does not mention it at all.
We literally owe Cheney and his crew a debt we can never repay. Cheney was instrumental in taking America from its largest surplus to its largest deficit—the worst fiscal reversal in modern American history. Nowadays you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a Republican kvetching about deficits. But none of them mentions that it was a Republican administration that created them.
Cheney opposed sanctions on the terrorist regimes in Iran and Libya. In 1996 President Clinton signed the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, which punished the thugs in Tehran and Tripoli. As the former secretary of defense, Cheney knew (or should have known) of the criminality of those regimes. But as the CEO of the oilfield services giant Halliburton, Cheney put profit ahead of patriotism. His firm got around sanctions against Iran, trading with the enemy through a foreign-based subsidiary. Cheney blasted the Clinton administration's get-tough-on-terrorists policy. He whined that because of the Clinton sanctions, U.S. companies like Halliburton were "cut out of the action" in Iran. "We seem," he said, "to be sanction-happy as a government."
The millions of dollars Halliburton paid Cheney allow him to move with ease among three luxury homes. But some of those millions came from enriching and empowering terrorist-supporting regimes that hate America.
If you think about the crises America faces—global terrorism, an overstretched military, crushing deficit and debt—all of them were made worse by Dick Cheney. His policies crippled the strongest economy on earth; he dropped his guard when he should have been vigilant; and he left the country weaker, poorer and more divided than the day he took power.
It is hard to find, in the annals of American history, a public servant less competent and more harmful. True, Vice President Aaron Burr committed treason and killed Alexander Hamilton. But for Burr, Cheney would be the worst vice president in history.
To be so wrong for so long is remarkable indeed. Don't let Mr. Cheney's gruff, arrogant attitude fool you, and I will not let good manners prevent me from saying it: Dick Cheney is one of the most incompetent, destructive public officials of his time, our time, or my time.
Cheney's Love Letter to Himself
By Paul Begala
Don’t let Dick Cheney’s gruff, arrogant attitude fool you, says Paul Begala. His memoir can’t hide the fact that he was one of the most destructive public officials of our time.
Dick Cheney calls his memoir In My Time. This is, apparently, Cheney's time; we all just live in it. From the title on, Cheney the author seems hopelessly, blindly, foolishly, sloppily in love with his subject. Condoleezza Rice may be teary and weak; Colin Powell may be timid and meek; even George W. Bush has a wobbly streak. But not our Dick. Cheney has written a 576-page love letter to himself.
It ought to be a 576-page apology. Few people have strutted and fretted upon the stage longer, or done more damage, than Dick Cheney. And yet I am glad he has written his memoir, because it allows us to have a much-needed debate about Cheney's policies. And yet Cheney's side of the debate is neither full nor candid. Perhaps even more telling than what he puts into his book are the things Cheney leaves out. Here is a brief compendium of other parts of the record that Cheney either ignores entirely or glosses over:
Cheney ignored the al Qaeda threat until it was too late. For all of the interesting experiences and important assignments in Cheney's long tenure of government service, he will forever be defined by the attacks of September 11, 2001. The hard truth is the attacks could have been prevented; America should have been protected. Cheney bears some responsibility for this, no doubt. But he does not address his malign neglect of the al Qaeda threat—nonfeasance that proved deadly.
Tellingly, Richard Nixon appears more often in Cheney's book than Osama bin Laden. Cheney mentions the 9/11 attacks again and again, although ten years later, the talismanic effect has largely worn off. Instead, you see a desperate old man seeking to distract history from his own catastrophic failure to prevent the attacks before they occurred, or kill bin Laden after.
But for Aaron Burr, who committed treason and killed Alexander Hamilton, Dick Cheney would be the worst vice president in American history.
Although he boasts of receiving a more detailed President's Daily Brief (PDB) than his boss, Cheney does not discuss the infamous PDB of August 6, 2001, entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Richard Clarke, the White House's top terrorism official, who had served four presidents and whose desperate efforts to warn the Bush-Cheney White House about the impending attack have been well-documented, is not mentioned at all.
And when Cheney writes about the task force on terrorism he was ordered to lead four months before the 9/11 attacks, he makes himself sound as busy as the proverbial beaver. Less self-interested observers say the Cheney task force did little or nothing. The Washington Post said "Neither Cheney's review nor Bush's took place." The Washington Monthly wrote: "Cheney's security task force did nothing for four months, lurching into action only after terrorists actually attacked America on September 11."
And the attacks came. And Cheney wants all knowledge of his dereliction of duty tossed down the memory hole.
The Bush-Cheney team allowed Osama bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora. In the first months of the war in Afghanistan, we had bin Laden pinned down. According to the official report of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he was trapped like the rat he was in a collection of caves and tunnels in a part of eastern Afghanistan called Tora Bora. Bin Laden was so certain he was about to be killed he wrote his last will and testament. The United States had tens of thousands of troops in Afghanistan, but, according to the Senate report, "The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines." And bin Laden escaped. Nowhere in his book does Cheney discuss this historic blunder.
"Deficits don't matter." When Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill became alarmed that the Bush-Cheney economic policies would explode the deficit, he turned to his old friend Dick Cheney. After all, Cheney had recruited him for the job and had served with him in the Ford Administration. But when O'Neill began to express his concerns, Cheney blew him off. "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter," he said. "We won the midterms. This is our due." And a month later O'Neill was history. We know all this because of O'Neill's candor. But Cheney does not mention it at all.
We literally owe Cheney and his crew a debt we can never repay. Cheney was instrumental in taking America from its largest surplus to its largest deficit—the worst fiscal reversal in modern American history. Nowadays you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a Republican kvetching about deficits. But none of them mentions that it was a Republican administration that created them.
Cheney opposed sanctions on the terrorist regimes in Iran and Libya. In 1996 President Clinton signed the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, which punished the thugs in Tehran and Tripoli. As the former secretary of defense, Cheney knew (or should have known) of the criminality of those regimes. But as the CEO of the oilfield services giant Halliburton, Cheney put profit ahead of patriotism. His firm got around sanctions against Iran, trading with the enemy through a foreign-based subsidiary. Cheney blasted the Clinton administration's get-tough-on-terrorists policy. He whined that because of the Clinton sanctions, U.S. companies like Halliburton were "cut out of the action" in Iran. "We seem," he said, "to be sanction-happy as a government."
The millions of dollars Halliburton paid Cheney allow him to move with ease among three luxury homes. But some of those millions came from enriching and empowering terrorist-supporting regimes that hate America.
If you think about the crises America faces—global terrorism, an overstretched military, crushing deficit and debt—all of them were made worse by Dick Cheney. His policies crippled the strongest economy on earth; he dropped his guard when he should have been vigilant; and he left the country weaker, poorer and more divided than the day he took power.
It is hard to find, in the annals of American history, a public servant less competent and more harmful. True, Vice President Aaron Burr committed treason and killed Alexander Hamilton. But for Burr, Cheney would be the worst vice president in history.
To be so wrong for so long is remarkable indeed. Don't let Mr. Cheney's gruff, arrogant attitude fool you, and I will not let good manners prevent me from saying it: Dick Cheney is one of the most incompetent, destructive public officials of his time, our time, or my time.
Republicans are Commemorating 9/11 By Saluting the Flag and Finishing What Al Quaida Began --- Destroying America
From The Daily Beast -- Sept. 9, 2011:
The GOP’s One-Sided War on Dems
By Michael Tomasky
Pundits love to apportion blame for partisan hostility equally to both sides. But as Michael Tomasky shows, the GOP deserves the lion’s share of the blame.
As we begin the countdown toward an eventual vote on the jobs bill Barack Obama laid out Thursday night, the question is how much bipartisan support the president can really expect. Democrats and liberals, of course, complain that Republicans have been unusually uniform in their opposition to Obama’s major proposals. Conservatives sometimes rejoin that Democrats were just as firmly opposed to George W. Bush’s major plans. Centrists of the “both sides do it” school of political analysis are dedicated to the proposition that the partisan intensity of both parties is more or less equal.
I thought this might be a good time to look at some numbers and see. So I conducted a little experiment, in which I’ve settled on four signal legislative achievements of each president and studied the roll call votes in each house on those eight measures to see what the numbers tell us.
The four Bush bills I chose: the first tax cut; No Child Left Behind; the Iraq War vote; and the 2003 Medicare prescription-drug bill. The four Obama bills: the stimulus; the health-care vote; the Dodd-Frank financial reform; and the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal. Other people might have selected others, but these just seemed to me commonsense answers to the question, “What were each president’s top legislative accomplishments?” As a country we spent a heck of a lot of time on these eight issues, so my findings must tell us something. And here’s what they tell us: levels of partisanship are not even remotely close.
1. First Bush Tax Cut: Here, not much Democratic support—just three of 43 voting senators, and 13 of 210 voting House members; 7 and 6.2 percent, respectively (percentages in all cases reflect the percentage of actual voting members, because some people missed some votes).
2. No Child Left Behind (NCLB): Democrats rallied to Bush here, supporting him, interestingly, by larger margins than even the Republicans did. Forty-seven of 50 Senate Democrats and 197 of 210 House Democrats backed NCLB; 94 percent in both cases.
3. Iraq War Vote: More than half, 28 of 50, Democrats backed Bush here, while 82 of 208 House Democrats voted yes. That’s 58 and 39 percent.
4. The Medicare Bill: Democratic support wasn’t very high, but was higher than I’d remembered, with 11 of 48 senators backing the bill and 16 of 203 House members in support; 23 and 7.9 percent.
Steve Helber / AP Photo
Now let’s look at the other side of the ledger:
5. The Stimulus: Three of 41 GOP senators backed it, and zero of 177 House members, for support levels of 7.3 and 0 percent.
6. Health Care: Zero of 39 senators and one of 177 House members; 0 and .6 percent.
7. Dodd-Frank: A little better! Three of 40 senators and three of 178 House members, equaling 7.5 and 1.7 percent.
8. DADT Repeal: Mon Dieu, a few votes! Eight of 39 senators and 15 of 179 House members, or 20.5 and 8.4 percent.
Here’s how it all adds up:
Average Democratic Senate support for Bush: 45.5 percent.
Average Democratic House support for Bush: 36.8 percent.
Average combined Democratic support for Bush: 41.1 percent.
Average Republican Senate support for Obama: 8.8 percent.
Average Republican House support for Obama: 2.7 percent.
Average combined Republican support for Obama: 5.75 percent.
Well now. You see, both sides do do it. It just so happens that one side opposes the major proposals of the president from the other party seven times more intensely than the other side does it.
The recent debt-ceiling vote was an "Obama initiative" in about the same way that Dunkirk was a Churchill initiative.
As I said, I acknowledge that this isn’t scientific. The NCLB vote, I confess, skews things a little. But this was certainly one of Bush’s biggest legislative items, and he’s the one who chose to make it so. If Bush had managed to put a Social Security privatization bill before Congress, our numbers would be different. But not as different as you think. There actually was a kind of test vote on Social Security privatization in 2001 in the House, and 20 Democrats voted yea. So even if such a vote had taken place in 2005, we have reason to think Bush would have received a higher percentage of support on that—the single most important program to Democrats—than Obama got from the Republicans on anything.
And it’s not as if I’m hiding high-profile votes on which Republicans, in bursts of magnanimity, broke the above pattern. Remember the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, way back right after Obama was sworn in, before the stimulus poisoned all that goodwill? That won the backing of three Senate Republicans (yes, the same “stimulus three”—Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Specter), while another three House Republicans, out of 175, voted yea. And no, the recent debt-ceiling vote does not count. That was an “Obama initiative” in about the same way that Dunkirk was a Churchill initiative.
What does this history tell us? It tells us plainly that one side is usually against the other guy, but within bounds that are to be expected, while the other side is blind with rage against the other guy. I wish every American knew this. It would be a start for Democrats to tell them.
The GOP’s One-Sided War on Dems
By Michael Tomasky
Pundits love to apportion blame for partisan hostility equally to both sides. But as Michael Tomasky shows, the GOP deserves the lion’s share of the blame.
As we begin the countdown toward an eventual vote on the jobs bill Barack Obama laid out Thursday night, the question is how much bipartisan support the president can really expect. Democrats and liberals, of course, complain that Republicans have been unusually uniform in their opposition to Obama’s major proposals. Conservatives sometimes rejoin that Democrats were just as firmly opposed to George W. Bush’s major plans. Centrists of the “both sides do it” school of political analysis are dedicated to the proposition that the partisan intensity of both parties is more or less equal.
I thought this might be a good time to look at some numbers and see. So I conducted a little experiment, in which I’ve settled on four signal legislative achievements of each president and studied the roll call votes in each house on those eight measures to see what the numbers tell us.
The four Bush bills I chose: the first tax cut; No Child Left Behind; the Iraq War vote; and the 2003 Medicare prescription-drug bill. The four Obama bills: the stimulus; the health-care vote; the Dodd-Frank financial reform; and the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal. Other people might have selected others, but these just seemed to me commonsense answers to the question, “What were each president’s top legislative accomplishments?” As a country we spent a heck of a lot of time on these eight issues, so my findings must tell us something. And here’s what they tell us: levels of partisanship are not even remotely close.
1. First Bush Tax Cut: Here, not much Democratic support—just three of 43 voting senators, and 13 of 210 voting House members; 7 and 6.2 percent, respectively (percentages in all cases reflect the percentage of actual voting members, because some people missed some votes).
2. No Child Left Behind (NCLB): Democrats rallied to Bush here, supporting him, interestingly, by larger margins than even the Republicans did. Forty-seven of 50 Senate Democrats and 197 of 210 House Democrats backed NCLB; 94 percent in both cases.
3. Iraq War Vote: More than half, 28 of 50, Democrats backed Bush here, while 82 of 208 House Democrats voted yes. That’s 58 and 39 percent.
4. The Medicare Bill: Democratic support wasn’t very high, but was higher than I’d remembered, with 11 of 48 senators backing the bill and 16 of 203 House members in support; 23 and 7.9 percent.
Steve Helber / AP Photo
Now let’s look at the other side of the ledger:
5. The Stimulus: Three of 41 GOP senators backed it, and zero of 177 House members, for support levels of 7.3 and 0 percent.
6. Health Care: Zero of 39 senators and one of 177 House members; 0 and .6 percent.
7. Dodd-Frank: A little better! Three of 40 senators and three of 178 House members, equaling 7.5 and 1.7 percent.
8. DADT Repeal: Mon Dieu, a few votes! Eight of 39 senators and 15 of 179 House members, or 20.5 and 8.4 percent.
Here’s how it all adds up:
Average Democratic Senate support for Bush: 45.5 percent.
Average Democratic House support for Bush: 36.8 percent.
Average combined Democratic support for Bush: 41.1 percent.
Average Republican Senate support for Obama: 8.8 percent.
Average Republican House support for Obama: 2.7 percent.
Average combined Republican support for Obama: 5.75 percent.
Well now. You see, both sides do do it. It just so happens that one side opposes the major proposals of the president from the other party seven times more intensely than the other side does it.
The recent debt-ceiling vote was an "Obama initiative" in about the same way that Dunkirk was a Churchill initiative.
As I said, I acknowledge that this isn’t scientific. The NCLB vote, I confess, skews things a little. But this was certainly one of Bush’s biggest legislative items, and he’s the one who chose to make it so. If Bush had managed to put a Social Security privatization bill before Congress, our numbers would be different. But not as different as you think. There actually was a kind of test vote on Social Security privatization in 2001 in the House, and 20 Democrats voted yea. So even if such a vote had taken place in 2005, we have reason to think Bush would have received a higher percentage of support on that—the single most important program to Democrats—than Obama got from the Republicans on anything.
And it’s not as if I’m hiding high-profile votes on which Republicans, in bursts of magnanimity, broke the above pattern. Remember the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, way back right after Obama was sworn in, before the stimulus poisoned all that goodwill? That won the backing of three Senate Republicans (yes, the same “stimulus three”—Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Specter), while another three House Republicans, out of 175, voted yea. And no, the recent debt-ceiling vote does not count. That was an “Obama initiative” in about the same way that Dunkirk was a Churchill initiative.
What does this history tell us? It tells us plainly that one side is usually against the other guy, but within bounds that are to be expected, while the other side is blind with rage against the other guy. I wish every American knew this. It would be a start for Democrats to tell them.
Friday, September 9, 2011
Republican Defector Labels Today's GOP America's Leninist Party
From The Daily Beast -- September 5, 2011:
GOP Defector Spills the Beans
By Michael Tomasky
Mike Lofgren loyally served the GOP on Capitol Hill for 28 years. But no longer. Michael Tomasky on what the defection of a Republican staffer tells us about the state of the party.
Many people are buzzing about an article at truthout.org by one Mike Lofgren, a longtime Republican staff aide on Capitol Hill who just couldn’t take the crazy anymore, left his job, and produced this buzzy (and quite well-written) lamentation about his party’s tactics and goals. If you haven’t read it, you must. There was nothing in there that surprised me. I’ve been saying all these things for a long time (as have many others). What continues to dumbfound me is why Lofgren’s assertions are even controversial, because as long as they remain so, “neutral” observers who deny this reality bear some responsibility for the sad shape our politics is in.
I should say before we get to the gravamen of Lofgren’s case that there is something in pieces like this that is a little bit too convenient for my side: a Republican with three decades of service to his party writes a scabrous attack on them, and it’s eloquent to boot! It makes me proceed with a little caution. On the other hand, James Fallows wrote over the weekend that while Lofgren was unknown to most of us, “among people who have covered or worked in the national-security field, he is a familiar and highly esteemed figure.” Jim being one of the very top journalists in the country, that’s a pretty valuable testimonial that eases the mind somewhat.
The Lofgren piece is full of harsh observations and accusations, but here’s just a little sampling:
Presidential candidates at a GOP debate in Manchester, N.H., in June, John Tully / Corbis
• The debt-ceiling debate was an act of “political terrorism,” in which the GOP concocted a crisis and used it to ensure that the party's unprecedented demands were met. He writes: “Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care.”
• The August FAA reauthorization fight was another instance such of hostage-taking: “Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers, and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel—how prudent is that?—in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.”
• The GOP plan to discredit government in the people’s eyes is very conscious: “A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.”
• As for belief as opposed to tactics, the party basically really cares only about the rich. Actually, Lofgren doesn’t say “basically.” He says “solely and exclusively.” And he explains how they’ve camouflaged this with talk of protecting small businesses and so on.
There is much, much more. He’s not very happy either about his party’s militarism, its cynical use of religion, its total opposition to doing anything about the environment, and other matters, but most especially its neo-Leninist posture in which political power trumps everything.
When Lofgren first started working on the Hill, in 1983, the House and Senate were still full of moderate Republicans—and even Reagan himself was a quisling by today’s standards.
Some with short memories may ask, how could such a person have been a Republican anyway? Answer: there used to be loads of Republicans like Lofgren. George H.W. Bush and his EPA secretary, William Reilly, put the first serious cap-and-trade proposals on the table. When Lofgren first started working on the Hill, in 1983, we were into the Reagan Revolution, granted, but the House and Senate were still full of moderate Republicans, and even Reagan himself, as has often been observed, was a quisling by today’s standards. And if you want to go back to Lofgren’s youth ... well, Google Thomas Kuchel or Charles Percy.
GOP Defector Spills the Beans
By Michael Tomasky
Mike Lofgren loyally served the GOP on Capitol Hill for 28 years. But no longer. Michael Tomasky on what the defection of a Republican staffer tells us about the state of the party.
Many people are buzzing about an article at truthout.org by one Mike Lofgren, a longtime Republican staff aide on Capitol Hill who just couldn’t take the crazy anymore, left his job, and produced this buzzy (and quite well-written) lamentation about his party’s tactics and goals. If you haven’t read it, you must. There was nothing in there that surprised me. I’ve been saying all these things for a long time (as have many others). What continues to dumbfound me is why Lofgren’s assertions are even controversial, because as long as they remain so, “neutral” observers who deny this reality bear some responsibility for the sad shape our politics is in.
I should say before we get to the gravamen of Lofgren’s case that there is something in pieces like this that is a little bit too convenient for my side: a Republican with three decades of service to his party writes a scabrous attack on them, and it’s eloquent to boot! It makes me proceed with a little caution. On the other hand, James Fallows wrote over the weekend that while Lofgren was unknown to most of us, “among people who have covered or worked in the national-security field, he is a familiar and highly esteemed figure.” Jim being one of the very top journalists in the country, that’s a pretty valuable testimonial that eases the mind somewhat.
The Lofgren piece is full of harsh observations and accusations, but here’s just a little sampling:
Presidential candidates at a GOP debate in Manchester, N.H., in June, John Tully / Corbis
• The debt-ceiling debate was an act of “political terrorism,” in which the GOP concocted a crisis and used it to ensure that the party's unprecedented demands were met. He writes: “Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care.”
• The August FAA reauthorization fight was another instance such of hostage-taking: “Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers, and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel—how prudent is that?—in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.”
• The GOP plan to discredit government in the people’s eyes is very conscious: “A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.”
• As for belief as opposed to tactics, the party basically really cares only about the rich. Actually, Lofgren doesn’t say “basically.” He says “solely and exclusively.” And he explains how they’ve camouflaged this with talk of protecting small businesses and so on.
There is much, much more. He’s not very happy either about his party’s militarism, its cynical use of religion, its total opposition to doing anything about the environment, and other matters, but most especially its neo-Leninist posture in which political power trumps everything.
When Lofgren first started working on the Hill, in 1983, the House and Senate were still full of moderate Republicans—and even Reagan himself was a quisling by today’s standards.
Some with short memories may ask, how could such a person have been a Republican anyway? Answer: there used to be loads of Republicans like Lofgren. George H.W. Bush and his EPA secretary, William Reilly, put the first serious cap-and-trade proposals on the table. When Lofgren first started working on the Hill, in 1983, we were into the Reagan Revolution, granted, but the House and Senate were still full of moderate Republicans, and even Reagan himself, as has often been observed, was a quisling by today’s standards. And if you want to go back to Lofgren’s youth ... well, Google Thomas Kuchel or Charles Percy.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Counting All the Lies in The Great Republican Debate
From The Washington Post -- September 8, 2011:
In an award-winning journalism career spanning nearly three decades, Glenn Kessler has covered foreign policy, economic policy, the White House, Congress, politics, airline safety and Wall Street. He was The Washington Post’s chief State Department reporter for nine years, traveling around the world with three different Secretaries of State. Before that, he covered tax and budget policy for The Washington Post and also served as the newspaper’s national business editor.
Fact checking the GOP debate at the Reagan library
By Glenn Kessler
That was a rip-roaring Republican debate Wednesday night at the Reagan library. As is our practice, we will quickly assess a number of claims and then perhaps come back later with a deeper look at some issues.
The debate started with a back and forth between former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Texas Gov. Rick Perry over job creation during their tenures. This in many ways is a silly discussion — governors and even presidents are very much at the mercy of the economic situation they inherited — and Romney actually framed it well:
“The states are different. Texas is a great state. Texas has zero income tax. Texas has a right-to-work state, a Republican legislature, a Republican Supreme Court. Texas has a lot of oil and gas in the ground. Those are wonderful things. But Governor Perry doesn’t believe that he created those things. If he tried to say that, why, it would be like Al Gore saying he invented the Internet.”
(Gore actually did not put it quite that way, but nevermind.)
So, for the moment, we are going to set aside the job discussion, stipulating that each man has his claims and counterclaims, and focus on other issues.
“It is a monstrous lie. It is a Ponzi scheme to tell our kids that are 25 or 30 years today you’re paying into a program that’s going to be there.”
— Gov. Perry
Perhaps the governor does not know the dictionary definition of a Ponzi scheme. Here’s what Merriam-Webster says: “An investment swindle in which some early investors are paid off with money put up by later ones in order to encourage more and bigger risks.”
This is a frequent mistake politicians make when talking about Social Security. It is not an investment vehicle; it is intended to provide income security as well disability and life insurance. Just more than 60 percent of the 54 million beneficiaries are retired workers; the rest are disabled workers, dependents or survivors.
Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system, which means that payments collected today are immediately used to pay benefits. Until recently, more payments were collected than were needed for benefits. So Social Security loaned the money to the U.S. government, which used it for other things. In exchange, Social Security received interest-bearing Treasury securities. The value of those bonds is now about $2.6 trillion. (We have written about this at length.)
In any case, Perry is wrong to label Social Security a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes ultimately go bust and everyone generally loses their money. Social Security faces a long-term funding issue, but one that most experts say is manageable. After all, the Social Security actuary says that Social Security’s shortfall is 0.7 percent of the gross domestic product over the next 75 years.
“Obamacare is killing jobs. We know that from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.”
— Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.)
Bachmann won’t give up on this factoid, even though we debunked it seven months ago and said it was worth three Pinocchios. It’s just not correct, and remains a perfect example of how politicians twist the facts.
The Congressional Budget Office in August 2010 estimated that the new health care law over the next decade would reduce the number of overall workers in the United States by one-half of 1 percent, which translates into 800,000 people. But that’s not the same as saying it would “kill” that many jobs.
In dry economic language, the CBO essentially said that some people who are now in the workforce because they need health insurance would decide to stop working because the health care law guaranteed they would have access to health care. (As an example, think of someone who is 63, a couple of years before retirement, who is still in a job only because he or she is waiting to get on Medicare at age 65.)
These jobs would disappear, not to be replaced, so there is an intellectually defensible argument one could make that this is bad for the economy; others, however, might argue that this is a small price worth paying for universal health care.
But in any case, the CBO did not say the health law was killing jobs.
“We’ve had requested for years at the Health and Human Services agencies to have that type of flexibility, where we could have menus, where we could have co-pays. And the federal government refuses to give us that flexibility.”
— Perry
Perry gives a misleading account of this application for a waiver on Medicaid rules. The George W. Bush administration rejected the application in 2008, saying it was incomplete and riddled with problems. As far as we can tell, the state has not resubmitted the waiver.
“Obamacare took over one-sixth of the American economy… . If we fail to repeal Obamacare in 2012, it will be with us forever and it will be socialized medicine.”
— Bachmann
“In our state, our plan covered 8 percent of the people, the uninsured. His plan has taken over a 100 percent of the people.”
— Romney
It is simply not true, no matter how often candidates say that the Obama health care law represents socialized medicine or took over one-sixth of the economy. Socialized medicine is a single-payer system, in which the government pays the bills and controls costs (much like Medicare.)
Obama’s law was modeled closely on the law passed by Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts — an inconvenient fact that Romney tries hard to run away from. His comparison here is misleading, since both plans try to deal with the problem of the uninsured by requiring an individual mandate.
“For the president of the United States to go to El Paso, Texas, and say that the border is safer than its ever been, either he has some of the poorest intel of a president in the history of this country, or he was an abject liar to the American people. It is not safe on that border.”
— Perry
Perry is referring to a speech that Obama gave May 10, in which he did some boasting that earned the president a Pinocchio. Obama did not put it quite as bluntly as Perry suggests, and calling the president an “abject liar” seems over the top for the politically tinged comments Obama actually made.
“He only went along with the Libyan mission because the United Nations told him to.”
— Former Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.)
Actually, Santorum has it backwards. The United States requested the U.N. resolution to gain international backing for the NATO-led intervention in the Libyan uprising.
“The idea that we would put Americans’ economy in jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet to me is just — is nonsense. I mean, it — I mean, and I told somebody, I said, just because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said, here is the fact — Galileo got outvoted for a spell.”
— Perry
We previously awarded Perry Four Pinocchios for his comments suggesting scientists were increasingly saying climate change was a fiction. We will note he repeatedly did not answer the question at the debate about whether he could name a scientists he thought was credible on the issue.
“As a matter of fact, what he’s done is, he’s said in fact to Israel that they need to shrink back to their indefensible 1967 borders.”
— Bachmann
Obama never said this. The president in May did give a controversial speech, in which he said the de facto border of 1967 should be a starting point for negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians, with agreed swaps of territory. A few days later, he further clarified his comments to make clear he was not saying the lines should be Israel’s border, to the point that he was thanked by the Israeli prime minister in a speech to Congress.
We’ve given Bachmann Four Pinocchios for making a similar claim in the past.
In an award-winning journalism career spanning nearly three decades, Glenn Kessler has covered foreign policy, economic policy, the White House, Congress, politics, airline safety and Wall Street. He was The Washington Post’s chief State Department reporter for nine years, traveling around the world with three different Secretaries of State. Before that, he covered tax and budget policy for The Washington Post and also served as the newspaper’s national business editor.
Fact checking the GOP debate at the Reagan library
By Glenn Kessler
That was a rip-roaring Republican debate Wednesday night at the Reagan library. As is our practice, we will quickly assess a number of claims and then perhaps come back later with a deeper look at some issues.
The debate started with a back and forth between former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Texas Gov. Rick Perry over job creation during their tenures. This in many ways is a silly discussion — governors and even presidents are very much at the mercy of the economic situation they inherited — and Romney actually framed it well:
“The states are different. Texas is a great state. Texas has zero income tax. Texas has a right-to-work state, a Republican legislature, a Republican Supreme Court. Texas has a lot of oil and gas in the ground. Those are wonderful things. But Governor Perry doesn’t believe that he created those things. If he tried to say that, why, it would be like Al Gore saying he invented the Internet.”
(Gore actually did not put it quite that way, but nevermind.)
So, for the moment, we are going to set aside the job discussion, stipulating that each man has his claims and counterclaims, and focus on other issues.
“It is a monstrous lie. It is a Ponzi scheme to tell our kids that are 25 or 30 years today you’re paying into a program that’s going to be there.”
— Gov. Perry
Perhaps the governor does not know the dictionary definition of a Ponzi scheme. Here’s what Merriam-Webster says: “An investment swindle in which some early investors are paid off with money put up by later ones in order to encourage more and bigger risks.”
This is a frequent mistake politicians make when talking about Social Security. It is not an investment vehicle; it is intended to provide income security as well disability and life insurance. Just more than 60 percent of the 54 million beneficiaries are retired workers; the rest are disabled workers, dependents or survivors.
Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system, which means that payments collected today are immediately used to pay benefits. Until recently, more payments were collected than were needed for benefits. So Social Security loaned the money to the U.S. government, which used it for other things. In exchange, Social Security received interest-bearing Treasury securities. The value of those bonds is now about $2.6 trillion. (We have written about this at length.)
In any case, Perry is wrong to label Social Security a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes ultimately go bust and everyone generally loses their money. Social Security faces a long-term funding issue, but one that most experts say is manageable. After all, the Social Security actuary says that Social Security’s shortfall is 0.7 percent of the gross domestic product over the next 75 years.
“Obamacare is killing jobs. We know that from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.”
— Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.)
Bachmann won’t give up on this factoid, even though we debunked it seven months ago and said it was worth three Pinocchios. It’s just not correct, and remains a perfect example of how politicians twist the facts.
The Congressional Budget Office in August 2010 estimated that the new health care law over the next decade would reduce the number of overall workers in the United States by one-half of 1 percent, which translates into 800,000 people. But that’s not the same as saying it would “kill” that many jobs.
In dry economic language, the CBO essentially said that some people who are now in the workforce because they need health insurance would decide to stop working because the health care law guaranteed they would have access to health care. (As an example, think of someone who is 63, a couple of years before retirement, who is still in a job only because he or she is waiting to get on Medicare at age 65.)
These jobs would disappear, not to be replaced, so there is an intellectually defensible argument one could make that this is bad for the economy; others, however, might argue that this is a small price worth paying for universal health care.
But in any case, the CBO did not say the health law was killing jobs.
“We’ve had requested for years at the Health and Human Services agencies to have that type of flexibility, where we could have menus, where we could have co-pays. And the federal government refuses to give us that flexibility.”
— Perry
Perry gives a misleading account of this application for a waiver on Medicaid rules. The George W. Bush administration rejected the application in 2008, saying it was incomplete and riddled with problems. As far as we can tell, the state has not resubmitted the waiver.
“Obamacare took over one-sixth of the American economy… . If we fail to repeal Obamacare in 2012, it will be with us forever and it will be socialized medicine.”
— Bachmann
“In our state, our plan covered 8 percent of the people, the uninsured. His plan has taken over a 100 percent of the people.”
— Romney
It is simply not true, no matter how often candidates say that the Obama health care law represents socialized medicine or took over one-sixth of the economy. Socialized medicine is a single-payer system, in which the government pays the bills and controls costs (much like Medicare.)
Obama’s law was modeled closely on the law passed by Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts — an inconvenient fact that Romney tries hard to run away from. His comparison here is misleading, since both plans try to deal with the problem of the uninsured by requiring an individual mandate.
“For the president of the United States to go to El Paso, Texas, and say that the border is safer than its ever been, either he has some of the poorest intel of a president in the history of this country, or he was an abject liar to the American people. It is not safe on that border.”
— Perry
Perry is referring to a speech that Obama gave May 10, in which he did some boasting that earned the president a Pinocchio. Obama did not put it quite as bluntly as Perry suggests, and calling the president an “abject liar” seems over the top for the politically tinged comments Obama actually made.
“He only went along with the Libyan mission because the United Nations told him to.”
— Former Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.)
Actually, Santorum has it backwards. The United States requested the U.N. resolution to gain international backing for the NATO-led intervention in the Libyan uprising.
“The idea that we would put Americans’ economy in jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet to me is just — is nonsense. I mean, it — I mean, and I told somebody, I said, just because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said, here is the fact — Galileo got outvoted for a spell.”
— Perry
We previously awarded Perry Four Pinocchios for his comments suggesting scientists were increasingly saying climate change was a fiction. We will note he repeatedly did not answer the question at the debate about whether he could name a scientists he thought was credible on the issue.
“As a matter of fact, what he’s done is, he’s said in fact to Israel that they need to shrink back to their indefensible 1967 borders.”
— Bachmann
Obama never said this. The president in May did give a controversial speech, in which he said the de facto border of 1967 should be a starting point for negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians, with agreed swaps of territory. A few days later, he further clarified his comments to make clear he was not saying the lines should be Israel’s border, to the point that he was thanked by the Israeli prime minister in a speech to Congress.
We’ve given Bachmann Four Pinocchios for making a similar claim in the past.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Today's Tea Party Republican Party Is No Longer the Party of Ronald Reagan
From The Daily Beast -- September 1, 2011:
Reagan's Party No More
By Eleanor Clift
Could the Gipper cut it in today’s Tea Party? Reagan staffers, including his chief of staff James Baker, tell Eleanor Clift how his record on tax hikes and abortion would play in the 2012 race.
Ronald Reagan is the patron saint for Republicans, just as John F. Kennedy is for Democrats. But parties evolve, and just as a Democrat with Kennedy’s views on foreign policy (“pay any price, bear any burden”) couldn’t be nominated today, the late Reagan might not be able win a Tea Party primary.
After all, he raised the debt ceiling 18 times during his eight years in office, signed one major tax increase into law, and let several other small tax increase take effect, too. And his tenure produced some of the most infamous examples of government waste, like the expenditures of the "star wars" program and the Pentagon's notorious $600 toilet seat cover.
“He’s dangerously liberal,” says Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “He raised taxes, was liberal on some social issues, and he changed his mind a lot depending on the circumstances.”
Former advisor Ed Meese has a different take, saying the Tea Party embodies Reagan’s principles of constitutional government and a strong defense. “He’d be as competitive as he was in 1980,” Meese insists. Reagan’s robust conservatism was new and a bit scary then, and he lost Iowa to moderate George H.W. Bush who boasted he had the momentum (the “big mo”) before Reagan bested him in New Hampshire.
Reagan was a former Democrat, had voted three times for FDR, and he had his own rules of engagement when it came to the other party.
Reagan then tapped James Baker, who had run two campaigns against him (Bush in ’80; Gerald Ford in ’76), to be White House chief of staff. “It was a measure of the broad-based nature of the guy,” Baker recalls, seeing in that decision three decades ago a lesson that may still apply today.
“I get asked what would Reagan think of the Tea Party, and I say, I think he would be out there leading the charge,” Baker tells The Daily Beast. “Remember how radical people thought he was—a shoot from the hip cowboy actor—and then look what he did when he got in there… Most people found he wasn’t extreme at all.”
Despite his record, Reagan managed to sustain his image as a tax cutter and opponent of big government. Aides found a euphemism that made it easier for Reagan to accept increasing taxes, calling them “revenue enhancements.”
Baker isn’t taking sides in the primary, but says candidates shouldn’t be judged solely by their red-meat rhetoric. “Politics is a blood sport, but it’s quite something else when they have to face the prospect and the difficulty of governing.”
Whether Reagan could win or not, there's no doubting his relevance in the GOP has waned with the crowd running this time. “The center has disappeared—not many of us left anymore,” Baker concedes. That Reagan could be counted as a centrist is evidence enough of the new Republican Party, which paid homage on Reagan's 100th anniversary of his birth in February but since have spoke little of him.
During the debt ceiling debate, Reagan’s name came up every day, but not from Republicans. It was President Obama who invoked the former president, asking why today’s Republicans couldn’t be more like Reagan, while Democrats dug up a 24-year-old audio tape of Reagan saying he wouldn’t think of defaulting on the nation’s debt.
Four years ago, Republicans fell all over each other genuflecting before the memory of their most popular recent president. This cycle they’ve been more restrained. In last month’s Republican debate, only Newt Gingrich mentioned Reagan’s name; it was the former speaker’s attempt to burnish his governing credentials. In truth, Gingrich was a backbencher during the Reagan years, lobbing bombshells at the White House in addition to Democrats. He had excoriated Reagan for the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 which—shudder—raised taxes. Gingrich accused Reagan of “trying to score a touchdown for liberalism.”
The Republican Party has moved steadily to the right since Reagan left the White House. Just as Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford couldn’t get nominated in Reagan’s Republican Party, Reagan might be the odd man out when the current crop of candidates takes the stage at the Reagan Library on September 7.
The eight candidates debating in the very long shadow of Reagan will pay their obligatory respects to his memory. But with the possible exception of Jon Huntsman, the most liberal and the lowest-polling in the group, none can easily lay claim to the Reagan legacy. “I’m sure Huntsman will try to emphasize he’s the real Reagan heir, recalling that Reagan was flexible and pragmatic and knew how to appeal to Democrats,” says Jack Pitney, professor of government at Claremont-McKenna College.
If Reagan is less relevant today, a lot of it is the passage of time. It has been seven years since he passed from the scene; 17 years since he announced he had Alzheimer’s, and 22 years since he left office. None of the students in Pitney’s classes this fall were born when Reagan was in the White House. The only presidents they remember are George W. Bush and Obama.
Since Bush left the White House, the GOP has lurched further right mainly because of the Tea Party influence but also as a reaction to Obama. The currently president is the antithesis of the gun-toting, real and rural America that is the Tea Party ideal, currently embodied in the latest entrant to the race, Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
On the stump, Perry laments that nearly half of all Americans don’t pay any income tax. Reagan had something to do with that. “Reagan was very proud of the 1986 tax reform which took millions of poor people off the tax rolls,” Pitney says. “For years, Republicans were saying what a great thing this was; now they’re opposed, which is bizarre.”
Noting that the only way for an anti-tax party to fix the situation would be to raise the taxes of all those slackers, Pitney adds, “If I were advising Governor Perry, I would ask him if he really wants to raise taxes on 50 percent of the people.”
Perry was a Democrat during the Reagan administration, and in 1988 managed Al Gore’s campaign in Texas. He’s not alone in being unable to claim ties to Reagan. When Mitt Romney was running for the Senate in Massachusetts against Ted Kennedy, he stressed that he had been an Independent during the Reagan years. Ron Paul ran against Reagan in 1984 as a Libertarian. Michele Bachmann had campaigned for Jimmy Carter, but became a Republican by the time Reagan was in office.
Reagan was a pragmatic politician. As governor of California, he signed a bill that liberalized the state’s abortion laws, and as president he privately railed against what he called “professional conservatives…who want me to jump off the cliff with the flag flying.” He had a Democratic House throughout his presidency, which meant compromise in order to get anything done. “His real skill, he knew how to adjust to the times,” says Scott Reed, who ran Bob Dole’s presidential campaign in 1996. “If he were running today, he would be a different candidate.”
The iconic memory of bipartisanship then was Reagan sitting down after-hours with Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill trading stories and talking about their Irish heritage. It didn’t stop O’Neill from calling out Reagan for trash-talking “welfare queens,” but there was a warmth there that today’s Tea Partiers probably wouldn’t abide—at least judging by their reaction to Speaker John Boehner’s efforts to forge a deficit deal with Obama.
Reagan was a former Democrat, had voted three times for FDR, and he had his own rules of engagement when it came to the other party. Mari Maseng Will, a speechwriter in the White House during Reagan’s first term, remembers the president telling his staff not to attack anyone by name, and not to attack Democrats. The only group that it was okay to assail, she says, was liberals. Reagan probably did more than any other politician to turn “liberal” into a dirty word, but he didn’t poison the well with the opposition the way Obama seems to have done when he takes on the GOP.
Obama has openly admired Reagan, beginning in the 2008 campaign when he told an interviewer that Reagan was a transformational president because his policies changed the direction of the country. The remark angered the Clintons, who saw it in the heat of the primary battle as a thinly veiled slap at their time in the White House. Historians agree that Reagan had a huge impact, and even those, like Obama, who opposed much of what he did, see him as transformational.
Whether a worthy successor will emerge from the current field is open to question. Nancy Reagan, for one, appears to be hedging her bets. She invited Marco Rubio to speak at the Reagan library last month, his first major speech since winning his Florida Senate. A likely contender for the VP spot on the ticket in 2012, Rubio caught the 90-year-old former first lady as she was about to take a tumble. That’s a maneuver Republicans hope he can repeat for the party.
Reagan's Party No More
By Eleanor Clift
Could the Gipper cut it in today’s Tea Party? Reagan staffers, including his chief of staff James Baker, tell Eleanor Clift how his record on tax hikes and abortion would play in the 2012 race.
Ronald Reagan is the patron saint for Republicans, just as John F. Kennedy is for Democrats. But parties evolve, and just as a Democrat with Kennedy’s views on foreign policy (“pay any price, bear any burden”) couldn’t be nominated today, the late Reagan might not be able win a Tea Party primary.
After all, he raised the debt ceiling 18 times during his eight years in office, signed one major tax increase into law, and let several other small tax increase take effect, too. And his tenure produced some of the most infamous examples of government waste, like the expenditures of the "star wars" program and the Pentagon's notorious $600 toilet seat cover.
“He’s dangerously liberal,” says Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “He raised taxes, was liberal on some social issues, and he changed his mind a lot depending on the circumstances.”
Former advisor Ed Meese has a different take, saying the Tea Party embodies Reagan’s principles of constitutional government and a strong defense. “He’d be as competitive as he was in 1980,” Meese insists. Reagan’s robust conservatism was new and a bit scary then, and he lost Iowa to moderate George H.W. Bush who boasted he had the momentum (the “big mo”) before Reagan bested him in New Hampshire.
Reagan was a former Democrat, had voted three times for FDR, and he had his own rules of engagement when it came to the other party.
Reagan then tapped James Baker, who had run two campaigns against him (Bush in ’80; Gerald Ford in ’76), to be White House chief of staff. “It was a measure of the broad-based nature of the guy,” Baker recalls, seeing in that decision three decades ago a lesson that may still apply today.
“I get asked what would Reagan think of the Tea Party, and I say, I think he would be out there leading the charge,” Baker tells The Daily Beast. “Remember how radical people thought he was—a shoot from the hip cowboy actor—and then look what he did when he got in there… Most people found he wasn’t extreme at all.”
Despite his record, Reagan managed to sustain his image as a tax cutter and opponent of big government. Aides found a euphemism that made it easier for Reagan to accept increasing taxes, calling them “revenue enhancements.”
Baker isn’t taking sides in the primary, but says candidates shouldn’t be judged solely by their red-meat rhetoric. “Politics is a blood sport, but it’s quite something else when they have to face the prospect and the difficulty of governing.”
Whether Reagan could win or not, there's no doubting his relevance in the GOP has waned with the crowd running this time. “The center has disappeared—not many of us left anymore,” Baker concedes. That Reagan could be counted as a centrist is evidence enough of the new Republican Party, which paid homage on Reagan's 100th anniversary of his birth in February but since have spoke little of him.
During the debt ceiling debate, Reagan’s name came up every day, but not from Republicans. It was President Obama who invoked the former president, asking why today’s Republicans couldn’t be more like Reagan, while Democrats dug up a 24-year-old audio tape of Reagan saying he wouldn’t think of defaulting on the nation’s debt.
Four years ago, Republicans fell all over each other genuflecting before the memory of their most popular recent president. This cycle they’ve been more restrained. In last month’s Republican debate, only Newt Gingrich mentioned Reagan’s name; it was the former speaker’s attempt to burnish his governing credentials. In truth, Gingrich was a backbencher during the Reagan years, lobbing bombshells at the White House in addition to Democrats. He had excoriated Reagan for the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 which—shudder—raised taxes. Gingrich accused Reagan of “trying to score a touchdown for liberalism.”
The Republican Party has moved steadily to the right since Reagan left the White House. Just as Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford couldn’t get nominated in Reagan’s Republican Party, Reagan might be the odd man out when the current crop of candidates takes the stage at the Reagan Library on September 7.
The eight candidates debating in the very long shadow of Reagan will pay their obligatory respects to his memory. But with the possible exception of Jon Huntsman, the most liberal and the lowest-polling in the group, none can easily lay claim to the Reagan legacy. “I’m sure Huntsman will try to emphasize he’s the real Reagan heir, recalling that Reagan was flexible and pragmatic and knew how to appeal to Democrats,” says Jack Pitney, professor of government at Claremont-McKenna College.
If Reagan is less relevant today, a lot of it is the passage of time. It has been seven years since he passed from the scene; 17 years since he announced he had Alzheimer’s, and 22 years since he left office. None of the students in Pitney’s classes this fall were born when Reagan was in the White House. The only presidents they remember are George W. Bush and Obama.
Since Bush left the White House, the GOP has lurched further right mainly because of the Tea Party influence but also as a reaction to Obama. The currently president is the antithesis of the gun-toting, real and rural America that is the Tea Party ideal, currently embodied in the latest entrant to the race, Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
On the stump, Perry laments that nearly half of all Americans don’t pay any income tax. Reagan had something to do with that. “Reagan was very proud of the 1986 tax reform which took millions of poor people off the tax rolls,” Pitney says. “For years, Republicans were saying what a great thing this was; now they’re opposed, which is bizarre.”
Noting that the only way for an anti-tax party to fix the situation would be to raise the taxes of all those slackers, Pitney adds, “If I were advising Governor Perry, I would ask him if he really wants to raise taxes on 50 percent of the people.”
Perry was a Democrat during the Reagan administration, and in 1988 managed Al Gore’s campaign in Texas. He’s not alone in being unable to claim ties to Reagan. When Mitt Romney was running for the Senate in Massachusetts against Ted Kennedy, he stressed that he had been an Independent during the Reagan years. Ron Paul ran against Reagan in 1984 as a Libertarian. Michele Bachmann had campaigned for Jimmy Carter, but became a Republican by the time Reagan was in office.
Reagan was a pragmatic politician. As governor of California, he signed a bill that liberalized the state’s abortion laws, and as president he privately railed against what he called “professional conservatives…who want me to jump off the cliff with the flag flying.” He had a Democratic House throughout his presidency, which meant compromise in order to get anything done. “His real skill, he knew how to adjust to the times,” says Scott Reed, who ran Bob Dole’s presidential campaign in 1996. “If he were running today, he would be a different candidate.”
The iconic memory of bipartisanship then was Reagan sitting down after-hours with Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill trading stories and talking about their Irish heritage. It didn’t stop O’Neill from calling out Reagan for trash-talking “welfare queens,” but there was a warmth there that today’s Tea Partiers probably wouldn’t abide—at least judging by their reaction to Speaker John Boehner’s efforts to forge a deficit deal with Obama.
Reagan was a former Democrat, had voted three times for FDR, and he had his own rules of engagement when it came to the other party. Mari Maseng Will, a speechwriter in the White House during Reagan’s first term, remembers the president telling his staff not to attack anyone by name, and not to attack Democrats. The only group that it was okay to assail, she says, was liberals. Reagan probably did more than any other politician to turn “liberal” into a dirty word, but he didn’t poison the well with the opposition the way Obama seems to have done when he takes on the GOP.
Obama has openly admired Reagan, beginning in the 2008 campaign when he told an interviewer that Reagan was a transformational president because his policies changed the direction of the country. The remark angered the Clintons, who saw it in the heat of the primary battle as a thinly veiled slap at their time in the White House. Historians agree that Reagan had a huge impact, and even those, like Obama, who opposed much of what he did, see him as transformational.
Whether a worthy successor will emerge from the current field is open to question. Nancy Reagan, for one, appears to be hedging her bets. She invited Marco Rubio to speak at the Reagan library last month, his first major speech since winning his Florida Senate. A likely contender for the VP spot on the ticket in 2012, Rubio caught the 90-year-old former first lady as she was about to take a tumble. That’s a maneuver Republicans hope he can repeat for the party.
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