Conservatives Are America's Real Terrorists

Give 'Em Hell, Barry!!

2012-01-25T05:05:00.000-08:00

From POLITICO -- January 25, 2012:

Congress makes an Easy Target for Obama

Barack Obama on Tuesday equated partisanship to a lack of patriotism.

By JONATHAN ALLEN and JAKE SHERMAN

Already down, Congress got kicked by President Barack Obama in the last State of the Union of his first term Tuesday night.

Republicans, wracked with worry about a soft agenda and dim prospects for escaping the “do nothing” label, sat fuming. Democrats clearly loved it.

Obama goes after Congress

The takeaway: Congress can’t — or won’t — do anything about its sorry state, even if the gridlock plays directly into the president’s political strategy.

“As long as I’m president, I will work with anyone in this chamber … But I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place,” Obama said early in the speech.

In concluding, he equated partisanship to a lack of patriotism, telling lawmakers that “those of us who have been sent here to serve can learn from the service of our troops.”

In between, Obama all but called the institution corrupt, saying the “deficit of trust” between Washington and the rest of the country is “at least as bad” as that between Main Street and Wall Street.

“Some of this has to do with the corrosive influence of money and politics. So together, let’s take some steps to fix that,” he said. “Send me a bill that bans insider trading by members of Congress, and I will sign it tomorrow. Let’s limited any elected official from owning stocks in industries they impact. Let’s make sure people who bundle campaign contributions for Congress can’t lobby Congress.”

Never mind that it’s already illegal for members of Congress to engage in insider trading or that influence-industry insiders bundled money for Obama’s election. It was a powerful, and largely expected, condemnation of an institution that is suffering through its worst approval ratings since polling companies started measuring public attitudes toward Congress.

His remarks landed like salt in Republicans’ open wounds, following as they did on the president’s controversial decision to make “recess” appointments of a new chairman of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and three members of the National Labor Relations Board when Congress had not agreed to an adjournment resolution.

Republicans know that there’s not much chance of moving an agenda now — particularly when the president sees no down side in attacking an institution that had a 9 percent approval rating in one recent poll.

“These speeches are all usually lots of rhetoric, long on promises, very short on follow through, and so we’ll if he follows through. Republicans, for our part, are prepared to work with him on tax reform, regulatory reform, reducing spending, energy security,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said.

But will those items get done?

“I think it’s going to be hard,” he said.

The tough new tack by Obama — telling Congress he would act “with or without” it — thrilled Democrats, as did the president’s economic message on taxes and benefits for the middle class.

“Newt, Romney were on the spot,” Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) said. “Because he came down for the middle class. Boom.”

He later added, “This is the beginning of the campaign, he just told you what he’s going to do for the next nine months. He’s going to pound the living daylights out of them.”

Mitt Romney -- The Great White Knight -- America's Class Warfare Champion of the Super-Rich

2012-01-18T05:02:00.000-08:00

From The Washington Post -- January 17, 2012

By Ruth Marcus

Mitt Romney’s miserly concern for the poor

“I’m concerned about the poor in this country,” Mitt Romney said the other day. “We have to make sure the safety net is strong and able to help those who can’t help themselves.”

I perked up at those words, because they were something of a departure from his usual stump speech and because they happened to come on a day when I had written about the dire implications of Romney’s proposals for the social safety net.

I don’t question his sincerity. The problem: This fine sentiment doesn’t square with his actual policies.

Consider Romney’s support for the budget plan crafted by Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan and passed by the Republican House. It would cut Medicaid spending by $700 billion over 10 years, reduce food stamps by $127 billion and cut in half the funding of Pell Grants for low-income college students.

As Fox News’s Chris Wallace usefully pointed out in an interview with Romney last month, “You would cut all of these programs, Governor, that people depend on, and a lot more than that.”

Romney, in response, focused on his proposal for Medicaid. He would turn the program over to the states and allow funding to grow at inflation plus 1 percentage point — significantly less than the historical growth of health-care costs.

“By doing that, you save an enormous amount of money,” Romney said. “I happen to believe that states can do a better job caring for their own poor, rooting out the fraud and waste and abuse that exists within those programs.”

Wallace: “But you don’t think, if you cut $700 billion in aid to the states, that some people are going to get hurt?”

Romney: “By cutting welfare spending dramatically, I don’t think we hurt the poor. In the same way, I think cutting Medicaid spending by having it go to the states, run more efficiently with less fraud, I don’t think will hurt the people that depend on that program for their health care.”

Really? Reforming welfare to encourage work was a good idea, but for those who need temporary help, benefits are increasingly inadequate. Adjusting for inflation, benefits are now below the 1996 level in all but two states. And turning the program into a block grant has meant that states, reeling from the impact of the recession, have been unable to respond adequately to increased needs.

That history is hardly reassuring about Romney’s plan to cut hundreds of billions from Medicaid. But the welfare analogy isn’t the only cause for concern. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), analyzing the Ryan cuts, found that states “would face significant challenges in achieving sufficient cost savings through efficiencies to mitigate the loss of federal funding.”

So much for Romney’s mythical world in which huge cuts can be accomplished with zero harm to the poor and disabled.

Instead, according to the CBO, states would face a menu of unappetizing choices. If they did not want to raise taxes or reduce other spending, they would have to choose among cutting already low provider payments; reducing the benefits that the program covers; or throwing people now eligible for help off the program.

The impact of Romney’s approach on the safety net would go far beyond Medicaid. The brutal arithmetic of his stated plan to cap spending at 20 percent of gross domestic product — while, unlike Ryan, increasing defense funding — is that safety-net programs would have to be chopped significantly beyond where even Ryan would take them.

Romney’s tax plan would exacerbate the unfairness. He would continue the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and provide extra breaks that would primarily help the rich. According to a new analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, taxpayers with incomes of $1 million or more would see an average tax cut of $287,000 compared to letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire.

At the same time, Romney would do away with recent increases in the child tax credit and the earned-income tax credit — provisions that help low-income families. As a consequence, between 16 and 20 percent of those with incomes of $50,000 or less would actually see their taxes rise under a President Romney.

In other words, Romney would spend hundreds of billions for a tax cut whose benefits flow overwhelmingly to the wealthiest Americans, even as he would cut even more from programs that help the most vulnerable.

Those skewed priorities are hard to square with Romney’s stated concern, however heartfelt, for the poor. The man from Bain Capital needs to take another look at his figures.

Mitt Romney Wages Class Warfare as a Champion of the Upper Class

2012-01-17T15:45:00.000-08:00

From The Progress Report -- January 17, 2012:

Mitt Romney Probably Pays A Lower Tax Rate Than You Do

Mitt Romney, Tax Loophole Exploiter-in-Chief

Way back in October, we called on Mitt Romney to release his tax returns and introduced you to the Romney Rule — the unfair tax loopholes that Romney both supports and which he personally exploits in order to pay a lower tax rate than millions of middle class Americans.

This is of course the opposite of the Buffett Rule proposed by President Obama: the simple idea that no millionaires should be able to cheat the system in order to pay a lower tax rate than middle class Americans. Romney quickly came out in opposition to the Buffett Rule, dismissing it with his now familiar charge of “class warfare.”

Today, after weeks of pressure from both progressives and his Republican opponents, Romney finally agreed to release just one year’s tax return in April if he is the Republican nominee. He also admitted what we’ve known all along: that he pays a tax rate of around 15 percent — a rate far lower than millions of middle class Americans pay on the wages they earn.

Q: What’s the effective rate you’ve been paying?

ROMNEY: What’s the effective rate I’ve been paying? It’s probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything, because my last 10 years, I’ve, my income comes overwhelmingly from investments made in the past, rather than ordinary income, rather than earned annual income.

How the Romney Rule Works

ThinkProgress Economy Editor Pat Garafalo explains in the Atlantic today why Romney pays such a low rate — and why there’s no economic justification for it:

Managers of private equity firms like Romney are often paid under an arrangement in which they receive both a set fee for their management, as well as a share of the profits that the firm makes for investors. While their management fees are taxed at normal income tax rates, the share of investor gains that go to a private equity manager (called “carried interest”) are treated as capital gains, and thus taxed at a top rate of 15 percent. (Hedge fund managers and partners in real estate ventures also benefit from receiving carried interest.)

The argument for a lower capital gains rate is that it encourages investment. Whether that’s true or not, private equity managers are allowed to pay the capital gains rate on the profits they make managing someone else’s money, not for any risk that they take themselves. Treating carried interest as capital gains is an unjustifiable tax break that needs to be eliminated. [...]

Thanks to a lucrative retirement package, Romney is still making millions from Bain, much of which is likely being taxed as carried interest. (While Romney has refused to make his tax returns public, he’s said that all of his income is taxed at investment rates.) Analysts have estimated that Romney’s tax rate is about 14 percent, lower than that of many middle class families.

Leaving aside the questions over whether Romney and Bain’s modus operandi adds value to the economy, there’s certainly no value added by letting private equity managers treat the paycheck they receive from investors as capital gains: that particular tax loophole just lets very wealthy money managers avoid paying the top tax rate, for no real reason.

In other words, since Romney makes almost of all of his money with money (his quarter billion dollar fortune, to be precise) and enjoys a tax loophole only available to partners in businesses like Bain Capital, he is allowed to pay a much, much lower tax rate than someone making a fraction of his income who is simply paid a wage for the work they do (e.g. teachers, firefighters, and cops). For example, a single filer making $60,000 in wages who didn’t itemize their deductions faced an effective tax rate of 29.5 percent in 2011 — double that of Mitt Romney, who makes millions of dollars a year.

By contrast, when Romney’s father, who was a wealthy corporate CEO, ran for president in 1968 he released 12 years of his tax returns. One contemporaneous press report uncovered today by Lee Fang noted that the elder Romney ”seldom took advantage of tax loopholes to escape his tax obligations.”

Adding Insult to Injury

Romney has already proposed an economic plan that is of, by, and for the wealthiest 1 Percent of Americans, including trillions in tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations paired with tax increases on middle class families and deep cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs and services Americans depend on each day. Last night during the GOP presidential debate, Romney went a step further and called for taxes on the wealthiest Americans to be cut by another ONE-THIRD or more.

Romney then dug the hole deeper this morning during the press conference at which he confirmed his shockingly low tax rate. He stated that almost all of his income is from investments; however, he noted that he has also received fees for giving speeches, adding “but not very much” with a laugh. According to his most recent financial disclosure form, “not very much” turns out to have been more than $370,000 for just the period between February 2010 and February 2011.

IN ONE SENTENCE: Millionaire Mitt Romney uses unfair tax loopholes not available to ordinary Americans to pay a lower tax rate than millions of middle class workers — many of whom will see a tax increase under the Romney plan even as he slashes taxes for the wealthiest Americans and corporations.

Mitt Romney -- the Republicans' Great White Hope -- Is Doomed

2012-01-12T22:58:00.000-08:00

From The Daily Beast -- January 13, 2012

Yes, Romney Could Lose

I just watched the Bain documentary featured below and being broadcast throughout South Carolina by Newt Gingrich's SuperPac in full. It's loaded with out-of-context quotes and heavily biased; it focuses on the specific human suffering of the necessary "creative destruction" of capitalism not its general benefits to the economy. It does so through the voices and stories of ordinary Americans. And, as an emotional bludgeon, it's devastating.

But what makes it so dangerous to Romney, it seems to me, is that the Bain Brahmin didn't just fire thousands of working class people in restructuring and in closing companies. He made a fucking unimaginable fortune doing it. That's the issue. Other Republicans can speak about the need for free markets in a sluggish economy. But with Romney, we have a singular example of someone who made a quarter of a billion dollars by firing the white middle and working class in droves in ways that do not seem designed to promote growth or efficiency, but merely to enrich Bain.

Here's the New York Post, for Pete's sake, making the case last year against the shifty Wall Street games of Bain:

Romney's private equity firm, Bain Capital, bought companies and often increased short-term earnings so those businesses could then borrow enormous amounts of money. That borrowed money was used to pay Bain dividends. Then those businesses needed to maintain that high level of earnings to pay their debts...

* Bain in 1988 put $5 million down to buy Stage Stores, and in the mid-'90s took it public, collecting $100 million from stock offerings. Stage filed for bankruptcy in 2000.

* Bain in 1992 bought American Pad & Paper (AMPAD), investing $5 million, and collected $100 million from dividends. The business filed for bankruptcy in 2000.

* Bain in 1993 invested $60 million when buying GS Industries, and received $65 million from dividends. GS filed for bankruptcy in 2001.

* Bain in 1997 invested $46 million when buying Details, and made $93 million from stock offerings. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2003.

Romney's Bain invested 22 percent of the money it raised from 1987-95 in these five businesses, making a $578 million profit.

Some of the associations in the ad are unfair - but they will resonate emotionally. Many, many people in, say, South Carolina, have lost jobs. That's rough enough. But if Romney comes across as the man who made a fortune off this kind of Wall Street maneuvering, he becomes a symbol and a focus for all the roiling populist discontent out there. When he is responsible for someone losing her house, the contrast with his multiple mansions and private beach gets a little de trop. One ad with one victim could be poison.

Of all the jobs he liquidated, moreover, many are in the American heartland. And his response to the people in this documentary - white working class heartland Americans, the GOP base - is that they are merely envious of his achievements. They don't come off that way in the ad. They come off as bewildered, betrayed and sure that Romney's goal in all this was merely, solely to make money for himself - the kind of money that most Americans cannot even compute.

I simply cannot imagine a worse narrative for a candidate in this climate; or a politician whose skills are singularly incapable of responding to the story in any persuasive way. This ad is powerful. Romney has already seen a drop in South Carolina. I suspect he'll drop some more. And I suspect once the potency of this line of attack is absorbed by the GOP establishment, there will be some full, if concealed, panic.

Mitt Romney, The Great Destroyer of American Jobs

2012-01-07T08:44:00.000-08:00

From The Daily Beast -- January 6, 2012:

New Anti-Romney Video Attacks Bain Capital Work

By Peter J. Boyer

An ex-Romney adviser is unleashing a half-hour attack video blasting Mitt’s work at Bain Capital. A pro-Gingrich super PAC just scooped it up.

The effort to derail Mitt Romney’s presidential quest heightened dramatically on Friday when a super PAC associated with Newt Gingrich outbid all comers for the rights to a scathing 30-minute attack video depicting Romney as a greedy, job-killing corporate raider “more ruthless than Wall Street.”

In a season filled with negative ads and rhetorical crossfire, the striking feature of the film, aside from its mini-documentary length, is its authorship. The film was made by Jason Killian Meath, a former associate of Romney’s top strategists, Stuart Stevens and Russ Schriefer. Meath had worked for the Romney campaign in 2008, creating much of the ad content for that failed effort. He left Stevens and Schriefer’s firm, SSG, in 2010. Meath declined to comment on his project, referring inquiries to the pro-Gingrich PAC Winning Our Future.

“We’re going to release a short, 27-minute film that is well-documented, and tells the real story of Mitt Romney at Bain Capital—and it’s not a pretty story,” says Rick Tyler, an adviser to the Gingrich-supporting PAC.

The video, called When Mitt Romney Came to Town, is a slick production focusing on Romney’s tenure as CEO of Bain Capital, a private investment firm.

The movie begins with a cinematic tableau of Americana, as the narrator intones, “Capitalism made America great. Free markets. Innovation. Hard work. The building blocks of the American dream. But in the wrong hands, some of those dreams can turn into nightmares.”

A shot of an American flag, waving in the breeze is replaced by gathering storm clouds, as the narrator continues: “Wall Street’s corporate raiders made billions of dollars. Their greed was matched only by their willingness to do anything to make millions in profits … nothing spared. Nothing mattered but profits. This film is about one such raider and his firm.”

At that point, a black-and-white photograph of Romney appears on the screen, as the narrator alleges that “Romney took foreign seed money from Latin America” to exploit “dozens of American businesses” and the “thousands of employees that worked there.”

“A story of greed,” the narrator intones. “Playing the system for a quick buck. A group of corporate raiders, led by Mitt Romney. More ruthless than Wall Street. For tens of thousands of Americans, the suffering began when Mitt Romney came to town.”

According to four sources familiar with the project, the film was commissioned by Barry Bennett, a conservative activist who was once chief of staff for Ohio Republican Congresswoman Jean Schmidt. Bennett is now at the Alliance for America’s Future, a Virginia-based group whose principals include Mary Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

When Mitt Romney Came to Town focuses on four case studies of Bain’s acquisitions—a Florida-based company called UniMac, which produced commercial laundry equipment; KayBee Toys; the electronics company DDI; and AmPad, an Indiana-based office-supply producer. The key result of these transactions, the film asserts, was “spectacular returns” for Bain through “stripping American businesses of assets, selling everything to the highest bidder, and often killing jobs for big financial rewards.”

The Tea Party, Rick Santorum and the Push for American Sexual Slavery

2012-01-07T06:07:00.000-08:00

From The Daily Beast -- January 6, 2012:

Rick Santorum’s Idea of Freedom: Enforcing Catholic Sexual Morality

By Michelle Goldberg

The former senator’s Iowa boost has thrown into high relief his hunger for more government control of Americans’ lives—on sex, divorce abortion, birth control—and the real force behind the Tea Party: the religious right.

Speaking to NPR in 2005, Rick Santorum criticized fellow Republicans who were disinclined to meddle in Americans’ private lives. “They took a more Goldwaterish libertarian point of view when it comes to the interaction of government in people’s lives, and I think to the detriment of the country,” he said. Santorum, by contrast, has always been resolutely anti-individualist, denouncing, in another interview, “this whole idea of personal autonomy.”

It’s long been clear that a large part of the Tea Party was simply the religious right rebranded. For all the movement’s talk of liberty, many in it hungered for more government control of the private lives of Americans—especially American women. Santorum’s rise, though, has thrown the movement’s strain of social authoritarianism into especially high relief. According to a CNN entrance poll, he won a plurality of Iowa caucus-goers who described themselves as strong supporters of the Tea Party movement, 30 percent, compared to 17 percent for Newt Gingrich and 16 percent for Ron Paul. This is revealing, and not just because Santorum is extremely socially conservative—after all, Paul is too. What makes Santorum unique is his desire to use government power to enforce his version of Catholic sexual morality.

This goes far beyond abortion. “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country,” he said last year in a video interview with the conservative blog Caffeinated Thoughts. “Many in the Christian faith have said, ‘Well, that’s OK, contraception is OK.’ It’s not OK. It’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” Included in this is birth control used by married couples. Sex, he said, is “supposed to be for purposes that are yes, conjugal and unitive, but also procreative.” Most presidents don’t talk about such things, he said, but “these are important public policy issues. They have profound impact on the health of our society.”

Santorum objects to the notion that “you have the right to consensual sex within your home.”

Santorum also wants the government to make it more difficult for people to get divorced. “Divorce is simply far too easy to get in this country,” he wrote in his 2005 book, It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good. “States should put in braking mechanisms for couples who have children under the age of 18. This means a mandatory waiting period and mandatory counseling before a divorce is granted.”

He has argued that the government should be able to prohibit both gay sex and adultery. In 2003, when the Supreme Court struck down Texas’s anti-sodomy law in Lawrence v. Texas, he told the Associated Press that such laws are “there for a purpose. Because, again, I would argue, they undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family. And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does.”

This says it all: Santorum objects to the notion that “you have the right to consensual sex within your home.” By elevating a person so hostile to individual rights, Iowa voters have actually done us all a weird sort of favor. They’ve exposed, in the starkest possible way, what a large part of the conservative movement means by freedom. It’s not the freedom to live as one chooses. It’s the freedom to impose one’s morality on others.

The Monster Disaster Called Rick Santorum

2012-01-05T21:56:00.000-08:00

From The Progress report -- January 5, 2012:

Rick Santorum’s Most Outrageous Campaign Moments

Rising GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum is presenting himself to national audiences as a common sense conservative senator from a Democratic state with both economic and national security acumen. A late surge in Iowa led the former Pennsylvania senator to a near-win in that state’s caucuses and gave his campaign momentum ahead of next Tuesday’s New Hampshire GOP primary.

But on the road to his second-place finish, Santorum laid out some extreme positions on health, economic, and social policies. His conservative stances may have won him endorsements from anti-gay Iowa leader Bob Vander Plaats and other groups, but here are 12 outrageous claims that Santorum has made on the campaign trail that you should know about:

1) ANNUL ALL SAME-SEX MARRIAGES: Arguing that gay relationships “destabilize” society, Santorum wouldn’t offer any legal protections to gay relationships and has pledged to annul all same-sex marriages if elected president. During his 99-country tour of Iowa, Santorum frequently compared same-sex relationships to inanimate objects like trees, basketballs, beer, and paper towels and even tried to blame the economic crisis on gay people. As Santorum explained back in August, religious people have a constitutional right to discriminate against gays: “We have a right the Constitution of religious liberty but now the courts have created a super-right that’s above a right that’s actually in the Constitution, and that’s of sexual liberty. And I think that’s a wrong, that’s a destructive element.”

2) ‘I’M FOR INCOME INEQUALITY’: “They talk about income inequality. I’m for income inequality,” Santorum said during an event in Pella, Iowa in December. “I think some people should make more than other people, because some people work harder and have better ideas and take more risk, and they should be rewarded for it. I have no problem with income inequality.”

3) CONTRACEPTION IS ‘A LICENSE TO DO THINGS’: Santorum has pledged to repeal all federal funding for contraception and allow the states to outlaw birth control, insisting that “it’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

4) GAY SOLDIERS ‘CAUSE PROBLEMS FOR PEOPLE LIVING IN CLOSE QUARTERS’: During an appearance on Fox News Sunday in October, Santorum defended his support for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell by arguing that gay soldiers would disrupt the military because “they’re in close quarters, they live with people, they obviously shower with people.” He also suggested that “there are people who were gay and lived the gay lifestyle and aren’t anymore.”

5) OBAMA SHOULD OPPOSE ABORTION BECAUSE HE’S BLACK: During an appearance on Christian television in January, Santorum said he was surprised that President Obama didn’t know when life began — given his skin color. “I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say ‘now we are going to decide who are people and who are not people,” he explained.

6) WE DON’T NEED FOOD STAMPS BECAUSE OBESITY RATES ARE SO HIGH: Speaking in Le Mars, Iowa in December, Santorum promised to significantly reduce federal funding for food stamps, arguing that the nation’s increasing obesity rates render the program unnecessary.

7) ABORTION EXCEPTIONS TO PROTECT WOMEN’S HEALTH ARE ‘PHONY’: While discussing his track record as a champion of the partial birth abortion ban in June, Santorum dismissed exceptions other senators wanted to carve out to protect the life and health of mothers, calling such exceptions “phony.” “They wanted a health exception, which of course is a phony exception which would make the ban ineffective,” he said.

8) HEALTH REFORM WILL KILL MY CHILD: Santorum, who claims that Obamacare motivated him to run for president, told reporters in April that his daughter Bella — who was born with a genetic abnormality — wouldn’t survive in a country with “socialized medicine.” “Children like Bella are not given the treatment that other children are given.”

9) UNINSURED AMERICANS SHOULD SPEND LESS ON CELL-PHONE BILLS: During a meeting with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register in August, Santorum said that people who can’t afford health care should stop whining about the high costs of medical treatments and medications and spend less on non essentials. Answering a question about the uninsured, Santorum explained that health care, like a car, is a luxury resource that is rationed by society and recalled the story of a woman who said she was spending $200 a month on life-saving prescriptions. Santorum told her to stop complaining and instead lower her cable and cell phone bills.

10) INSURERS SHOULD DISCRIMINATE AGAINST PEOPLE WITH PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS: Santorum sounded like a representative from the health insurance industry when he addressed a small group of high school students in Merrimack, New Hampshire in December. The former Pennsylvania senator not only defended insurers for denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, he also argued that individuals who are sick should pay higher premiums because they cost more money to insure. And just this morning, he mocked President Obama for extending health care to “everyone.”

11) HIS FAVORITE JUSTICE THINKS CHILD LABOR LAWS ARE UNCONSTITUTIONAL: At a recent GOP debate, Santorum identified Justice Clarence Thomas as his favorite current member of the Supreme Court, even though Thomas believes that pretty much everything violates the Constitution. Thomas has repeatedly advocated a twisted reading of the Constitution that would invalidate a long list of essential laws, including the federal ban on workplace discrimination, similar laws protecting older Americans and Americans with disabilities, the national minimum wage, national child labor laws, and the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters.

12) MUSLIMS SHOULD BE PROFILED: During the CNN national security debate in November, Santorum endorsed the idea of profiling Muslims to increase airport security. “Obviously, Muslims would be someone you’d look at,” he told the debate’s moderator Wolf Blitzer. But his proposed profiling for the sake of national security follows a pattern of his holding anti-Muslim beliefs.

Mitt Romney and the Death of The American Dream

2012-01-04T05:52:00.000-08:00

From The Washington Post -- January 3, 2012:

By Harold Meyerson

No longer the land of opportunity

“Over the past three years, Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an Entitlement Society,” Mitt Romney wrote in USA Today last month. The coming election, Romney told Wall Street Journal editors last month, will be “a very simple choice” between Obama’s “European social democratic” vision and “a merit-based opportunity society — an American-style society — where people earn their rewards based on their education, their work, their willingness to take risks and their dreams.”

Romney’s assertions are the centerpiece of his, and his party’s, critique not just of Obama but of American liberalism generally. But they fail to explain how and why the American economy has declined the past few decades — in good part because they betray no awareness that Europe’s social democracies now fit the description of “merit-based opportunity societies” much more than ours does.

The best way to measure a nation’s merit-based status is to look at its intergenerational economic mobility: Do children move up and down the economic ladder based on their own abilities, or does their economic standing simply replicate their parents’? Sadly, as the American middle class has thinned out over recent decades, the idea of America as the land of opportunity has become a farce. As a paper by Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution has shown, sons’ earnings approximate those of their fathers about three times more frequently in the United States than they do in Denmark, Norway and Finland, and about 11 / 2 times more frequently than they do in Germany. The European social democracies — where taxes, entitlements and the rate of unionization greatly exceed America’s — are demonstrably more merit-based than the United States.

That’s hardly the only measure by which Europe’s social democracies demonstrate more dynamism than our increasingly sclerotic plutocracy. Unemployment rates in Northern European nations — as of October, Germany’s unemployment rate was 6.5 percent; the Netherlands, 4.8 percent; Sweden 7.4 percent — are substantially lower than ours (9 percent then). Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Germany in particular have sizable trade surpluses, while the United States runs the largest trade deficits in human history.

There are, of course, a multitude of reasons the nations of Northern Europe are outperforming us. But if entitlements and social democracy were anywhere near the impediments to enterprise that Romney claims, Germany would hardly be the most successful economy in the advanced industrial world, with those of Scandinavia close behind.

The secrets of social democracy’s successes are in plain view. In Scandinavia, government commitment to worker retraining and job relocation mean that there is no major political pressure to keep failing firms in business; it’s a policy that favors innovative start-ups. In Germany, management and unions cooperate to upgrade their products and their processes — partly because corporate boards consist of equal numbers of management and worker representatives. Germany’s surge in exports may be partly attributable to its union workers agreeing to hold their wages flat (at levels still well above those of their U.S. counterparts). But their workers’ willingness to sacrifice in order to stay competitive is surely increased by the fact that their CEOs on average make just 11 times as much as their workers. In the United States, chief executives make roughly 200 to 300 times (choose your survey) as much as their average employees’ salary.

Which brings us back to Romney’s characterization of our country as a merit-based society and his failure to notice the huge changes in economic rewards over the past three decades. During the 30 years after World War II, the average American family’s income doubled, while chief executives’ income was restrained, increasing by less than 1 percent annually, according to a 2010 paper by economists Carola Frydman and Raven Saks. Beginning around 1980, however, as unions were smashed, industry moved offshore and executive pay skyrocketed, the incomes of most Americans began to flatten or decline, while financiers and corporate leaders were able to claim more and more of the nation’s income for themselves.

Corporate leaders have been rewarded with huge payouts even when their corporation’s performance has been disappointing. Conversely, millions of Americans have maintained or upgraded their skills yet seen their jobs shipped abroad or downgraded. Is this a description of a merit-based society? How does it compare with that of mid-century America, when the rewards for work were distributed more broadly?

Romney and his Bain Capital buddies may view their wealth as the just rewards endemic to successful people in a merit-based society. But why are so few Americans sharing in those rewards today while so many Americans shared in them 40 years ago? Are most Americans no longer meritorious? Or has our country ceased to reward any but the rich and powerful?

How Congressional Republicans Try to Bamboozle Ordinary Americans

2012-01-02T20:35:00.000-08:00

From The New York Times -- January 1, 2012:

Nobody Understands Debt

By PAUL KRUGMAN

In 2011, as in 2010, America was in a technical recovery but continued to suffer from disastrously high unemployment. And through most of 2011, as in 2010, almost all the conversation in Washington was about something else: the allegedly urgent issue of reducing the budget deficit.

This misplaced focus said a lot about our political culture, in particular about how disconnected Congress is from the suffering of ordinary Americans. But it also revealed something else: when people in D.C. talk about deficits and debt, by and large they have no idea what they’re talking about — and the people who talk the most understand the least.

Perhaps most obviously, the economic “experts” on whom much of Congress relies have been repeatedly, utterly wrong about the short-run effects of budget deficits. People who get their economic analysis from the likes of the Heritage Foundation have been waiting ever since President Obama took office for budget deficits to send interest rates soaring. Any day now!

And while they’ve been waiting, those rates have dropped to historical lows. You might think that this would make politicians question their choice of experts — that is, you might think that if you didn’t know anything about our postmodern, fact-free politics.

But Washington isn’t just confused about the short run; it’s also confused about the long run. For while debt can be a problem, the way our politicians and pundits think about debt is all wrong, and exaggerates the problem’s size.

Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.

This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.

First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.

Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.

This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers, such as all the people who bought savings bonds. So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history.

But isn’t this time different? Not as much as you think.

It’s true that foreigners now hold large claims on the United States, including a fair amount of government debt. But every dollar’s worth of foreign claims on America is matched by 89 cents’ worth of U.S. claims on foreigners. And because foreigners tend to put their U.S. investments into safe, low-yield assets, America actually earns more from its assets abroad than it pays to foreign investors. If your image is of a nation that’s already deep in hock to the Chinese, you’ve been misinformed. Nor are we heading rapidly in that direction.

Now, the fact that federal debt isn’t at all like a mortgage on America’s future doesn’t mean that the debt is harmless. Taxes must be levied to pay the interest, and you don’t have to be a right-wing ideologue to concede that taxes impose some cost on the economy, if nothing else by causing a diversion of resources away from productive activities into tax avoidance and evasion. But these costs are a lot less dramatic than the analogy with an over-indebted family might suggest.

And that’s why nations with stable, responsible governments — that is, governments that are willing to impose modestly higher taxes when the situation warrants it — have historically been able to live with much higher levels of debt than today’s conventional wisdom would lead you to believe. Britain, in particular, has had debt exceeding 100 percent of G.D.P. for 81 of the last 170 years. When Keynes was writing about the need to spend your way out of a depression, Britain was deeper in debt than any advanced nation today, with the exception of Japan.

Of course, America, with its rabidly antitax conservative movement, may not have a government that is responsible in this sense. But in that case the fault lies not in our debt, but in ourselves.

So yes, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way.

Republicans are Willing to Fight to the Death on Behalf of the Top 1%

2011-12-23T07:13:00.000-08:00

From The Washington Post -- December 23, 2011:

Dems win one as GOP Caves

By Greg Sargent

A GOP leadership aide confirms that a deal has been reached with Senate Dems under which Republicans will allow a vote on the Senate payroll tax cut extension bill.

Under the agreement, the Senate bill will get new language ensuring that “small businesses are protected from the costly new reporting requirements in the Senate bill,” the aide says. And Reid will appoint conferees for talks to begin on a year long extension.

This appears to be the main thing Republicans gained in exchange for agreeing to support the bill. Reid’s agreement to appoint
“conferees” isn’t materially any different from his previous willingness to negotiate a deal on the long term extension after the shorter term one passed. No fixed deadline was set for those talks to begin.

Now Boehner has to take the agreement to his caucus. While that didn’t go too well last time around, he’s allowing a vote on it, and only around two dozen Republicans have to support the extension for it to pass, presuming it will get overwhelming Dem support. The bill may pass with a huge majority of House Dems supporting it, while a minority of Republicans back it. What that means for Boehner’s speakership remains to be seen.

This is a very significant victory for Obama and Dems, and it stands as an all too rare example of what can happen when they draw hard lines and refuse to budge, secure in the knowledge that the public is on their side. That said, a few caveats are necessary. First, Dems already made significant concessions just to get to this point: They dropped the millionaire surtax (which had very broad public support) and agreed to an expedited decision on the Keystone XL pipeline (though it remains unclear what this means in practice, both substantively and politically).

Second, this tough stand by Dems was enabled by a unique turn of events. Either through a failure of communication among GOP leaders or a bad misjudgment of sentiment in the House GOP caucus, a bizarre situation developed which gave Dems all the leverage and left the House GOP with none. This upended the dynamic we’ve seen for the last year, in which Dems had regularly been placed on the defensive and Republicans held much of the leverage, due to their apparent willingness to flirt with true disaster in order to get the concessions they were demanding. In this case, the Senate passed the extension with overwhelming bipartisan support — putting virtually every GOP Senator on record in favor of the proposal, before they went home for the holidays — even as the House GOP leadership was confronted with a rebellion in its caucus that suddenly left the House GOP isolated. This strange turn made it far easier for Obama and Dems to drive a wedge among Republicans and ensured that pressure on House Republicans would only mount from within their own party.

Third, this is the only piece of Obama’s jobs plan that Dems have been able to pressure Republicans into supporting. As a result, the basic overall dynamic may remain unchanged: A bad economy next year; Congressional gridlock; rising public disenchantment with government; and an incumbent running for reelection after failing to prevail on Congress to pass many of his major proposals to fix the economy. And forth, on the payroll tax cut itself, there’s a whole new set of talks set for January; Dems will be facing a more unified GOP and will not enjoy the leverage they did this time around. While the coming standoff will be good election year politics for Dems, they will likely have to make some concessions that will not be fun for liberals to swallow.

But still, for Dems and Obama, it’s not a bad way to end 2011. It’s a big win. And its overall storyline dovetails perfectly with the message about the GOP’s true priorities — and the Dems’ willingness to fight for the middle class against Republicans who place the interests of the wealthy first — that Dems had been hoping to take into next year.

Is Obama Headed for a Landslide?

2011-12-14T07:08:00.000-08:00

From The Daily Beast -- December 13, 2011:

Michael Tomasky: Could Obama Be Headed for a Landslide?

Obama’s approval rating is soft, but new polls of South Carolina and Florida show him ahead of Gingrich and Romney. Michael Tomasky asks: could the GOP be headed for disaster?

How can Barack Obama, as this new NBC/Marist poll has it, be beating Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney in South Carolina, of all places? The leads are narrow—it’s just 45-42 over Romney and 46-42 over Gingrich. But still, this is South Carolina, the home state of a senator (Lindsey Graham) who, just this past Sunday on Meet the Press, was talking nullification of federal laws in the shameful style that is his state’s benighted tradition. Is it conceivable that 10 months and three weeks from now, Obama could actually win the state? If it happens, we will know that the Republicans are headed off the cliff. And that is precisely where we should all hope they go.

Everyone wants sanity and civility restored to our politics. Some moderate Democrats and a smattering of Republicans have this fantasy that a centrist third party will do it. Nonsense. As I’ve written before, all a centrist third party will accomplish is ensure the election of the right-wing candidate. The only thing that might bring back sanity and civility is the destruction of the current GOP. If Republicans wake up next Nov. 7 to see that their extremist-obstructionist posture of the last four years has only reelected a president who started the year below 50 percent (as he will) and whom they should have been able to beat, then they might finally return to earth.

Nothing would say that the American people thought Republicans had vacated our planet like losing South Carolina. Everything was going gangbusters for the GOP there recently, even more than usual. The last remaining Democratic federal-level officials were all wiped out, except for James Clyburn, the congressman who represents the one majority-black district. The Democrats’ last Senate candidate was a laughingstock. And the Palmetto State had this hot new governor, Nikki Haley: right wing; a Sikh, of all improbable things (by birth—she's a fervent Christian now); a heavyweight endorsee of Sarah Palin; and a rising star.

Now? Well, the Democrats aren’t going to take over state politics anytime soon. But Haley’s star is very much on the wane. Her approval rating in the state, 36 percent, is 8 points lower than Obama’s. A state agency of her administration—get this—voted to grant Savannah, Ga., the right to deepen its port channels, thereby potentially putting the port of Savannah in a position to take business away in the future from the port of Charleston. Haley’s appointees to the board voted with Georgia.

In a new NBC/Marist poll, Obama is beating Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney in South Carolina.

There are various allegations flying about. But on the central question of why the appointees of a governor of South Carolina would side with Georgia’s interests and against their own state’s, one South Carolina politics website, linked to above, has this to say: “According to our sources, moneyed Georgia interests with connections to the Port of Savannah threw a big fundraiser for Haley in Atlanta last month. Also, our sources say that the chairman of the Georgia Ports Authority—a major GOP donor who will select speakers for next year’s Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida—has been negotiating with Haley and her political consultant to land the governor a coveted prime time speaking gig at the event.”

Ten months and three weeks is a long, long time. But today’s poll suggests that a wipeout is not unimaginable—by a president whose anemic approval rating is just 44 percent!
Haley is sinking like a stone. Meanwhile, South Carolina Republicans surely know deep down that Gingrich is unelectable, and they find Romney unpalatable. The state’s black voters, about 30 percent of the total, have no such reservations about the Democratic candidate. And his 45 or 46 percent in the new poll suggests he’s getting some white support, too—more than he got in 2008, arguably, when he won just under 45 percent of the vote against John McCain.

OK. Realistically, South Carolina is a reach. But nobody cares about South Carolina, really—it is assumed to be in the red column just as Massachusetts is assumed to be in the blue. But now let’s look at the Florida numbers from the NBC/Marist poll. There Obama is beating both Romney and Gingrich by outside the margin of error. He leads Romney 48-41 and Gingrich 51-39.

Again, all politics is local. Republican Rick Scott is the least popular governor in the United States—right now at 26 percent and still sinking. Scott and Haley are prime examples of governors who were supposed to show a new and better way, with politics forged in the cauldron of Tea Party fervor about an absence of accountability, and so on. But these politicians have turned out to be just like all the old ones, except less competent. And if Obama holds Florida, he can afford to lose—take note of this list—Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, Nevada, New Mexico, and either Michigan or Pennsylvania, and still rack up a winning 270 electoral votes. (Here, go click the states yourself.) But of course, if he’s winning Florida, he’s likely not losing any of those other states, with the exception of Indiana. Indeed, if he’s winning Florida by around double digits, he’s winning Missouri, Arizona, and maybe Georgia (yes, even—I’d say especially—against Gingrich).

Ten months and three weeks is a long, long time. But today’s poll suggests that a wipeout of such proportions is not unimaginable. By a president whose anemic approval rating is just 44 percent! But I am not here to say the GOP had better grow up fast. Quite the contrary. If this tantrum lasts through the election, and if 2012 is for the Republicans what 1984 was for the Democrats, then finally our polity stands a chance of functioning again. The Tea Party will be dead and buried. Grover Norquist’s vise lock on the GOP will loosen. Someone will start a centrist Republican Leadership Council, just as people started the centrist DLC back in 1985. A certain number of elected Republicans will understand that being the Party of No didn’t get them much of anywhere. So this poll should not be a wake-up call for Republican voters. Hit the snooze button, folks, and keep fuming away.

Republicans Poropose Billions in Budget-Busting Tax Cuts for the Top 1% and Higher Taxes for the Remaining 99%

2011-12-13T21:30:00.000-08:00

From The Progress Report -- December 13, 2011:

While Mitt Romney’s plan economic plan — a windfall for the 1 Percent paid for by the 99 Percent — would provide $6.6 TRILLION in budget-busting tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and corporations, Newt Gingrich’s plan far outdoes him on both scores:

The average millionaire would get a whopping $615,689 annual tax cut.

Those in the wealthiest top 0.1 percent would receive an annual tax cut of more than $2 MILLION each — on top of what they’re already getting from the Bush tax cuts.

Millionaires would pay a lower tax rate than middle class families making $40-50,000 a year.

In 2015, the tax giveaway to millionaires and billionaire alone would be about the same size as the entire Medicare budget under the Paul Ryan GOP budget plan.

In the best year of his plan, 2015, the deficit would be a whopping $1.2 TRILLION — even after taking into account the draconian spending cuts imposed by the Paul Ryan GOP budget plan. The publicly held debt would double by 2019 and triple by 2024.

IN ONE SENTENCE: In the race to deliver trillions in tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, Newt Gingrich is the winner in a landslide.

Congressional Al Quaida Republicans Continue Their War Against America, Cutting Heating Aid to the Poor and Not Raising taxes on the Top 1%

2011-12-11T17:08:00.000-08:00

From The Daily Beast -- Dec 11, 2011:

Northeast states cut heating aid to poor

By ANDREW MIGA, Associated Press

Cuts in heating aid may leave a lot of poor people out in the cold. AP correspondent Shirley Smith reports.

AP correspondent Shirley Smith reports several Northeast states have reduced heating aid benefits to families as Congress considers slicing more than $1 billion out of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

AP correspondent Shirley Smith reports thousands of poor people across the Northeast are bracing for a difficult winter with substantially less home heating aid coming from the federal government.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Mary Power is 92 and worried about surviving another frigid New England winter because deep cuts in federal home heating assistance benefits mean she probably can't afford enough heating oil to stay warm.

She lives in a drafty trailer in Boston's West Roxbury neighborhood and gets by on $11,148 a year in pension and Social Security benefits. Her heating aid help this year will drop from $1,035 to $685. With rising heating oil prices, it probably will cost her more than $3,000 for enough oil to keep warm unless she turns her thermostat down to 60 degrees, as she plans.

"I will just have to crawl into bed with the covers over me and stay there," said Power, a widow who worked as a cashier and waitress until she was 80. "I will do what I have to do."

Thousands of poor people across the Northeast are bracing for a difficult winter with substantially less home heating aid coming from the federal government.

"They're playing Russian roulette with people's lives," said John Drew, who heads Action for Boston Community Development, Inc., which provides aid to low-income residents in Massachusetts.

The issue could flare just as New Hampshire votes in the Republican presidential primary.

Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, said she hopes the candidates will take up the region's heating aid crunch because it underscores how badly the country needs a comprehensive energy policy.

Several Northeast states already have reduced heating aid benefits to families as Congress considers cutting more than $1 billion from last year's $4.7 billion Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program that served nearly 9 million households.

Families in New England, where the winters are long and cold and people rely heavily on costly oil heat, are expected to be especially hard hit. Many poor and elderly people on fixed incomes struggle with rising heating bills that can run into thousands of dollars. That can force them to cut back on other necessities like food or medicine.

"The winter of 2011-12 could be memorable for the misery and suffering of thousands of frigid households," New Hampshire's Concord Monitor newspaper said in an editorial. "Heating oil prices are expected to hit record highs, and federal fuel assistance may reach a record low for recent years."

Higher home heating oil prices and more families seeking aid due to the sour economy are straining resources. There's a 10 percent surge in new applicants in Boston, Drew said.

"Our whole program could hit a rock soon," said Mark Wolfe of the National Energy Assistance Directors' Association.

Families can expect to pay, on average, about $3,300 to heat a home with oil this winter in New England, Wolfe said. That's about $500 more than last winter. About half of the region's homes use oil heat.

Congress, which is locked in a bitter battle over reducing spending, still must decide how much money to give the program for the budget year that began Oct. 1.

In fall 2008, amid concerns about rising fuel prices, the government nearly doubled fuel assistance, releasing $5.1 billion to states for the following winter.

But last February, President Barack Obama proposed cutting the program nearly in half, calling for about $2.5 billion. The House is considering $3.4 billion for fuel assistance, while the Senate reviews a $3.6 billion proposal.

Snowe, along with Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., are pushing for $4.7 billion, last year's funding level, but they face long odds.

The government has given an initial round of funding, $1.7 billion, to the states.

In Maine, one of the coldest states, the average benefit has been reduced by about $500. The state's average benefit last winter was about $800 among 63,842 households served. The average income of recipients was $16,757. About 80 percent of Maine households use oil heat.

"It's a very serious situation," Dale McCormick, director of MaineHousing, a state agency that administers heating aid, said. "We can't send out money we don't have."

That view is shared by home heat aid advocates across New England and into New York and Pennsylvania. Most of those states have cut benefits. New Hampshire has tightened eligibility requirements.

Vermont's average benefit was cut from $866 to $474. New York's maximum benefit this year is $500, down from $700 last winter. Pennsylvania's minimum benefit is dropping from $300 last year to $100, Wolfe said.

"We have a lot of terrified people who can't see how they are going to survive," said Drew.

Wendi Smith Gives Us a True Picture of Barack Obama As Opposed to the Relentless Barrage of Lying Conservative Slimeball Smears

2011-12-06T16:27:00.000-08:00

Charles --

My name is Wendi, and about a month ago, I had dinner with President Obama.

It was one of the most significant experiences of my life.

It all happened because I responded to a "Dinner with Barack" email in my inbox. I was planning on making a donation anyway, so I thought I might as well do it now.

When I got the call, I couldn't believe it -- and when I flew out to D.C. for the dinner, I really couldn't believe it. I'm just one of more than a million grassroots supporters of this campaign. But a few hours later there I was.

I never imagined that I would sit down for a conversation, let alone a meal, with the President of the United States.

If you've thought about entering but haven't taken the chance yet, I urge you to do so now. You never know what might happen.

And I hear the First Lady is going to be there for this one, too ... very cool.

I've supported Barack Obama for a long time, and in 2008, I phone banked and canvassed for him near my hometown of Corydon, Indiana.

To be able to talk to him in person, to connect with him across the dinner table, was very special.

I told him about my son and his college loans, my work as an artist, and asked him about public education -- I could tell that he was genuinely listening to each of us, even though I'm sure he had a lot going on that day, and his own family back at the White House.

When I got back home, I told my husband and friends that the President was exactly the man we all thought he was: modest, genuine, engaged, and very caring.

It's a memory I will cherish for the rest of my life. I'm so glad I decided to enter.

Wendi Smith

Real American Values Vs. The Phony, Un-American Values of So-Called "Conservatives" (Destructionists)

2011-12-06T14:31:00.000-08:00

From The Progress Report -- December 5, 2011:

A Fair Shot v. You’re-On-Your-Own Economics

A Truly American Idea: An Economy That Works For Everyone

“I hold that while man exists it is his duty to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating mankind.”

“The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need to is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise. We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows.”

President Obama gave a major speech on the economy and economic inequality today, but those aren’t his words. They are the words of two Republican presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, respectively.

Today’s speech by the president paid particular homage to Roosevelt’s famous 1910 “New Nationalism” speech, which like President Obama’s speech today was also delivered in Osawatomie, Kansas. In his speech, Roosevelt attacked the power of corporate special interests and the wealthy few and called for a Square Deal for everyone. Today, President Obama laid out his own vision of a fair shot and an America with economy that works for everyone, just as it did in the past when “hard work paid off, responsibility was rewarded, and anyone could make it if they tried — no matter who you were, where you came from, or how you started out.”

What Conservatives Believe In: You’re-On-Your-Own Economics

“Their philosophy is simple: we are better off when everyone is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.”

“Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, there’s been a certain crowd in Washington for the last few decades who respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If only we cut more regulations and cut more taxes – especially for the wealthy – our economy will grow stronger. Sure, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everyone else. And even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, they argue, that’s the price of liberty.”

“It’s a simple theory – one that speaks to our rugged individualism and healthy skepticism of too much government. It fits well on a bumper sticker. Here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It’s never worked. It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible post-war boom of the 50s and 60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade.”

What Progressives Believe In: An Economy That Works For Everyone

“We are greater together than we are on our own. I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, and when everyone plays by the same rules. Those aren’t Democratic or Republican values; 1% values or 99% values. They’re American values, and we have to reclaim them.”

“Our success has never just been about survival of the fittest. It’s been about building a nation where we’re all better off. We pull together, we pitch in, and we do our part, believing that hard work will pay off; that responsibility will be rewarded; and that our children will inherit a nation where those values live on.”

FACTS: America Isn’t Supposed to Work for the Top 1 Percent Alone

The top 1 percent of Americans own 40 percent of our country’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent owns only 7 percent.

The richest 1 percent earned $1 out of every $4 in 2007. Thirty years earlier the richest only made one out of every $11.
The top 1 percent is taking in more of the nation’s income than at any time since the 1920s.

The average income in the top .01 percent is now $27 MILLION.
A typical CEO used to earn 30 times more than his or her workers now earns 110 times more.

Millionaires are making more money and paying fewer taxes – their taxes declined from about 31 percent in 1995 to about 22 percent in 2009.
One in four millionaires pays a lower tax rate than 10 MILLION middle-class Americans.

Tax rates for the richest 400 Americans were sliced in half as their income quadrupled. Now they’re paying just 16.6 percent.
Nearly 1,500 millionaires paid NO income taxes in 2009.

FACTS: When the Economy Isn’t Working for Everyone, It’s Not Working

Fourteen million Americans are unemployed.
Nearly one in two young adults are not employed. This is the lowest rate since the end of World War II.

Corporations are sitting on $2 trillion in cash—more cash than at any time in nearly a half century—instead of hiring more employees.
While the richest 1 percent saw their incomes triple between 1974 and 2007, most Americans’ incomes didn’t grow at all.

The bottom 90 percent are responsible for paying 73 percent of all credit card and mortgage debt.
One in four homeowners are underwater, meaning they owe more on their mortgage than their house is worth.

College tuition and fees increased 274.7 percent from 1990 to 2009. That’s faster than any other goods or services besides cigarettes.

Almost one in four American children are growing up in poverty.

In Short

“This isn’t about class warfare. This is about the nation’s welfare. It’s about making choices that benefit not just the people who’ve done fantastically well over the last few decades, but that benefits the middle class, and those fighting to get to the middle class, and the economy as a whole.”

And Finally…

From Teddy Roosevelt’s 1910 New Nationalism speech:

“If that remark was original with me, I should be even more strongly denounced as a Communist agitator than I shall be anyhow. It is Lincoln’s. I am only quoting it; and that is one side; that is the side the capitalist should hear. Now, let the working man hear his side.”

From President Obama’s speech today, a passage which elicited knowing laughter from the audience:

“For this, Roosevelt was called a radical, a socialist, even a communist. But today, we are a richer nation and a stronger democracy because of what he fought for in his last campaign: an eight hour work day and a minimum wage for women; insurance for the unemployed, the elderly, and those with disabilities; political reform and a progressive income tax.”

Republicans are Hired Guns -- Hired by the Top 1% to Destroy Most Other Americans

2011-12-03T20:35:00.000-08:00

From Democracy For America -- December 3, 2011:

Republicans only care about one thing -- tax cuts. It's the only thing they talk about.

When Americans demand jobs -- Republicans say "tax cuts."

When Democrats take action on education, healthcare and job creation -- Republicans say "tax cuts."

When people demand Wall Street be held accountable for wrecking the economy -- Republicans say "tax cuts."

Republicans are obsessed with cutting taxes, but now that Democrats have put forward a payroll tax cut that will put real money in the pockets of working Americans, Republicans say "No!"

Republicans are hypocrites that only care about lining the pockets of their big-money friends and it's time we called them out for it.

We're demanding answers. Click here to ask Republicans in Congress -- Why do you hate tax cuts for working families?

Republicans have been getting a free pass on this too for too long. It's time that we stand up and called them out for propping up the super rich while pushing working families down.

The 1% Are Not "Job Creators" -- They Are Parasites

2011-12-01T21:42:00.000-08:00

From The Progress Report -- December 1, 2011:

YOU Have The GOP On The Run

By ThinkProgress War Room

Back on Their Heels After the 99 Percent Fight Back

What a difference two and a half months makes. The 99 Percent movement is now part of our culture, is changing the narrative, and is here to stay. The New York Times looked at just one example of the impact the movement is having:

Protesters have succeeded in implanting “We are the 99 percent,” referring to the vast majority of Americans (and its implied opposite, “You are the one percent” referring to the tiny proportion of Americans with a vastly disproportionate share of wealth), into the cultural and political lexicon. [...]

Perhaps most important for the movement, there was a sevenfold increase in Google searches for the term “99 percent” between September and October and a spike in news stories about income inequality throughout the fall, heaping attention on the issues raised by activists.

“The ‘99 percent,’ and the ‘one percent,’ too, are part of our vocabulary now,” said Judith Stein, a professor of history at the City University of New York.

GOP Tries to Message Away the 99 Percent — Because the Movement is Having an Impact

At a retreat with Republican governors, Republican message guru Frank Luntz expressed his concerns at the growing power of the 99 Percent:

I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death.

In response to his fears, Luntz held a seminar to instruct Republicans on how to discuss the issues the 99 Percent have elevated. Here are some lowlights of Luntz’s anti-99 Percent newspeak:

1. Don’t say ‘capitalism.’

“I’m trying to get that word removed and we’re replacing it with either ‘economic freedom’ or ‘free market,’ ” Luntz said. “The public . . . still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral. And if we’re seen as defenders of quote, Wall Street, end quote, we’ve got a problem.”

2. Don’t say that the government ‘taxes the rich.’ Instead, tell them that the government ‘takes from the rich.’

“If you talk about raising taxes on the rich,” the public responds favorably, Luntz cautioned. But ”if you talk about government taking the money from hardworking Americans, the public says no.Taxing, the public will say yes.”

3. Republicans should forget about winning the battle over the ‘middle class.’ Call them ‘hardworking taxpayers.’

“They cannot win if the fight is on hardworking taxpayers. We can say we defend the ‘middle class’ and the public will say, I’m not sure about that. But defending ‘hardworking taxpayers’ and Republicans have the advantage.”

Some unsolicited advice for the GOP: the 99 Percent and our economic problems can’t be dismissed

One Percenter Piles On: Tax the Rich to Help the 99 Percent — The Real ‘Job Creators’

When it comes to protecting the wealthiest Americans from having to pay their fair share, the GOP usually trots out one of two euphemisms for the wealthiest Americans: “small businesses” or “job creators.” (Neither of which are really valid, by the way.)

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), for example, explained yesterday why 345,000 millionaires shouldn’t have to pay a very small surtax on their income above $1 MILLION in order to prevent a tax increase on 160 MILLION Americans:

We just think we shouldn’t be punishing job creators to pay for it. The Democrats can say they just want some people to pay a little bit more to cover this or that dubious proposal. Think about that. The Democrats’ response to the jobs crisis we’re in right now is to raise taxes on those who create jobs. This isn’t just counterproductive. It’s absurd.

In a must-read op-ed on Bloomberg News today, successful entrepreneur and bona fide member of the 1 Percent Nick Hanauer destroys the Republican argument:

I’m a very rich person. As an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, I’ve started or helped get off the ground dozens of companies in industries including manufacturing, retail, medical services, the Internet and software. I founded the Internet media company aQuantive Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. I was also the first non-family investor in Amazon.

Even so, I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.

That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.

The Republican Total Assault Against the American Economy

2011-11-30T20:35:00.000-08:00

From The Progress Report -- November 30, 2011:

Another Way The GOP Can Kick The Economy While It’s Down

Will the GOP Really Block Extended Unemployment Benefits?

This week, we’ve been talking about the extension of the payroll tax cut that the GOP is likely to block tomorrow — which would have disastrous economic consequences and raise taxes on 160 MILLION Americans. But there’s another equally important piece of must-pass legislation Congress must take up before they leave for their vacation next month: an extension of unemployment benefits. The current extension, which Republicans agreed to as part of the December 2010 deal that extended the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy for through 2012, runs out at the end of next month.

Here’s the rundown.

A Quick Explainer of How Unemployment Insurance Works

The State Role: The states are responsible for running their own unemployment insurance programs. They raise the funds for their own programs through taxes, administer state-level trust funds, determine eligibility rules, and distribute the funds under the guidelines they have established.

The Federal Role: While states are given a good deal of flexibility, federal law establishes certain overall rules and guidelines that the states must also abide by. And in times of high unemployment — like right now — Congress can authorize federally-financed extended unemployment benefits.

How Long Benefits Last: Typically, state-financed benefits last for up to 26 weeks, though many states have been cutting back benefits even as the unemployment crisis has worsened. Federally-financed benefits can run up to a maximum of 99 weeks in the states with the highest unemployment rates, though the number of weeks available varies considerably by state. Shockingly, some state legislatures have simply failed to pass the necessary legislation to enable their citizens to receive these extended benefits paid for entirely by the federal government.

By the Numbers:

$1.52…the amount of economic growth generated by every dollar spent on unemployment benefits

4…the approximate number of workers actively job-hunting for every position available.

48…the percentage of unemployed Americans currently receiving unemployment insurance benefits thanks to growing crisis of the long-term unemployment

500,000+…the number of jobs that could be destroyed next year if unemployment insurance is not extended

700,000+…the number of new jobs created in recent years thanks to extended unemployment benefits

2,200,000…the number of unemployed Americans who will lose their benefits in January if Congress fails to pass an extension of federal benefits

3,200,000…the number of Americans pulled out of poverty in 2010 thanks to unemployment benefits.

4,400,000…the approximate number of Americans who have been unemployed for more than a year

6,000,000…the number of unemployed Americans who will lose their benefits over all of 2012 if Congress fails to pass an extension of federal benefits

14,000,000…the current number of unemployed Americans

$57,000,000,000…the hit the economy would take during just the first three months of 2012 if unemployment benefits are not extended

No Time To End Extended Unemployment Benefits

How the Occupy Movement May Reverse the Fascist Takeover of America

2011-11-22T20:11:00.000-08:00

From Common Dreams -- November 22, 2011:

'You Can Crush the Flowers, But You Can’t Stop the Spring'

Dream big. Occupy your hopes. Talk to strangers. Live in public. Don’t stop now.

by Rebecca Solnit

Last Tuesday, I awoke in lower Manhattan to the whirring of helicopters overhead, a war-zone sound that persisted all day and then started up again that Thursday morning, the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street and a big day of demonstrations in New York City. It was one of the dozens of ways you could tell that the authorities take Occupy Wall Street seriously, even if they profoundly mistake what kind of danger it poses. If you ever doubted whether you were powerful or you mattered, just look at the reaction to people like you (or your children) camped out in parks from Oakland to Portland, Tucson to Manhattan.

Of course, “camped out” doesn’t quite catch the spirit of the moment, because those campsites are the way people have come together to bear witness to their hopes and fears, to begin to gather their power and discuss what is possible in our disturbingly unhinged world, to make clear how wrong our economic system is, how corrupt the powers that support it are, and to begin the search for a better way. Consider it an irony that the campsites are partly for sleeping, but symbols of the way we have awoken.

When civil society sleeps, we’re just a bunch of individuals absorbed in our private lives. When we awaken, on campgrounds or elsewhere, when we come together in public and find our power, the authorities are terrified. They often reveal their ugly side, their penchant for violence and for hypocrisy.

Consider the liberal mayor of Oakland, who speaks with outrage of people camping without a permit but has nothing to say about the police she dispatched to tear-gas a woman in a wheelchair, shoot a young Iraq war veteran in the head, and assault people while they slept. Consider the billionaire mayor of New York who dispatched the NYPD on a similar middle-of-the-night raid on November 15th. Recall this item included in a bald list of events that night: “tear-gassing the kitchen tent.” Ask yourself when did kitchens really need to be attacked with chemical weapons?

Does an 84-year-old woman need to be tear-gassed in Seattle? Does a three-tours-of-duty veteran need to be beaten until his spleen ruptures in Oakland? Does our former poet laureate need to be bashed in the ribs after his poet wife is thrown to the ground at UC Berkeley? Admittedly, this is a system that regards people as disposable, but not usually so literally.

Two months ago, the latest protests against that system began. The response only confirms our vision of how it all works. They are fighting fire with gasoline. Perhaps being frightened makes them foolish. After all, once civil society rouses itself from slumber, it can be all but unstoppable. (If they were smart they’d try to soothe it back to sleep.) “Arrest one of us; two more appear. You can’t arrest an idea!” said the sign held by a man in a Guy Fawkes mask in reoccupied Zuccotti Park last Thursday.

Last Wednesday in San Francisco, 100 activists occupied the Bank of America, even erecting a symbolic tent inside it in which a dozen activists immediately took refuge. At the Berkeley campus of the University of California, setting up tents on any grounds was forbidden, so the brilliant young occupiers used clusters of helium balloons to float tents overhead, a smart image of defiance and sky-high ambition. And the valiant UC Davis students, after several of them were pepper-sprayed in the face while sitting peacefully on the ground, evicted the police, chanting, “You can go! You can go!” They went.

Occupy Oakland has been busted up three times and still it thrives. To say nothing of the other 1,600 occupations in the growing movement.

Alexander Dubcek, the government official turned hero of the Prague Spring uprising of 1968, once said, “You can crush the flowers, but you can’t stop the spring.”

The busting of Zuccotti Park and the effervescent, ingenious demonstrations elsewhere are a reminder that, despite the literal “occupations” on which this protean movement has been built, it can soar as high as those Berkeley balloons and take many unexpected forms. Another OWS sign, “The beginning is near,” caught the mood of the moment. Flowers seem like the right image for this uprising led by the young, those who have been most crushed by the new economic order, and who bloom by rebelling and rebel by blooming.

The Best and the Worst

Now world-famous Zuccotti Park is just a small concrete and brown marble-paved scrap of land surrounded by tall buildings. Despite the “Occupy Wall Street” label, it’s actually two blocks north of that iconic place. It’s rarely noted that the park is within sight of, and kitty-corner to, Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center towers crumbled.

What was born and what died that day a decade ago has everything to do with what’s going on in and around the park, the country, and the world now. For this, al-Qaeda is remarkably irrelevant, except as the outfit that long ago triggered an incident that instantly released both the best and the worst in our society.

The best was civil society. As I wandered in the Zuccotti Park area last week, I was struck again by how much what really happened on the morning of September 11th has been willfully misremembered. It can be found nowhere in the plaques and monuments. Firemen more than deserve their commemorations, but mostly they acted in vain, on bad orders from above, and with fatally flawed communications equipment. The fact is: the people in the towers and the neighborhood -- think of them as civil society coming together in crisis -- largely rescued themselves, and some of them told the firefighters to head down, not up.

We need memorials to the coworkers who carried their paraplegic accountant colleague down 69 flights of stairs while in peril themselves; to Ada Rosario-Dolch, the principal who got all of the High School for Leadership, a block away, safely evacuated, while knowing her sister had probably been killed in one of those towers; to the female executives who walked the blind newspaper seller to safety in Greenwich Village; to the unarmed passengers of United Flight 93, who were the only ones to combat terrorism effectively that day; and to countless, nameless others. We need monuments to ourselves, to civil society.

Ordinary people shone that morning. They were not terrorized; they were galvanized into action, and they were heroic. And it didn’t stop with that morning either. That day, that week they began to talk about what the events of 9/11 actually meant for them, and they acted to put their world back together, practically and philosophically. All of which terrified the Bush administration, which soon launched not only its “global war on terror” and its invasion of Afghanistan, but a campaign against civil society. It was aimed at convincing each of us that we should stay home, go shopping, fear everything except the government, and spy on each other.

The only monument civil society ever gets is itself, and the satisfaction of continuing to do the work that matters, the work that has no bosses and no paychecks, the work of connecting, caring, understanding, exploring, and transforming. So much about Occupy Wall Street resonates with what came in that brief moment a decade before and then was shut down for years.

That little park that became “occupied” territory brought to mind the way New York’s Union Square became a great public forum in the weeks after 9/11, where everyone could gather to mourn, connect, discuss, debate, bear witness, share food, donate or raise money, write on banners, and simply live in public. (Until the city shut that beautiful forum down in the name of sanitation -- that sacred cow which by now must be mating with the Wall Street Bull somewhere in the vicinity of Zuccotti Park.)

It was remarkable how many New Yorkers lived in public in those weeks after 9/11. Numerous people have since told me nostalgically of how the normal boundaries came down, how everyone made eye contact, how almost anyone could talk to almost anyone else. Zuccotti Park and the other Occupies I’ve visited -- Oakland, San Francisco, Tucson, New Orleans -- have been like that, too. You can talk to strangers. In fact, it’s almost impossible not to, so much do people want to talk, to tell their stories, to hear yours, to discuss our mutual plight and what solutions to it might look like.

It’s as though the great New York-centric moment of openness after 9/11, when we were ready to reexamine our basic assumptions and look each other in the eye, has returned, and this time it’s not confined to New York City, and we’re not ready to let anyone shut it down with rubbish about patriotism and peril, safety and sanitation.

It’s as if the best of the spirit of the Obama presidential campaign of 2008 was back -- without the foolish belief that one man could do it all for civil society. In other words, this is a revolt, among other things, against the confinement of decision-making to a thoroughly corrupted and corporate-money-laced electoral sphere and against the pitfalls of leaders. And it represents the return in a new form of the best of the post-9/11 moment.

As for the worst after 9/11 -- you already know the worst. You’ve lived it. The worst was two treasury-draining wars that helped cave in the American dream, a loss of civil liberties, privacy, and governmental accountability. The worst was the rise of a national security state to almost unimaginable proportions, a rogue state that is our own government, and that doesn’t hesitate to violate with impunity the Geneva Convention, the Bill of Rights, and anything else it cares to trash in the name of American "safety" and "security." The worst was blind fealty to an administration that finished off making this into a country that serves the 1% at the expense, or even the survival, of significant parts of the 99%. More recently, it has returned as another kind of worst: police brutality (speaking of blind fealty to the 1%).

The Pathetic, Ignorant Tea Party Morons

2011-11-22T19:52:00.000-08:00

From The New York Times -- April 17, 2010:

New York Times poll reveals Tea Party ignorance, dishonesty and hypocrisy

By Marc Rubin

There were new myth making headlines out of a New York Times poll that supposedly showed that tea party supporters are "better educated and wealthier" than the general population. The supposed findings were used by some journalists and tea party organizers to build up the credentials of the tea party.

But when you look at the actual poll data that the NY Times used for its story, it's clear neither the Times editors nor the reporters who wrote the story could analyze their way out of a paper bag. The claims are preposterous and further re-enforces the credentials of the newspaper that brought us Whitewater and Judith Miller's bogus front page stories on the absolute certainty of WMD in Iraq in the run up to the war.

Many in the news media and on the cable news talk shows just took the preposterous conclusions by a bunch of inept Times reporters at face value without looking at the actual results (which are available here) which paints a very different picture. In fact, supposedly according to Michelle Bachman and some silly reporting, Tea Party supporters are even "hotter" than liberals.

But the data shows that compared to the general population almost twice the number of Tea Party supporters are retired, 32% to 18%. And another interesting poll number which calls the entire validity of the Times poll and the veracity of the those polled into question, is that according to their poll data only 16% of the tea party respondents say they are on Medicare.

Since everyone becomes eligible for Medicare at 65 its hard to believe that 50% of retirees who claim to be Tea Party supporters do not have Medicare. It indicates a number of things: a willingness to lie or be deceptive on the part of the respondents, probab;y because Medicare is a government run healthcare program and indicates a lack of analytical ability on the part of the Times pollsters, reporters who wrote the story and their editors..

With this answer and the answer to other questions, there is every indication that a good number of Tea Party supporters are willing to lie to pollsters to support their agenda, which, based on based on past performance shouldn't come as any surprise to anyone with the obvious exception of the New York Times.

On religion 83% are catholic or protestant with 1% saying they are Jewish and 6-9% saying "other". With only 1% of those polled saying they are Jewish its not likely that many of the respondents in the New York Times poll are from New York, or much of the northeast or Florida, a state where an anti-healthcare Tea Party Republican was just crushed in a special election for a seat in the House of Representatives. Given the lack of polling in the northeast, the claim that Tea Party supporters are "better educated" is also suspect and further examination of the poll data supports that also not to mention what we've seen of the protestors.

Of these supposedly higher educated Tea Partiers, 1% checked the answer " I dont know", when asked the question of whether they are married, had ever been married are divorced or separated, Of the supposedly less educated general public, 0% checked "I don't know" to that question. This might begin to explain the popularity of Michelle Bachman and Fox News.

One wonders if Tea Partiers have their names and addresses sewn into their clothing when they go on protests.

To the question of ideology, 73% of Tea Party supporters describe themselves as "conservative to very conservative" . This blows another hole in the veracity of the NY Times poll and/or the truthfulness of their Tea Party respondents since every poll, every measurable educational statistic has shown that those with liberal ideologies tend to be better educated while people who describe themselves as conservative less educated in the general population.

It's not likely that has changed as far as the Tea Party movement is concerned and there is more raw data in the New York times poll to back that up.

So what it also suggests is that, like the Medicare question, Tea Partiers are likely to be less than truthful when it comes to answering certain questions.In the answer to questions about their education, "some college" drew the highest percentage. Which means what? They dropped out? Couldn't handle it? Or was that the easiest to lie about? There is more polling data to call into question the "better educated" claim as well.

As for the Times conclusion that they are "wealthier", these are the actual numbers:
25% say they make between $50,000 and $75,000 a year compared to 18% of the general population and 12% between $75k-and 100k compared to 11% of the general population.

Assuming the Tea Partiers are telling the truth which has been shown can be highly doubtful, the disparity in the $75-100,000 category is so small as to be irrelevant. And with regards to the use of the term "wealthier"( the word used by the Times), it's doubtful that anyone in the country making $50-$75,000 or $75 -$100,000 a year thinks they are wealthy.

According to the poll there is a slightly higher number than the public as a whole claiming to make over $250,000 but that number is such a small percentage of the Tea Party supporters and general population as a whole that the conclusion that Tea Party supporters are "wealthier" is beyond silly and far from the truth.

But to get back to the "better educated" claim, maybe the biggest nail in the coffin of the New York Times article, is their poll data that shows 63% of these supposedly " better educated" Tea Party supporters say their primary source of information is Fox News. It is beyond the realm of possibility that highly educated people would use Fox News as their primary source of information.

This is the same Fox News where Sean Hannity said the healthcare bill if passed, could turn U.S. doctors into terrorists because it would cut their salaries and they'd be susceptible to taking money from Al-Qaeda to commit terrorist acts. There is no supermarket tabloid in America that wouldnt be embarrassed to publish such a story. This is also the same Fox News where Glenn Beck conducting his Ding Dong School fact-denying show, told people that under the new healthcare bill they will "go to jail", ( written on his blackboard) if they don't get health insurance.

Fox News is not news for highly educated people. And what's more Fox News itself knows it.

More data proving the absurdity of Tea Party supporters being better educated are the poll numbers that show 57% have a favorable view of George W Bush, the most inept, disastrous president in U.S. history. Bush visited more catastrophies on the United States because of his incompetence and negligence than U.S president in history, from getting 3000 people killed on 911 because he dismissed terrorism as a threat until it was too late, to destroying the balanced budget, exploding the deficit, creating the worst economic disaster since the depression, and the debacle in Iraq, not to mention those who died because of his handling of Katrina.

Yes this is the president that supposedly "better educarted" Tea Party supporters give a 57% job approval rating, which says as much about who Tea Party supporters really are as it says about the New York Time ability to analyze.

It reveals the Tea Party supporters as totally partisan, somewhat fascistic and completely hypocritical since every problem they complain about was caused by Bush and the Republicans who proved to be incompetent beyond anything anyone would have thought possible.

It also explains why Tea Party supporters didn't demonstrate when Bush destroyed the balanced budget, blew a $ 5 1/2 trillion budget surplus, cut tax rates for upper 5% of the country, exploded the deficit, sent the country into an unnecessary $1 billion a day war without paying for it, caused the worst economic crisis since the Depression, and are now "angry" with Democrats over the economy. Tea Party supporters are either mindlessly partisan or they were in a six year coma for 2001-2006.

What the Times poll really reveals is that a large segment ( no one can say "all") of the Tea Party movement is what it appears to be every day on television: ignorant,dishonest, uneducated, neo fascistic, filled with moral and intellectual hypocrites (as the foul mouthed family values conservatives who made obscene calls to Bart Stupak and others proved) with no real values except a deep desire to have everyone act they way they do and believe as they do to justify themselves and their conformity.

And there is, though a minority, a definite and distinct element of raw racism motivating many as was evident not just by some clearly racist signs aimed at Obama over healthcare. but even by the Governor of Virginia who neglected to mention slavery as the cause of the Civil War in a speech honoring those who fought for the confederacy.

As the data and any real analyis shows, the conclusions the Times reporters drew from their polling data are simply preposterous. And what the Tea Party protests have shon is that more than anything, the Tea Party movement is made of a bunch of small minded conservative partians, angry that the massive failure of their ideology led to their representatives being thrown out of power. And if the American people have any sense, it will stay that way despite Republican political operatives who try and exploit their temper tantrums for their own political ends.

Continue reading on Examiner.com New York Times poll reveals Tea Party ignorance, dishonesty and hypocrisy - New York Obama Administration | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/obama-administration-in-new-york/new-york-times-poll-reveals-tea-party-ignorance-dishonesty-and-hypocrisy#ixzz1eUskHurh

The Republican Ideological Terrorists Who Are Dooming America

2011-11-22T05:02:00.000-08:00

From The Washington Post -- November 21, 2011:

Republican obstinacy doomed the supercommittee

By Eugene Robinson

No, the sun didn’t rise in the west this morning. No, Republicans on the congressional supercommittee didn’t offer meaningful concessions on raising new tax revenue. And no, “both sides” are not equally responsible for the failure to compromise.

As usual, the two parties began with vastly different ideas of what it means to negotiate. Democrats envisioned meeting somewhere in the middle, while Republicans anticipated not moving an inch. This isn’t just my spin, it’s a matter of public record: Before the 12-member supercommittee ever met, House Speaker John Boehner warned that they had better not agree to any new tax revenue.

Think about this for a minute. The whole point of the subcommittee exercise was to begin reducing the ballooning national debt, now more than $15 trillion. Closing such a big gap with spending cuts is possible only in the parallel universe inhabited by GOP ideologues, a place where the laws of arithmetic do not apply.

Here in the real world — where tax receipts as a percentage of gross domestic product are lower than they’ve been since 1950 — it’s ridiculous to think of solving the long-term debt problem without substantial new revenue. Yet the position taken by Republicans in Congress is that tax rates can go only down, never up. To uphold this absolutist principle, they have gone so far as to threaten to send the U.S. Treasury into default.

That is basically where the subcommittee talks stood — Democrats ready to give and take, Republicans willing only to take — until the eleventh hour, when Sen. Patrick Toomey (R-Pa.) presented to his supercolleagues a proposal for tax reform that some commentators hailed as a breakthrough. It was, in fact, nothing of the sort.

Toomey’s plan would have actually cut tax rates, including for the wealthy, with a promise to raise them again if that’s what was needed to boost tax revenue by $250 billion over the next decade.

Puh-leeze.

While $250 billion sounds like a lot, it’s much less impressive when compared with the supercommittee’s overall goal of reducing the debt by $1.2 trillion. This would still mean four dollars in spending cuts for every one dollar of new revenue.

And Toomey’s number is a drop in the bucket when you look at the $15 trillion debt — or even the $4 trillion in debt reduction that most analysts believe would really make a difference. With so little new revenue, we would need to make draconian cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security that would radically alter the social contract in this country.

Toomey’s proposal on taxes is a breakthrough only if we’re grading on a curve — giving Republicans extra credit for moving an inch, simply because they’ve been so adamant about not moving at all. Democrats, meanwhile, get accused of being intransigent for drawing a line after having moved many, many miles.

It’s useful to remember that not all Republicans are so stubborn. Many realize that a balanced approach of spending cuts and tax increases will be needed to address the debt problem — and that these adjustments shouldn’t be made too abruptly, given the fragility of the economic recovery. But anyone who speaks these truths out loud is branded a heretic in Republican circles, where tax cuts are not a matter of policy but of faith.

The deal that established the supercommittee specified that if the superlegislators failed to reach agreement, $1.2 trillion in budget cuts would automatically take place at the beginning of 2013. Is this really better, from the progressive point of view, than some sort of lopsided “compromise” incorporating the Toomey revenue, which would reduce the dollar amount of budget-slashing needed to attain the $1.2 trillion goal?

Yes, no deal is almost certainly better than a bad deal. The automatic cuts will be painful, but they don’t touch entitlements — and thus don’t preempt the serious discussion we need to have about making sure that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are sustainable.

Instead, the Pentagon bears the brunt of the sword-of-Damocles cuts. Already, Republicans are beginning to howl that we need to find some way to avoid damaging our national security. The solution is clear: If we want a military that projects U.S. power around the globe, we need to pay for it.

Maybe Republicans will acknowledge that American greatness doesn’t come free. That’s the breakthrough we need.

America's F--- You System of Government

2011-11-21T18:42:00.000-08:00

From Common Dreams -- November 16, 2011:

Our F— You System of Government

Anti-Occupy Crackdowns Highlight Lack of Services

by Ted Rall

Governments are supposed to fulfill the basic needs of their citizens. Ours doesn’t pretend to try.

Sick? Too bad.

Can’t find a job? Tough.

Broke? Can’t afford rent? We don’t give a crap.

Forget “e pluribus unum.” We need a more accurate motto.

We live under a f— you system.

Got a problem? The U.S. government has an all-purpose response to whatever ails you: f— you.

During the ’80s I drove a yellow taxi in New York. Then, as now, there were no public restrooms in the city. At 4 in the morning, with few restaurants or bars open, the coffee I drank to stay awake posed a significant challenge.

It was—it is—insane. People pee. People poop. As basic needs go, toilets are as basic as it gets. Yet the City of New York, with the biggest tax base of any municipality in the United States, didn’t provide any.

So I did what all taxi drivers did. What they still do. I found a side street and a spot between two parked cars. It went OK until a cop caught me peeing under the old elevated West Side Highway, which later collapsed due to lack of maintenance. Perhaps decades of taxi driver urine corroded the support beams.

“You can’t do that here,” said the policeman.

“Where am I supposed to go?” I asked him. “There’s aren’t any restrooms anywhere in town.”

“I know,” he replied before going to get his summons book from his cruiser.

The old “f— you.” We create the problem, then blame you for the results.

I ran away.

In recent days American mayors have been ordering heavily armed riot police to attack and rob peaceful members of encampments allied with Occupy Wall Street.

Like NYC, which won’t provide public restrooms but arrests public urinators, government officials and their media allies use their own refusal to provide basic public services to justify raids against Occupations.

In the middle of the night on November 15th NYPD goons stormed into Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. They beat and pepper-sprayed members of Occupy Wall Street and destroyed the books in their library. Citing “unsanitary conditions,” New York’s billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, then told reporters: “I have become increasingly concerned…that the occupation was coming to pose a health and fire safety hazard to the protesters and to the surrounding community.”

Four days before the police attack The New York Times had quoted a city health department statement worrying about the possible spread of norovirus, vomiting, diarrhea and tuberculosis: “It should go without saying that lots of people sleeping outside in a park as we head toward winter is not an ideal situation for anyone’s health.”

So why don’t they give the homeless some of the thousands of abandoned apartment units in New York?

Anyway, according to the Times: “Damp laundry and cardboard signs, left in the rain, have provided fertile ground for mold. Some protesters urinate in bottles, or occasionally a water-cooler jug, to avoid the lines at [the few] public restrooms.”

Of course, there’s an obvious solution: provide adequate bathroom facilities—not just for Occupy but for all New Yorkers. But that’s off the table under New York’s f— you system of government.

Doctors noted a new phenomenon called “Zuccotti cough.” Symptoms are similar to those of “Ground Zero cough” suffered by 9/11 first responders.

Zuccotti is 450 feet away from Ground Zero.

Which brings to mind the fact that the collapse of the World Trade Center towers released 400 tons of asbestos into the air. It was never cleaned up properly. Could Occupiers be suffering the results of sleeping in a should-have-been-Superfund site for two months?

We’ll never know. As under Bush, Obama’s EPA still won’t conduct a 9/11 environmental impact study.

Sick? Wanna know why? F— you.

One of the authorities’ most ironic complaints about the Occupations is that they attract the mentally ill, drug users and habitually homeless.

To listen to the mayors of Portland, Denver and New York, you’d think the Occupiers beamed in bums and nutcases from outer space.

When mentally disabled people seek help from their government, they get the usual answer: f— you.

When people addicted to drugs—drugs imported into the U.S. under the watchful eyes of corrupt border enforcement officers—ask their government for help, they are turned away. F— you again.

When people who lost their homes because their government said “f— you” to them rather than help turn to the same government to look for safe shelter, again they are told: “f— you.”

And then, after days and years and decades of shirking their responsibility to provide us with such staples of human survival as places to urinate and defecate and sleep, and food, and medical care, our “f— you” government has the amazing audacity to blame us, victims of their negligence and corruption and violence, for messing things up.

Which is why we are finally, at long last, starting to say “f— you” to them.

Congressional Republicans: Screw You, America!

2011-11-21T15:00:00.000-08:00

From The Progress Report -- November 21, 2011:

GOP Derails Super Committee To Protect Millionaires & Billionaires

By Pat Garofalo

The fiscal super committee created by last summer’s deal to raise the debt ceiling was charged with crafting a $1.5 trillion deficit reduction package by Thanksgiving. However, moments ago, the committee’s co-chairs issued a statement officially conceding that “it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee’s deadline.” For weeks, the GOP has been refusing to even consider new revenue, pairing modest attempts to close loopholes in the tax code with giant new tax cuts centered on the very rich that would add trillions to the deficit. The committee’s co-chairman Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) even said the GOP would not consider “any penny” in new revenue (a statement that he later walked back). Without a deal, automatic cuts are supposed to be scheduled for 2013, but several congressional leaders have been discussing canceling the cuts, leaving the super committee the latest in a long line of deficit commissions to unable to succeed in their attempt to alter the U.S. budget.

GOP REFUSED TO TAX MILLIONAIRES & BILLIONAIRES: The GOP, in lockstep with anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist and his radical Americans for Tax Reform no-taxes pledge, adamantly refused to include new revenue in a deficit reduction deal. Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), one of the super committee’s members, released a plan to raise $300 billion in revenue via closing loopholes in the tax code, but at the same time lowering income tax rates, including taking the top tax rate from its current 35 percent down to 28 percent. A second, smaller plan put forward by the GOP included $640 billion in deficit reduction, with just $3 billion coming from closing tax loopholes. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted, the Toomey plan would result in a “shift in tax burdens from households at the top of the income scale to low- and middle-income households.” “The Toomey plan still results in the biggest tax cut since the Great Depression. It would be the biggest tax cut since Calvin Coolidge, and we all know how that turned out,” said Sen. Jon Kerry (D-MA) on NBC’s Meet the Press yesterday. “Now, we didn’t come here to do another tax cut for the wealthiest people while we’re (asking) fixed-income seniors to ante up more, people on Medicaid, who are poor, to ante up more.” Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), who is Hensarling’s co-chair on the super committee, added, “as long as we have some Republican lawmakers who feel more enthralled with a pledge they took to a Republican lobbyist [Norquist] than they do to a pledge to the country to solve the problems, this is going to be hard to do.”

The Republican Congress Fails America Again

2011-11-21T05:23:00.000-08:00

From The Washington Post -- November 20, 2011:

Debt supercommittee members brace for failure

By Paul Kane

The congressional “supercommittee” stumbled its way toward failure Sunday, with final staff-level discussions focusing mostly on how the panel should publicly admit that lawmakers could not meet their mandate of shaving $1.2 trillion from the federal debt.

Rather than making a final effort at compromise, members of the special deficit-reduction committee spent their final hours casting blame and pointing fingers, bracing for the reaction from financial markets that are already jittery over the European debt crisis.

If Congress can’t come up with a way to cut $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years, the Budget Act will do it for them unless some sort of postponement is worked out. A look at the deadlines that must be met and what happens if they’re not:

Half of the 12 lawmakers turned to the Sunday political news shows as their outlet, speaking of their effort in the past tense and accusing the other side of intransigence that they blamed for the failure to clinch a deal. There were no last-minute negotiations, no behind-closed-doors huddles, just a near-empty Capitol in which senior aides could not agree on how to formally shutter the panel by Monday night.

The only face-to-face meetings for members of the supercommittee came in the green rooms of the talk shows. On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) blamed the committee’s failure on Democratic reluctance to cut into popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare. “Our Democratic friends were never able to do the entitlement reforms,” Kyl said, arguing that Democrats were the roadblock to a deal. “They weren’t going to do anything without raising taxes.”

Calling Kyl’s remarks “patently not true,” Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) accused Republicans of blocking the committee’s work by demanding an extension of George W. Bush-era tax cuts and refusing to consider significant tax increases on wealthier people. “We didn’t come here to do another tax cut to the wealthiest people while we’re [asking] fixed-income seniors to ante up more, people on Medicaid who are poor to ante up more,” he said.

Barring a last-second breakthrough, the law calls for a punitive set of $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts to kick in at the start of 2013, with half coming from national security budgets. Kyl and other lawmakers have embraced reconfiguring the automatic cuts to save the Pentagon from such steep cuts, but any movement that decreases the overall savings runs the risk of causing financial ratings agencies to downgrade the U.S. Treasury’s debt.

Senior staff members ran a last round of checks Sunday to make sure there wasn’t some final give from the other side. There wasn’t. Aides left the Capitol on Sunday evening with no clear path for shutting down the panel, which, under the committee’s rules, needed to unveil legislation before midnight Monday.

Republicans prefer releasing a joint statement from the co-chairmen, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), after the markets close Monday, fearing that formally ending their effort could set off a market reaction. Democrats were considering pushing for a brief public statement from the co-chairmen.

Almost every congressman has left Washington for the week-long Thanksgiving break, so the legislative reaction to the committee’s failure will not come until early next month. The impasse leaves a host of other must-pass items, such as extensions for unemployment insurance and the payroll tax holiday, without any vehicle for passage before year’s end.

Despite a national debt that topped $15 trillion last week, the two sides could not bridge the taxes-vs.-entitlement divide. The GOP’s passion for keeping tax rates as low as possible meant the panel’s Republicans demanded steep entitlement cuts for small-to-modest increases in tax revenue, and the Democrats fiercely guarded entitlement programs unless the Republicans gave in on higher taxes.

It was the same stumbling block that prevented President Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) from reaching the “grand bargain” they negotiated over the summer, an effort to trim $4 trillion from future borrowing by the Treasury.

If Congress can’t come up with a way to cut $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years, the Budget Act will do it for them unless some sort of postponement is worked out. A look at the deadlines that must be met and what happens if they’re not:

The Obama-Boehner negotiation ended with an agreement on more than $900 billion in spending cuts to federal agency budgets over the next decade while creating the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction — tasked with finding at least $1.2 trillion more in savings and voting out a plan before Thanksgiving.

The panel of six Democrats and six Republicans, granted extraordinary fast-track powers, began convening in early September with a series of hearings and closed-door meetings. The group, however, has broken down in the past month into a series of small huddles, with a handful of lawmakers working to hit their minimum target of $1.2 trillion and others working on a smaller backup plan that would cushion the blow from the automatic spending cuts.

Neither Hensarling nor Murray formally admitted that the panel was hopelessly gridlocked, but each suggested a new effort was needed in the very near term to fix the government’s balance sheet.

“It wasn’t so much of a failure as it was a failure to seize an opportunity. . . . This nation better seize another one or we will be in big economic trouble,” Hensarling said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“I believe strongly that we still have the capability to come together to solve this problem,” Murray said on CNN”s “State of the Union. “If the supercommittee can’t do it, then I hope that Congress will. In fact, I’m committed to solving this. You can’t just ignore this crisis.”

The trigger of automatic cuts should assuage jittery financial markets, which have been on a roller-coaster ride since the summer’s debt standoff in the United States and the struggle to tame even greater fiscal quagmires in Europe. But lawmakers fear that the sentiment of a dysfunctional federal government could solidify and prompt new fear in the global markets.

After the summer-long battle over lifting the debt ceiling, Standard & Poor’s downgraded U.S. debt based on “America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective.” The supercommittee gridlock came despite its unprecedented parliamentary power — any plan winning at least seven votes would have been guaranteed a straight up-or-down vote in the House and Senate before Christmas.

“There is a real threat that not only will there be a downgrade,” Kerry said, “but that the market on Monday will look at Washington and say, ‘You guys can’t get the job done.’ And just the political confusion and gridlock is enough to say to the world: America can’t get its act together.”

Combating Rising Inequality

2011-11-21T04:56:00.000-08:00

From The Washington Post -- November 20, 2011:

Three ways to combat rising inequality

By Lawrence Summers

There has been a strong and troubling shift in market rewards for a small minority relative to the rewards available to most citizens. A recent Congressional Budget Office study found that incomes of the top 1 percent of the U.S. population (adjusted for inflation) rose 275 percent from 1979 to 2007, while income for the middle class grew only 40 percent. Even this dismal figure overstates the fortunes of typical Americans. In 1965, only one in 20 men ages 25 to 54 was not working; by the end of this decade, it is likely to be one in six, even if a full cyclical recovery is achieved.

Another calculation suggests that if the income distribution had remained constant from 1979 to 2007, incomes of the top 1 percent would be 59 percent, or $780,000, lower and that incomes among the bottom 80 percent would be 21 percent, or more than $10,000, higher.

Those looking to remain serene in the face of these trends or who favor policies that would disproportionately cut taxes at the high end — and exacerbate inequality — assert that snapshot inequality is all right as long as there is mobility within people’s lifetimes and across generations. In fact, there is too little of both. Inequality in lifetime incomes is only marginally smaller than inequality in a single year. And intergenerational mobility in the United States is now poor by international standards.

Why has the top 1 percent done so well relative to the rest? The answer lies substantially in changes in technology and in globalization. When George Eastman revolutionized photography, he did very well, and because he needed a large number of Americans to carry out his vision, the city of Rochester, N.Y., had a thriving middle class for two generations. When Steve Jobs revolutionized personal computing, he and Apple shareholders did very well, but those shareholders are all over the world, and a much smaller benefit flowed to middle-class American workers, both because production was outsourced and because the production of computers and software was not terribly labor-intensive.

The market system distributes rewards increasingly inequitably. On one side, the debate is framed in zero-sum terms, and the disappointing lack of income growth for middle-class workers is blamed on the success of the wealthy. Those with this view should consider whether it would be better if the United States had more, or fewer, entrepreneurs like those who founded Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook. Each did contribute significantly to rising inequality. It is easy to resent the level and extent of the increase in CEO salaries, but firms that have a single owner, such as private equity firms, pay successful chief executives more than public companies do. And for all their problems, American global companies have done very well compared with those headquartered in more egalitarian societies over the past two decades. Where great fortunes are earned by providing great products or services that benefit large numbers of people, they should not be denigrated.

Meanwhile, those who call concerns about rising inequality misplaced or a product of class warfare are even further off base. The extent of the change in the income distribution is such that it is no longer true that the overall growth rate of the economy is the principal determinant of middle-class income growth — how the growth pie is distributed is at least equally important. The observation that most of the increase in inequality reflects gains for those at the very top at the expense of everyone else further belies the idea that simply strengthening the economy will reduce inequality. Focusing on American competitiveness, as many urge, could easily exacerbate inequality while doing little for most Americans if the focus is placed on measures such as corporate tax cuts or the protection of intellectual property for the benefit of companies that are not primarily producing in the United States.

We need more and better responses to rising inequality. Here are three places to start.

First, government must not facilitate increases in inequality by rewarding the wealthy with special concessions. Where governments dispose of assets or allocate licenses, preference should be on the use of auctions to which all have access. Where government provides implicit or explicit insurance, premiums should be based on the market rather than in consultation with the affected industry. Government’s general posture should be standing up for capitalism rather than for well-connected capitalists.

Second, there is scope for pro-fairness, pro-growth tax reform. The moment when more great fortunes are being created and the federal deficit is growing is hardly the time for the estate tax to be eviscerated. And there is no reason tax changes in a period of sharply rising inequality should reinforce the trends in pretax incomes produced by the marketplace.

Third, the public sector must ensure greater equity in areas of the most fundamental importance. It will always be the case in a market economy that some will have mansions, art, etc. More troubling is that middle-class students’ ability to attend college has been seriously compromised by increasing tuitions and sharp cutbacks at public universities, and that, over the past generation, a gap has opened between the life expectancy of the affluent and the ordinary.

Neither the politics of polarization nor those of noblesse oblige on behalf of the fortunate will serve to protect the interests of the middle class in the post-industrial economy.

The writer, a professor and past president at Harvard University, was Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration and economic adviser to President Obama from 2009 through 2010.

Is Fascism Conquering the USA?

2011-11-20T21:23:00.000-08:00

From The Sarcastic Liberal: Progressive and Abrasive -- November 20, 2011:

I do not attempt to be unbiased or polite. While I hold liberal views, this in no way means that I am a Democrat; I hold the view that the Democratic Party neither holds truly liberal views nor fights for its views in the public debate.

Occupy USA: Worst Police Brutality Cases

Over the past two months, the Occupations across the country have faced an extreme response by the police relative the threat they represent. Police have attacked the occupations as though they were domestic terrorists; utilizing LRAD sound cannons, flashbang/concussion grenades, nonlethal chemical weapons, rubber bullets, beanbag cannons, and simple batons in order to break up peaceful protests.

Don't get me wrong, there are times and places where such actions are justifiable (Look at the recent Penn State riot). Violent protests are a danger to the public welfare and might very well require physical force to suppress, but nonviolent protests should not encounter such a push back. The "Occupy" movement is entirely peaceful, utilizing a type of long term sit in (Essentially a "Live In") and marches in order to make their point. There is minimal graffiti, and no rioting associated with the occupations, but rather a concern for the public safety. At the Occupy Boston site, we have voted to not only attempt to minimize the negative effects of our occupation on our neighbors, but to re-sod the area where we live after we finish using it (the grass has been destroyed by the tents) and to act as an impromptu homeless shelter (we provide clothes, food and shelter to all who come). Police cite violence and crime in the camp, which is arguably true because we do have occasional problems; we have a zero tolerance policy for violence, drugs, and alcohol, enforced by removal from camp. The Occupations are not a threat to the public, nor are they guilty of anything other than challenging the rich, a crime that is apparently punishable by violence and incarceration.

I was under the impression that we are living in America, a country where we have constitutionally protected rights, not a repressive police state. The entire purpose of the first amendment is that the government may not always like what the citizens are saying, but they must not attempt to prevent the citizen from speaking. From a purely rhetorical standpoint, have we not sanctioned other governments for suppressing speech in similar ways in the recent future (Ex. China, Iran, Libya, Egypt, etc..)?

I am personally biased towards the Occupations due to my heavy involvement with the Boston occupation, so look at these videos and come to your own conclusions: Excessive force, or justifiable riot control.

This video is possibly the most egregious of a long series of egregious police brutality videos; in it, Kayvan Sabeghi, an Iraq war veteran is beaten by the police; to add insult to injury, Sabeghi was charged with resisting arrest. The police beat Sabeghi so badly that his spleen ruptures and then he is refused medical attention for hours in jail. A ruptured spleen only occurs when EXTREME force is exerted on the organ and is unbelievably painful. I seriously doubt that the police failed to notice that Sabeghi was in agony and unable to walk while incustody, thus the only conclusion is that they didn't care. Sabeghi was very close to the police before the incident, but he was not obstructing them, merely walking in step with them; his actions don't even get to the standard of obstructing traffic, never mind interfering with police business. When the officer begins to beat Sabeghi, he doesn't simply let him run, but follows him and continues the assault. The actions of the police officer go so far beyond misconduct that they enter the realm of criminal assault. Police officers are not allowed to indiscriminately beat protesters until they suffer severe injury (never mind chasing after and beating a man fleeing for his life).

In this video, notice how the police officer not only hits the legal observer (designated by the green cap) with the scooter, but parks it ON his leg. Once the scooter is parked on the guy's leg, the officer calmly walks away until he manages to kick the scooter over. After the observer manages to dislodge the scooter, the police beat him with batons until he loses consciousness and then arrest him, bringing him to the hospital in cuffs; the charges are resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer. I don't even think that I need to comment on how wrong this is and if you require explanation as to why this is wrong, please seek professional help.

This video was shot on the quad at the University of California Davis. The protesters were engaging in a sit in, when they received a three hour warning that they would need to disperse. The important factors in this situation are that the protesters are UC Davis students, in their own quad and there was no allegation of violence or property damage by the police. This video was shot when the order to disperse time limit was up. Clearly, the police officer doing the spraying is enjoying himself (look at the flourish of the can before he starts spraying), and none of the police officers consider the students a threat. The police officers turn their backs upon the students in numerous occasions, not something that you would do if you consider the person threatening enough to pepper spray.

This video is of the famous Scott Olson shooting in Oakland, Ca. The man on the ground is Olsen after he was hit in the face by a tear gas canister. Firing a gas canister, similar to a filled tin can, directly at a crowd is very dangerous as it can break bones and damage soft tissue. Olsen was shot directly in the face and when you consider his location with that of the police line, the police must have been firing directly at him. While the shooting of Olsen could have been accidental, what comes after was clearly not. Notice how the police observe Olsen laying on the ground, not helping, while waiting for the protesters to come back to help. Once the protesters come back to drag Olsen to safety and medical attention, the police throw a flash bang directly into the group. How were the concerned protesters a threat while they were tending to their fallen friend? I would like to point out the similarities between this strategy and that of terrorists worldwide: A common terrorist tactic is to detonate a smaller explosive first, then wait for the first responders to arrive before detonating a larger blast.

Who hasn't seen this video, shot on Wall street, of women being corralled and pepper sprayed? The women are clearly boxed in and not a threat to anybody, but Anthony Bologna still comes by and assaults them with pepper spray. Bologna lost ten vacation days and received a transfer to Staten Island (closer to his home), where he was promoted to a special projects coordinator(with a raise). Sadly, the only lingering consequences of his reprehensible actions is the social stigma he will receive as being know as "That guy who pepper sprayed those women" and the grief that Anonymous can throw his way.

This video was taken on the college campus of Berkeley. The police actions can be broken down into two important parts: the crowd action and the arrest action. The "crowd control" methods utilized by the police in this situation are to crowd the students into a cluster and jab them with batons. The students are not resisting arrest, nor are they able to move away. The only purpose of this action is to inflict pain on the protesters while preventing them from escaping; a goal that is wholly outside of law enforcement's charter in this country (although perfectly fine in North Korea). Police can use force like this in riots, but this is clearly not a riot. Once several people are arrested, the police assault those who they have in custody. Look at the video at 1:20, and you will clearly see a cuffed and held protester being beaten by a police officer for no apparent reason. I don't care what you are protesting or where, the tactics shown by the police in this video are needlessly aggressive and sadistic.

What the hell has happened in this country, where corporations are considered people and given the right to speak, while people are treated without humanity while their right to speak is taken away?

Congressional Republicans Continue to Dump America Down the Garbage Chute and Throw Americans Out to the Street like Trash

2011-11-20T08:13:00.000-08:00

From The Washington Post -- November 19, 2011:

Supercommittee likely to admit defeat on debt deal

By Lori Montgomery and Rosalind S. Helderman

The congressional committee tasked with reducing the federal deficit is poised to admit defeat as soon as Monday, and its unfinished business will set up a year-end battle over emergency jobless benefits and an expiring payroll tax holiday.

Those provisions are among a host of measures set to lapse at the end of December. During nearly three months of negotiations, the “supercommittee” had been weighing whether to extend at least some of them as part of a broader plan to shave a minimum of $1.2 trillion over the next decade.

Democrats and many economists consider particularly urgent the need to extend jobless benefits and the one-year payroll tax cut. With national unemployment stuck at 9 percent, and the ranks of the long-term unemployed at record levels, the government is providing up to 99 weeks of support to about 3.5 million people.

Meanwhile, the payroll tax cut, enacted last December, allows most American workers to keep an additional 2 percent of their earnings, a boon to tight household budgets as well as the economic recovery. Economists at J.P. Morgan Chase recently estimated that if Congress does not extend the two measures, economic growth next year could take a hit of as much as two percentage points — enough to revive fears of a recession.

Time is also running out for doctors who see Medicare patients. These physicians are scheduled to absorb a 30 percent cut in government reimbursements in January. A long list of tax breaks, including an inflation adjustment that protects more than 30 million families from paying the alternative minimum tax, also will be eliminated unless Congress acts.

Although many of the expiring provisions have received bipartisan support in the past, this year they face a welter of political obstacles, none more important than cost. Extending them all through 2012 threatens to add nearly $300 billion to annual budget deficits — and therefore to future borrowing — darkening the nation’s fiscal outlook at the very moment lawmakers had hoped to reassure financial markets with fresh savings.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, said he was uneasy about extending the payroll tax holiday, calling the national debt “a greater threat to us” than the weak economy.

“If the supercommittee fails, I think there will be a stark realization by every member of the U.S. Senate that we’re at the end of the year and these complex challenges have not been dealt with,” Sessions said. “It’s likely to be a really difficult period.”

The policy battle comes as the parties are gearing up for a high-stakes election season dominated by economic concerns, with both the White House and Congress in play. The political pressure that has helped keep the 12-member supercommittee from compromising on hot-button issues such as taxes is sure to grow more intense.

The panel remained gridlocked Saturday with the clock ticking toward a deadline of midnight Monday. Although the official deadline is midnight Wednesday, the committee is legally barred from voting on any plan that was not made public at least 48 hours in advance.

Republicans on the supercommittee held a conference call Saturday morning, and aides said members from both parties continued to talk by phone. But neither side was predicting a last-minute breakthrough. Instead, seven panel members booked appearances on the Sunday talk shows, as both sides readied their best arguments for why the other is at fault.

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), a panel member, spent the day in his Capitol office. “The hope was that even at this late date, they could take things that had been scored [by the Congressional Budget Office] and put them together,” he told reporters as he left for the evening. “That gets pretty doubtful at this point,” he said.

If the supercommittee does not finish on time, it would lose special procedural powers to push a tax-and-spending plan through a bitterly divided House and Senate, leaving congressional leaders without an easy path to compromise on the expiring provisions — and a potentially nasty holiday-season fight on their hands.

“We don’t have the answers,” Sen. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, conceded recently as it became evident that the panel’s effort had stalled. “The supercommittee was put in place” to develop “a strategy to take us through the election” by resolving the toughest outstanding budget problems, he said. “If they don’t succeed, then we have to address these issues.”

Durbin said he is “prepared to add to the deficit at this moment” to extend the economic measures and “bring us out of this recession, to put people to work.” But many Democrats have conflicting emotions about the measures, especially the one-year payroll tax cut.

In addition to adding more than $100 billion to budget deficits, the tax cut would reduce Social Security’s dedicated financing stream, making the program dependent on congressional appropriations at a critical moment.

“There are a lot of other casualties that will be collateral damage with the failure of the supercommittee,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), a key House moderate, adding that the payroll tax cut would be a particularly “heavy lift.”

“You don’t want to do anything at this juncture to retard what seems like it’s an uptick in the economic growth,” Connolly said. “But on the other hand, we’re worried about Social Security. Do we really want to be starving it of revenue?”

Republicans are also divided. Rep. Nan A.S. Hayworth (N.Y.) said she is “extremely sympathetic to extending” the payroll tax holiday, but Rep. Jason Chaffetz (Utah) said he would have trouble supporting it without matching cuts in spending.

“I’m in favor of lower taxes. But, when you don’t couple it with a spending decrease, it’s a real problem,” Chaffetz said. “And we don’t seem to be able to cut anything around here.”

President Obama has demanded a more ambitious economic package that would, among other things, expand the payroll tax cut to employers as well as workers and overhaul the unemployment insurance system. In September, he called on the supercommittee to come up with a way to cover the $447 billion cost so the package wouldn’t increase budget deficits. Obama suggested raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

Democrats on the supercommittee pressed to use savings from the drawdown of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to cover the cost of economic measures. But Republicans on the panel wanted to use the war savings to cover the cost of fixing the alternative minimum tax (AMT) and protecting payments to doctors who see Medicare patients.

Without the political cover of a supercommittee deal to reduce borrowing by the $1.2 trillion target, aides in both parties say it would be difficult to claim savings for any purpose from what some lawmakers have taken to calling “the overseas contingency account.” Because the decision has been made to bring the troops home, many budget analysts argue that the money — as much as $900 billion over the next decade — was never going to be spent anyway. Using war savings to “pay for” other priorities is therefore widely considered an accounting gimmick that is unlikely to pass muster in the House or the Senate.

While December is shaping up as a critical month, lobbyists and senior aides say they expect lawmakers to put off some decisions until next year. For example, although the inflation adjustment for the AMT is set to expire on Dec. 31, most people would not have to pay the higher tax until April 2013. That leaves plenty of time for Congress to fix it.

Dozens of expiring tax breaks for businesses and individuals, collectively known as the “tax extenders,” also could be revived retroactively.

Lawmakers may want to delay debate on the tax extenders for another reason, said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog group. Many of the breaks are designed to benefit narrow home-state interests, such as NASCAR racetracks, racehorse breeders and ethanol producers. Those are precisely the sorts of provisions that have been excoriated throughout this year’s debate over the debt. Both parties are now firmly on record as being in favor of a simpler tax code, stripped of such items.

Said Ellis: “To have gone through this whole wailing and rending of garments and gnashing of teeth that the supercommittee process has elicited and then to turn around and increase the deficit by extending a bunch of tax breaks — many of which are for special interests — would just look terrible.”

The Super Crap-Box Fomerly Known as the Congressional Super-Committee

2011-11-20T05:54:00.000-08:00

From Politico -- November 20, 2011:

BACKSTAGE - HOW THE SUPERCOMMITTEE FLUNKED :

The supercommittee last met Nov. 1 - three weeks ago! It was a public hearing featuring a history lesson, "Overview of Previous Debt Proposals," with Alan Simpson, Erskine Bowles, Pete Domenici and Alice Rivlin. The last PRIVATE meeting was Oct. 26. You might as well stop reading right there: The 12 members (6 House, 6 Senate; 6 R, 6 D) were never going to strike a bargain, grand or otherwise, if they weren't talking to each other. Yes, we get that real deal-making occurs in small groups. But there never WAS a functioning supercommittee: There was Republican posturing and Democratic posturing, with some side conversations across the aisle.

Playbook was a superoptimist: We thought that human factors would prod ambitious members to crack the code, and that the committee would take on its own ecology, regardless of pressures from above or below. But we were punk'd: The supercommittee - one of the most fascinating government experiments of this generation -- never existed as a dynamic political organism.

The official deadline for action by the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction is Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. The real deadline is Monday night, since any plan has to be posted for 48 hours before it's voted on. So conversations this weekend revolved around how to shut this turkey down. Aides expect some "Hail Mary" offers on Sunday, and there's something on the stove that could be inoffensive to both sides. But the committee may not even have a fig-leaf agreement to announce. Total, embarrassing failure. The markets and the country will hate it.

The most likely scenario: The co-chairs, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), on Monday will issue a short joint statement with the basic message: "This marriage is over." Other possibilities are to hold a short going-out-of-business hearing, or to vote down a Republican proposal and a Democratic proposal. But one aide says: "Few, if any, one either side, want a final, ugly food fight ... The chairs are working to figure out how to put the appropriate period on the sentence and do so in the most dignified manner possible. ... [Don't expect] a showdown of dueling voters and a ton of fingerpointing."

Both sides recognize that the optics are disastrous. The Dem. aide continued: "They don't feel the need to burn the place down as they turn off the lights."

The concept of the supercommittee, as POLITICO's Jake Sherman articulated in an email: "[I]f you put 12 serious members in a room, no distractions, easy way through the Senate [direct path for bill], they'd be able to get something." BUT THAT NEVER HAPPENED: The 12 members never had specific, hot-box, come-to-Jesus discussions. It was all white noise. Neither side was willing to jump first, and the two didn't have the capacity to jump together.

One Democrat said Murray "had a really great relationship with Hensarling. They had a very productive relationship -- well, I guess, not 'productive' in the sense of producing a deal at the end. ... [Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John] Kerry [D-Mass.] was his diplomatic self: very active in trying to keep the channels of communication open and feeling the sides out."

A senator told us the supercommittee should have gotten serious sooner - made some tough choices on parameters at the beginning, then figured out how to get there. But that implies committee members got serious at the end. Instead, they were sniping about what was an "offer" and what was a "conversation." When one side claimed a breakthrough, the opposition emailed reporters with the subject line: " Old News Ain't News."

The supercommittee even fooled itself. "Both sides at various times, after ad hoc conversations, felt like we were making progress in the evening," recalled a GOP participant, "before coming back in the morning and finding, 'We can't actually do that.'" A Democratic participant: "It became clear on our end that this all came down to [insistence on extending] the Bush tax cuts for Republicans, and that was the immovable object at the end of the day."

Democrats have almost the same beefs, and even express them similarly. A top Dem. aide : "The Democrats on the committee didn't feel like they had a willing partner in negotiations because revenue was never a serious component of discussion. ... [W]e've seen offers, and none of those offers are legitimate or are plans that would require the wealthiest Americans to sacrifice along with everybody else. ... Democrats came into this in the spirit of, 'We can make some hard choices around entitlements. We can make some painful decisions and we can take some guff from the left.' And I think that throughout the process, they did that. If you look at MoveOn and AARP and even the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, we took a lot of hits from the left on the entitlement reforms that we put forward ."

One Democrat said the supercommittee structure "was a kind of diffuse, horizontal ... You had a lot of folks trying to take initiative and be the one to get the deal done."

Republicans usually met in the Cannon House Office Building, where Hensarling has his office as chair of the House Republican Conference. The GOP prepared elaborate plans: not just how much the government could make from auctioning spectrum, but what part would go on the block, and what part would be reserved for public safety. Hensarling repeatedly told the GOP members: "I'm an old Boy Scout. I like to be prepared."

Democrats usually met in S-116, in one of Kerry's Foreign Relations conference rooms. Murray - the Democratic chair, who also chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee - was described by one participant as "the police ... the voice of our base." Another Democrat put it more gently: "She is really influenced by the constituents that she represents. Throughout this process, she had these conversations with people about, 'My Social Security is on the line.' So she really felt a very heavy burden to do something, but to do something in a way that was going to be fair to the people that she's made a career out of representing. She made some really difficult choices, and she felt like she did enough that if Republicans reciprocated, there was an opportunity for a deal. ... She's one of those people who believes that while it certainly seems like Washington is broken, it has to work."

Two supercommittee members - Reps. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) and Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) -- never really checked into the conversation, according to numerous participants on both sides. A Democrat explained: "There's a basic threshold for our guys that any deal has to be better than what would happen with no deal. There were some folks who never really saw us get close to [that] threshold."

Through all this, the White House was mostly hands-off. One Democrat said President Obama gave the committee "a lot of autonomy." Another Democrat: "It was kind of the opposite of the debt ceiling. Instead of really haggling, inserting himself into the actual haggling back-and-forth, he intervened kind of surgically to draw clear lines at a couple points that we felt put us in a good negotiating position."

Speaker John Boehner, elliptically in public and explicitly in private, had given Republicans top cover to raise revenues in return for tax reform. "This has always been a question of scale," a top GOP aide explained. "If they were willing to go a little further on entitlements, we'd see what we can do on revenues. That was the way it would have to work. What we found was, they needed a trillion-plus in revenues, and weren't willing to do anywhere near that on entitlements."

Republicans pat themselves on the back for a plan - floated by supercommittee member Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), a former president of the Club for Growth - that would, in the GOP euphemism, "lead to additional revenues." As one aide recalled: "We thought we had found the sweet spot: The right was pissed, but not too pissed. The mainstream media was giving us credit for getting out of our comfort zone." At Tuesday's regular meeting of House Republicans, Hensarling gave a detailed description of the plan, and got applause.

But Democrats sensed the Republicans were getting pushback, either from leaders or rank and file. A Dem. aide: "What you saw was over the course of last weekend was members getting somewhat close to a deal. [There were] empty Senate office buildings, empty House buildings, members meeting casually to talk about this. ... Once the House came back into town, the negotiating stance of those House Republicans radically changed. ... At the end of the day, it was clear that there was nothing that they could say 'yes' to."

A Democratic aide had this eulogy for the supercommittee: "The worm has turned a little bit. The national conversation now is about income inequality and about jobs, and it's not really about cutting the size of government anymore or cutting spending. 2010 gave one answer to that question. But 2012 will give another, and we've got to see what it is."

Welcome to the New American Fascism (formerly "Conservatism")

2011-11-20T04:21:00.000-08:00

Fourteen Defining Characteristics Of Fascism

By Dr. Lawrence Britt

Source Free Inquiry.co

Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the Fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread
domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.

6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and Government are Intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

9. Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is Suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

The Creepy Right-Wing Losers Who Are Attacking Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-19T06:12:00.000-08:00

From SALON -- NOV 18, 2011:

The bizarre history of the OWS counter-protesters

A Fox contributor and failed talk radio host with a penchant for publicity-seeking takes to the streets against OWS
When brothers John and Derek Tabacco showed up at the big Occupy Wall Street protest Thursday holding “Occupy a Desk” and “Get a Job” signs, they claimed they were engaging in an organic counter-protest against dirty hippies who were preventing them from getting to work. The local, national, and even international media promptly picked up their story.

But it turns out the Tabacco brothers have a long and sometimes checkered history of publicity-seeking and relentless self-promotion — and their claim that 50 local businessmen are supporting the anti-Occupy protest is entirely unsubstantiated.

Besides owning a finance company called LocateStock in lower Manhattan, John Tabacco is a Fox News contributor, a failed talk radio host, an unsuccessful city council candidate from Staten Island, and a onetime participant in the VH1 show “My Coolest Years.” An endorsement John Tabacco received in his city council campaign was later alleged to have been part of a pay-to-play deal. Derek Tabacco, for his part, is the CEO of what appears to be a defunct social network company for sports fans.

The Tabaccos showed up Thursday morning at the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway, the spot where news cameras had gathered to film protesters and the throng of NYPD officers who had barricaded the street and were demanding “work IDs” for entry.

TV camera crews were assembled in a packed media area pointed down Wall Street toward the New York Stock Exchange, which protesters had planned to try to disrupt, but which they ultimately got nowhere near because of multiple NYPD barricades. So bored cameramen, who had been waiting around all morning for action (much of which ended up happening a few blocks away), turned to the Tabacco brothers.

That’s when I snapped the above photo. Each Tabacco brother was dressed more like a “Wall Street businessman” from central casting than an actual Wall Street businessman. They repeatedly said that occupiers were preventing them from getting to work; this seemed unlikely, as the police barricades were efficiently sorting protesters from actual office workers.

I asked them the name of the company they worked for a few times. They refused to say.

It all seemed like a pre-planned stunt designed exclusively for the benefit of the media, rather than any kind of organic counter-protest. And, as a media stunt, it worked remarkably well.

The story was picked up by multiple regional and national media outlets, as well as the Daily Mail. In one interview, Derek Tabacco referred to the occupiers as “these animals.” In another, John Tabacco referred to himself as “a member of the 53 percent,” a reference to the right-wing campaign around those Americans who “pay more in federal income taxes than they receive back in deductions or credits.”

John Tabacco was promptly brought in to Fox News for a sit-down interview with Neil Cavuto.

Note that in the Fox interview Tabacco said he and his brother had “about 50 small business owners” who were there — or there in spirit — standing against the Occupy protesters.

In my interview with Tabacco, he said he had “about 25 business owners” backing the effort. “It started very organically between small business organizers,” he told me.

Who are they? I asked.

“A lot of them are reluctant to stand in the street with a homemade sign. But we had their support,” Tabacco said. He later identified just two supporters in an email: John Bostany of the Bostany Law Firm and Robert Steffanelli of Legend Securities.

Here is what I have been able to piece together about John and Derek Tabacco’s history:

* In April, John Tabacco’s local talk radio show, “Family Business,” was cancelled just two weeks after it launched after he invited on Drita D’avanzo of the reality show “Mob Wives,” and she repeatedly used profanity on the air. Another “Mob Wives” star Tabacco had on the show, Renee Graziano, also swore on air.

* Tabacco has also been involved in an online TV show called “Street Cents” that touched on mob themes. Here he is interviewing Victoria Gotti. The show now appears to be defunct.

* In 2009 John Tabacco mounted an unsuccessful bid for city council from Staten Island. He later acknowledged to the New York Post that he had received the endorsement of the Independence Party in the race after making a $10,000 loan to the party chairman’s wife. The episode of (in the Post’s words) “possible pay-to-play conduct” was brought to the newspaper by Tabacco himself for reasons that are not entirely clear.

* In 2010, Tabacco attempted to get on an Independence Party primary ballot to challenge U.S. Rep. Michael McMahon — but failed to submit enough valid signatures. The McMahon camp challenged the signatures, alleging that Tabacco had submitted “sheets of names all signed by the same person.” The Board of Elections ruled against Tabacco, finding that he had not collected the 497 signatures needed to get on the ballot. In response, Tabacco filed a lawsuit to appeal the ruling – but then withdrew it without explanation.

* John Tabacco has been a regular guest on Neil Cavuto’s Fox News show going back to 2008. Transcripts frequently identify him as a “Fox business analyst.” Tabacco tells me he is a “contributor to Fox and CNBC” but he is not paid.

* John Tabacco is the CEO of LocateStock. According to its website, the firm’s “Matador Platform” will help you “optimize hedging strategies by getting locates on hard-to-borrow securities.” The site also throws around words like “revolutionary” and “unique” to describe its product. For a company offering “exclusive real time access to a global pool of securities,” the website has remarkably low production values and features a lot of random Wall Street-themed stock art. In an interview Tabacco told me the company provides tools that allow “retail traders” to engage in short-selling.

* Tabacco made “his nationwide television debut” on the VH1 series “My Coolest Years” in 2005, according to one of his bios.

* The brothers have a local sports show, which is produced by “Tabacco TV.” In this episode, they box each other at a gym in Brooklyn.

* John said his brother Derek is the CEO of FreeTheFan.com, described as “a competitive social community for sports fans.” But the site appears to be defunct, and its Twitter feed, which has six followers, was last updated in 2009.

* UPDATE: Derek Tabacco also appeared on season 4 of the Bravo reality show “Millionaire Matchmaker.”

So what’s next for the Tabaccos? It sounds like they’re going to ride the anti-Occupy theme for as long as possible. There is now a “wallstfighters” Twitter feed.

“We had a strategy session last night,” Tabacco told me. “We have a couple strategic counter-protests coming up.” But, he added, they’re not ready to reveal the details.

More Bad News for the GOP TeaBag DoucheBags

2011-11-18T14:02:00.000-08:00

From The Washington Post -- November 18, 2011:

Obama outpaces GOP rivals and his own 2008 results in small donations

By Dan Eggen and T.W. Farnam

Even with low approval ratings and an uncertain path to reelection, President Obama is exceeding expectations in one area: His campaign is doing far better at attracting grass-roots financial support this year than his GOP rivals or his own historic effort in 2008, according to new contribution data.

The sheer scale of small donations, totaling $56 million for Obama and his party, has surprised many Democratic strategists and fundraisers, who feared that a sour economy would make it difficult for Obama to raise money from disenchanted and cash-strapped voters.

President Obama’s reelection campaign and DNC together raised $70 million in the third quarter of 2011. Outside of fundraising, the president is ramping up support for his reelection with his visits and talk about focusing on the economy.

A Washington Post analysis shows that nearly half of his campaign contributions, and a quarter of the money he has raised for the Democratic Party, has come from donors giving less than $200. That’s much higher than it was four years ago, and far beyond what the best-funded Republicans have managed.

Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, the leading GOP fundraisers, have instead embraced a traditional approach, focusing on big-dollar contributors who can fill the coffers without the high overhead costs of a campaign targeting small donations, the analysis shows.

Business executive Herman Cain has had more success with small donors, who have helped propel a surge in contributions to the candidate in recent weeks.

A grass-roots-oriented campaign presents both opportunities and risks for Obama, who is already weighed down by the stagnant economy, a glum public mood and signs of disaffection among Democrats.

The focus is rooted in the belief that donors, even if they only give a few dollars, are more committed to their candidate than those who have not written a check.

“The number of small donations shows who it is that supports this president and who put him there,” said Katherine Hahn, a self-described “mom and artist” from Evergreen, Colo., who gives Obama $25 a month. “It wasn’t the powers that be so much as it was people like me.”

But relying on donors of modest means could limit the fundraising ability of the president, who is already showing signs of struggling to bring in big donations. Fewer than 6,000 contributors had given Obama $2,500 or more through September.

That compares with more than 8,000 maxed-out donors to Romney. And if Romney wins the nomination, the same people will be able to give much larger amounts to his campaign and the Republican Party.

“We always knew we needed to build a broad-based support network, and we try not to rely too much on one thing,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in an interview. “Our experience is that people who give become volunteers, and people who volunteer become donors. We want to build a relationship with them.”

Republicans say their eventual nominee will have plenty of time to build widespread excitement after the primaries.

“The role of small donors is the same as large donors – to participate in our campaign community, one that is eager to replace President Obama with a new leader who can get our country back on track,” said Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul. She said 83 percent of Romney’s donors in the third quarter gave less than $250.

A central part of the Obama campaign’s grass-roots strategy is in swing districts such as Jefferson County, Colo., west of Denver. The county, home to Coors Brewing Co. and the Colorado School of Mines, leans Republican but went decisively for Obama in 2008.

In interviews with a cross-section of donors from the area, Hahn and others said they are backing Obama’s reelection, even if they are disappointed in some aspects of his presidency.

President Obama’s reelection campaign and DNC together raised $70 million in the third quarter of 2011. Outside of fundraising, the president is ramping up support for his reelection with his visits and talk about focusing on the economy.

“I think he’s trying very hard,” said retiree James Dunn of Wheat Ridge, who has given Obama $225 so far this cycle. “I am 86 years old and I have never seen such a concentration of lies against a decent man.”

Pat Angel, 71, of Morrison said she gives $25 to the president’s campaign when she can, with another $10 per month from her husband for the Democratic National Committee. Angel helps run the family business, Angels Bail Bonds, and also works full-time at Wal-Mart because she can’t afford to retire.

Despite her struggles, Angel remains loyal to Obama. “I honestly think he is the only hope,” she said. “When I look at the Republican slate I shudder.”

But there are also many donors who supported Obama in 2008 who haven’t returned. Michael Glode, 64, a registered Republican and medical professor in Golden, gave Obama $210 in 2008 — the first political donation of his life — but won’t do so again.

“His biggest mistake was not going directly to the American people with his oratory skills,” Glode said. “I’m pretty disappointed in American politics.”

This year, about 45 percent of the $90 million raised by Obama’s reelection campaign from April through September came from donors who each gave less than $200 in aggregate donations, according to The Post’s analysis of Federal Election Commission records. When money that Obama has helped raise for the DNC is included, the figure is 36 percent.

Either way, the share is higher than in 2008, when about a quarter of the $755 million raised directly for Obama’s campaign came from the smallest donors.

About 9 percent of the $32 million raised by Romney through September came from small donors; the figure for Perry, who raised $17 million, was 4 percent. Several other GOP candidates have notably high percentages of small donors, but their overall fundraising is modest.

One surprise for the Obama campaign was the discovery that, out of more than 1 million donors so far this year, half had never given to him before.

Supporters who make revolving donations get special T-shirts, monthly conference calls with Messina and other goodies as part of “Team 2012,” an effort with more than a passing resemblance to a public-radio fundraising drive. Donors who give as little as $3 can enroll to win dinner with the president.

The campaign has also mounted a program to contact every 2008 supporter by phone or in person, and an effort to recruit students and other young adults.

“The fundamental thing that we believe, and that we bring to all the work online and offline, is that people take action on behalf of a campaign because they feel an emotional connection with it,” said Teddy Goff, the campaign’s digital director. “We are much more focused on how we can give people access to the campaign than on thinking up new tricks or gimmicks.”

The T-GOP Is Insane

2011-11-18T06:54:00.000-08:00

From The Washington Post -- November 17, 2011:

How Republican conformity is ruining politics

By Michael Gerson

In the GOP’s whack-a-mole primary process, Newt Gingrich is about to get thumped by conservatives.

The cause is likely to be climate policy. It is not only that Gingrich appeared next to Nancy Pelosi in a 2008 commercial calling for “action to address climate change.” A year earlier, Gingrich argued, “The evidence is sufficient that we should move toward the most effective possible steps to reduce carbon-loading in the atmosphere.” To that end, he supported “mandatory carbon caps combined with a trading system, much like we did with sulfur.”

At the time, Gingrich’s position was not unique. John McCain had been the Senate sponsor of cap-and-trade legislation. His primary GOP opponents in the 2008 presidential campaign, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, had endorsed greenhouse gas limits in various forms. When Tim Pawlenty was criticized for similar views this year, he noted, “Everybody in the race — at least the big names in the race — embraced climate change or cap-and-trade at one point or another. Every one of us.”

There is a reason for such mass heresy: because the case once made by Gingrich and the others is perfectly reasonable. Conservatives have been open to market-oriented restrictions on pollution since Milton Friedman talked of “effluent taxes.” Recent studies, using increasingly refined methodologies, have confirmed a long-term rise in global temperatures and made a strong case for the contributing role of carbon emissions. In addition, many national security conservatives are disturbed by the massive U.S. payments to hostile, oil-producing nations.

But Gingrich, in the manner of Cultural Revolution self-criticism, has now called his appearance with Pelosi the “dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years.” Some conservatives may dispute this claim, arguing that Gingrich’s previous support for the individual health insurance mandate and the Medicare prescription drug benefit are rivals. (Never mind that Medicare now provides medicines to seniors at 41 percent less than was initially projected.)

It is now a familiar pattern — the scandal of sanity. Rick Perry is criticized for supporting discounted higher education for the children of undocumented workers, as though the ignorance of the innocent is an obviously superior policy option. Herman Cain is attacked for supporting a TARP bailout that prevented a national panic. “Owning a part of the major banks in America is not a bad thing,” wrote Cain in 2008. “We could make a profit while solving a problem.” Which is precisely what happened. For all its (considerable) flaws, Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health reform was based on ideas that originated in conservative think tanks.

There is room for debate on all these issues. Cap-and-trade may be an innovative, market-oriented solution or an easily gamed mess. Romneycare may be a good idea badly applied or an approach doomed to failure. But these are not the arguments we’ve seen. Instead, candidates are accused of political heresy. Then they apologize — some eagerly, others reluctantly. Movement conservatives have created a box of orthodoxy so small that even the most conservative candidates must engage in undignified contortions just to fit.

Some of this is just the nature of primaries, in which audiences applaud for purity. But there are other factors. Over the past few decades, the GOP has become a more conservative party. The development of self-consciously conservative media — on radio, cable and the Internet — has provided a welcome alternative to the bias of the mainstream media. It has also simplified many public debates into a contest of ideological teams — a tendency shared by self-consciously liberal media. Candidates, pundits and voters are called to join one side or the other, doing nothing that will give comfort to the enemy. But ideological conformity easily becomes cultural isolation — the development of assumptions, language and views disconnected from the broad middle of American life.

Many political activists have adopted a form of fundamentalism: the belief that a return to power can be achieved only by a return to purity. This is particularly unproductive during a presidential primary. It narrows the range of qualifications — elevating fealty above other, important public virtues such as stable judgment, competence, relevant experience and integrity.

And this approach makes for bad politics. There is a reason that the purest candidates are often not the strongest candidates. Appealing, successful politicians have usually built unexpected governing coalitions, engaged in creative ideological outreach and shown intellectual independence.

A political party that is serious about winning does not punish candidates for their virtues.

9 Demands of the 99%

2011-11-17T22:27:00.000-08:00

1. Tax Wall Street for gambling with our money. Pass the financial speculation tax.

2. Support education. Put teachers back in classrooms and ease the crippling burden of student debt.

3. Keep working families in their homes. Pass a mortgage relief plan that puts the needs of homeowners above the greed of mortgage bankers.

4. End too big to fail. Rein in the big banks NOW and hold the people who caused the financial crisis accountable.

5. Fair share of taxes from the 1%. End the Bush tax cuts for the 1% and close corporate tax loopholes.

6. Businesses should invest in jobs. Corporations must stop sitting on their profits and start hiring again here in America.

7. Extend unemployment insurance. Millions of Americans are still out of work, and unemployment insurance is a vital lifeline.

8. End corporate control of our democracy. Abolish "corporate personhood" and restore full voting rights to real people.

9. Add Your Own

The Republican Congress Has Occupied America -- Get Rid of the T-GOP

2011-11-16T05:09:00.000-08:00

From The Pen -- November 16, 2011:

The Designated Meanies On The Debt Super Committee

Nothing would please us more than seeing the Democrats in Congress
finally stand up for the other 99% of we the people and reap the
rewards of that in the next election. And yet all signs are they are
pathologically determined to do the opposite, and only your voices
can shift the tide. The good news is that the Occupy Wall Street
movement has grown into a force they have been compelled to address.
But first the action page:

Hands Off Social Security & Medicare Action Page:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1081.php

It is simply despicable that anybody is even talking about chopping
down Social Security and Medicare, when the whole, entire cause of
our current budgetary mess consists of endless foreign wars of
aggression and more and more tax breaks for those who least need it.
Instead they want to take away from those who have the least what
little they have.

We happen to believe the only purpose of the Debt Super Committee,
like the Gang of Six before it, was so that members of Congress could
try to wash their hands of whatever reprehensible proposal might come
out of there, as if to say, "It's just those 12 meanies who made us
do it." We hold each and every member of Congress responsible for
whatever damage they do.

Some of the things they have thrown out in all seriousness, like
cutting funds for preventive care, are utter policy lunacy. Every
dollar cut from preventive care now can only cost much more in
medical costs in the future. They are even talking about decimating
what are called "durable medical equipment" funds. In other words,
take the crutches away from Grandma and wheelchairs from the
handicapped. What do you have to say about that?

Hands Off Social Security & Medicare Action Page:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1081.php

Students of history will know that the only reason the original New
Deal even happened at all was that people were in the streets.
Remember Hooverville? Well, there are people in the streets now, and
they are going to stay there.

FDR was no inherent altruist, himself a patrician if the truth be
known. But as a politician he recognized that the American people
were at their limit, just as they are today. He said, "Make me do
it." That is the only way any change for the better can happen now.
YOU must demand that the politicians pay heed, and not just settle
for weak bleatings about good intentions, never to be fulfilled..

And after you submit the action page you are welcome to request a
free copy one of the new "Occupy America" bumper stickers. Please
note we HAVE corrected the minor bug in the form that was affecting
certain IE browsers, and thank you for all your helpful reports. So
if the form did not work for you before please try again, because it
will definitely go through now.

Occupy America bumper stickers:
http://www.peaceteam.net/all_bumper_stickers.php

Since the Occupy Wall Street movement has truly spread nationwide,
what we did was combine the word "Occupy" in big letters with a map
of the US fashioned from a billowing flag. It's bold, it's symbolic,
and you can have one for no charge, not even shipping, if you just
submit the form above now.

Fox News Lies!

2011-11-15T22:46:00.000-08:00

From Media Matters for America -- November 15, 2011:

Whitewash: Fox Host Tries To Dismiss "Fox News Lies" Chants

Following a live report from New York City's Zuccotti Park in which protesters chanted "Fox News lies," Fox Business host Gerri Willis claimed that Fox is simply "trying to cover the story just like everybody else." However, Fox hosts and contributors have pushed lies, smears, and attacks about the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Fox Business Host "Angry" At "Fox News Lies" Chants From Occupy Wall Street

Willis: "I Have No Idea What They're Talking About." After airing a live report from Fox Business reporter Adam Shapiro during which a crowd at Zuccotti Park chanted "Fox News lies," Willis responded: "I have no idea what they're talking about. We're trying to cover the story just like everybody else there." She continued: "Every time I hear a crowd chant that, I get really, really angry, because Fox News -- just like everybody else -- is trying to cover the story." [Fox Business, The Willis Report, 11/15/11]

But Fox News Repeatedly Aired Lies, Smears, Attacks About Protesters

Fox News: "ACORN Playing Behind Scenes Role In 'Occupy' Movement." FoxNews.com claimed that ACORN, which disbanded in November 2010, is playing a "behind [the] scenes role" in Occupy Wall Street. Fox alleged that the group New York Communities for Change (NYCC) -- which is led by a former ACORN official -- is paying people to join protests and collecting money to fund OWS activities. [FoxNews.com, 10/26/11, via Media Matters]

Fox & Friends Promoted "We Are The 53 Percent." While Fox was baselessly claiming the Occupy Wall Street protesters do not pay taxes, Fox & Friends hyped a counter movement launched by CNN contributor and conservative pundit Erick Erickson, a website called, "We are the 53 percent." [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 10/11/11]

Special Report's Baier Claimed Protests Were Supported By Ayatollah Khamenei And Hugo Chavez. Special Report anchor Bret Baier claimed that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez "threw his support behind protesters" at Occupy Wall Street. A day later, he also claimed that the protests had "elicit[ed] support" from Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei. [Fox News, Special Report with Bret Baier, 10/11/11; 10/12/11, via Media Matters]

Fox's Trotta On Occupy Wall Street Website: "What You Will Read Is The Ravings Of What Sounds Like The Unabomber." On the October 8 edition of Fox News' America's News HQ, Fox News contributor Liz Trotta claimed, "I advise anybody who has a sense of humor left about this to go to OccupyWallStreet.com, and what you will read is the ravings of what sounds like the Unabomber. ... [I]t's certainly better going down there and carrying signs than going out and hitting the pavement for a job." [Fox News, America's News HQ, 10/8/11, via Media Matters]

Hannity Graphic Labeled Protesters "Lunatics Of The Left Wing." During the September 30 edition of Fox News' Hannity, an on-screen graphic aired while the co-hosts discussed the protests, reading, "Lunatics of the left wing".

Fox's Watters: Wall Street Protesters Are "The Sludge" Of "Every Left-Wing Cause." On the September 30 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, Fox News producer Jesse Watters said of the protests: "I think if you put every single left-wing cause into a blender and hit power, this is the sludge you'd get. And it's basically anti-capitalism. And they want to redistribute the wealth. But if you eliminate capitalism, there is no wealth to redistribute." [Fox News, The O'Reilly Factor, 9/30/11, via Media Matters]

Guilfoyle: Protesters Have "Absolutely No Purpose Or Focus" And Are "Just Looking To ... Dirty The Streets." On the September 30 edition of Fox News' Hannity, Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle said of the protests: "It's like Woodstock meets Burning Man meets people with absolutely no purpose or focus in life. No wonder, they have nothing but free time to be down there. They make up a slogan or a cause as they go along. And they are just looking to, like, go out there and dirty the streets. And they really don't have any, like, idea about what they are doing there." [Fox News, Hannity, 9/30/11, via Media Matters]

Kilmeade: Protesters "Sit In Their Own Squalor All Day." On the October 11 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, Kilmeade claimed Occupy Wall Street protesters "sit in their own squalor all day." [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 10/11/11, via Media Matters]

Bolling: Occupy Wall Street Protesters "Do Seem Like Petulant Little Children." On the October 10 edition of Fox News' Your World, guest host Eric Bolling hosted syndicated columnist Star Parker to attack the Occupy Wall Street protests. Bolling introduced the segment by claiming that the protesters "do seem like petulant little children." He then asked: "How about going out and trying to find a job instead?" [Fox News, Your World, 10/10/11, via Media Matters]

Crowley: Protesters Are "Useful Idiots Who Probably Haven't Paid Much In Taxes Their Whole Life." On the October 10 edition of Fox News' Your World, Fox News contributor Monica Crowley called the protesters "useful idiots who probably haven't paid much in taxes their whole life, have no concept -- and all they know is, 'Oh, profit is a four-letter word, corporations and rich folks -- millionaires and billionaires are evil, they need to be taxed more.' As if they don't pay enough." [Fox News, Your World, 10/10/11, via Media Matters]

Johnson: "I Would Think" Wall Street Protesters "Are Deluded In A Lot Of Ways." On the October 3 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, Fox News legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr. attacked the Occupy Wall Street protesters, claiming, "Clearly, I would think these folks are deluded in a lot of ways and probably provide the best argument for national service for 18-year-olds that we have ever seen." Johnson later said of the protests: "I don't know what it is. I don't think they know what it is. But it's costing Americans millions of dollars in tax dollars in order to arrest them."

Crowds Also Chanted "Fox News Lies" During Wisconsin Labor Protests

Any Member of the 99% Who Votes for a Republican Is Committing Financial Suicide

2011-11-15T21:30:00.000-08:00

From The Progress Report -- November 15, 2011:

This isn’t the end of the 99 Percent Movement, or the fight for an economy that works for everyone.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka sums it up pretty well:

The 99% is undaunted. Occupy Wall Street’s message already has created a new day. This movement has created a seismic shift in our national debate—from austerity and cuts to jobs, inequality and our broken economic system.

None of these facts changed overnight, and the 99 Percent Movement will continue to demand an economy that works for everyone:

The top 1 percet of Americans still own 40 percent of our country’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent owns only 7 percent.

The richest 1 percent earned one out of every four dollars in 2007. Thirty years earlier, the richest only made one out of every 11 dollars.

One in four millionaires pays a lower tax rate than 10 million middle-income Americans.

Fourteen million Americans are unemployed.

Corporations are sitting on $2 trillion in cash – more cash than at any time in nearly a half century – instead of hiring more employees.

Republicans Hate The Truth

2011-11-14T10:46:00.000-08:00

Paul Krugman to Paul Ryan: "The Truth Hurts" -- November 10, 2011

By Paul Krugman -- Op Ed

During a recent speech, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, expressed outrage over what President Obama has been saying lately.

“Just last week, the president told a crowd in North Carolina that Republicans are in favor of, quote, ‘dirtier air, dirtier water and less people with health insurance,’ ” Mr. Ryan said at a gathering at The Heritage Foundation on Oct. 26. “Can you think of a pettier way to describe sincere disagreements between the two parties on regulation and health care?”

Just for the record: Why is this petty? Why is it anything but a literal description of Republican proposals to weaken environmental regulation and repeal the Affordable Care Act?

I mean, to the extent that the G.O.P. has a coherent case on environmental regulation, it is that the economic payoff from weaker regulation would more than compensate for the dirtier air and water.

Is anyone really claiming that less regulation won’t mean more pollution?

And Republicans have not proposed anything that would make up for the loss of the measures in the Affordable Care Act that would lead to more people being insured.

Let me also point out that whatever else you think of it, Romneycare — which is essentially the same as the Affordable Care Act — clearly has sharply reduced the number of uninsured people in Massachusetts.

So Mr. Ryan is outraged — outraged — that Mr. Obama is offering a wholly accurate description of his party’s platform.

Let me add that this illustrates a point that many commenters here don’t seem to get: Criticism of policy proposals is not the same thing as an ad hominem attack.

If I say that Paul Ryan’s mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries, that’s ad hominem. If I say that his plan would hurt millions of people and that he’s not being honest about the numbers, that’s harsh, but not ad hominem.

The GOP Candidates are Reality-Challenged

2011-11-14T04:58:00.000-08:00

From The Daily Beast -- Nov. 14, 2011:

GOP Debate Showed Candidates' Reality Gap on Important Issues

By Peter Beinart

In Saturday’s GOP debate, candidates argued for bombing Iran and staying longer in Afghanistan, ignoring the threat of Asian economic power, the global financial crisis, and the financial constraints on U.S. foreign policy.

It was hard to know who were worse at Saturday night’s Republican presidential debate, the candidates or the moderators. With American and European economic might in near-collapse, and the world witnessing a once-a-millennium power shift from west to east, Scott Pelley of CBS News and Major Garrett of National Journal waited until the debate’s closing minutes to ask about the global financial crisis—and when Jon Huntsman and Rick Perry tried to answer, Pelley cut each of them off.

The exaggeration of the threat America faces from jihadist terrorism and the minimization of the threat America faces from Asian economic power is one of the most disastrous legacies of Bush foreign policy. And listening to Pelley and Garrett—and their overwhelming focus on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran (China was mentioned briefly; India not at all)—was to re-inhabit the world according to Dick Cheney, not the world in which America actually lives.

Then there were the candidate’s answers. In their debates over domestic policy, the Republican presidential contenders describe America as a bankrupt nation, too poor to afford even the meager welfare state we have. It would be nice if someone introduced those candidates to the folks who debated last Saturday night.

When Republicans discuss foreign policy, something miraculous happens: America’s economic constraints disappear. Oh, sure, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich called for slashing foreign aid, the foreign policy equivalent of Amtrak. But when it comes to defense spending, which costs nearly 20 times as much, and the overseas commitments that have sent that spending skyrocketing since September 11, you would have thought America was flush with cash. Perry and Herman Cain criticized Obama’s timetable for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan; Michele Bachmann said Obama had sent too few to begin with; Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich ruled out negotiations with the Taliban; Romney and Rick Santorum declared themselves willing to bomb Iran.

How might war with Tehran—and the resulting disruption of the world’s oil supply—affect America’s economy? Who knows? The question never came up. What are the budgetary implications of revoking Obama’s timetable for Afghan troop withdrawal and refusing to negotiate a political settlement with the Taliban, thus closing off the only plausible avenue for ending the war? Why should the U.S. continue to spend $100 billion a year to fight a war in one of the poorest and weakest nations on earth when mammoth, prosperous nations increasingly threaten our preeminence? And how might it affect our chances of victory in Afghanistan if we go to war with Iran, its powerful neighbor to the east? Neither the moderators nor the candidates thought any of these questions important enough to even raise.

To listen to all the GOP presidential candidates--except Huntsman and Ron Paul— was to witness the power of inertia. When George W. Bush laid out his “war on terror” strategy after 9/11, he built it upon two premises. First, that “radical Islam” was as great a threat as Nazi Germany and the U.S.S.R. had been. Second, that by overthrowing Iraq and Afghanistan and pressuring authoritarian U.S. allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the U.S. could bring liberty to the Middle East, thus sapping militant Islam’s support.

Saturday night, the Republican candidates barely even bothered to rehearse Bush’s arguments about the extent of the Islamist threat. None of the Republican candidates embraced Bush’s democracy promotion agenda, and Cain and Gingrich denounced Obama for helping oust Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, thus repudiating Bush’s democratization policies in the process. And yet the top-tier candidates largely embraced the policies—in favor of an open-ended commitment in Afghanistan, in favor of war to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and in favor of waterboarding and Guantanamo Bay—from which Bush’s “war on terror” derived. Why? Because it’s a dangerous world and America must always lead. It was the right-wing foreign policy equivalent of Muzak.

Even many of the Republican Party’s most loyal supporters don’t find the candidates’ neoconservative belligerence convincing.
The debate contained only three interesting features. First, Huntsman, whose substantive, thoughtful, honest answers to the few questions the moderators threw his way made him look like Yo-Yo Ma at an audition for America’s Got Talent. Second, Ron Paul, who regardless of whether you agree with all his policy views, at least tried to reconcile his foreign policy perspective with his support for limited government at home. And third, the audience, which, for the most part, remained mum when candidates waxed hawkish on Afghanistan and Iran and clapped wildly when Paul said the U.S. should go not to war without congressional approval, when Huntsman said the U.S. should do its nation-building here at home, when Perry and Gingrich denounced foreign aid, when Gingrich threatened to reduce U.S. funding for the U.N., when Paul rejected U.S. intervention in Syria, and when Romney proposed tariffs against China.

Some of this simply may have been Paul’s powerful-lunged backers. But listening to the entire debate, it was hard to escape the sense that in the struggle to determine whether Barack Obama is destroying America by engaging too much in the world or too little, grassroots conservatives increasingly want less commitment. According to the Pew Research Center, in fact, the percentage of Republicans who think scaling back U.S. military commitments should be a top priority has risen from 29 percent in 2008 to 44 percent today. Even many of the Republican Party’s most loyal supporters, in other words, don’t find the candidates’ neoconservative belligerence convincing. Too bad they weren’t moderating the debate last Saturday night

The 1% Are the Very Best Destroyers of Wealth the World Has Ever Seen

2011-11-12T07:19:00.000-08:00

From Common Dreams -- November 12, 2011

Published on Tuesday, November 8, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

The 1% Are the Very Best Destroyers of Wealth the World Has Ever Seen

Our common treasury in the last 30 years has been captured by industrial psychopaths. That's why we're nearly bankrupt

by George Monbiot

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.

The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. "The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill." Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.

Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin. When Kahneman tried to point this out, they blanked him. "The illusion of skill … is deeply ingrained in their culture."

So much for the financial sector and its super-educated analysts. As for other kinds of business, you tell me. Is your boss possessed of judgment, vision and management skills superior to those of anyone else in the firm, or did he or she get there through bluff, bullshit and bullying?

In a study published by the journal Psychology, Crime and Law, Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon tested 39 senior managers and chief executives from leading British businesses. They compared the results to the same tests on patients at Broadmoor special hospital, where people who have been convicted of serious crimes are incarcerated. On certain indicators of psychopathy, the bosses's scores either matched or exceeded those of the patients. In fact, on these criteria, they beat even the subset of patients who had been diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders.

The psychopathic traits on which the bosses scored so highly, Board and Fritzon point out, closely resemble the characteristics that companies look for. Those who have these traits often possess great skill in flattering and manipulating powerful people. Egocentricity, a strong sense of entitlement, a readiness to exploit others and a lack of empathy and conscience are also unlikely to damage their prospects in many corporations.

In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded. Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you're likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you're likely to go to business school.

This is not to suggest that all executives are psychopaths. It is to suggest that the economy has been rewarding the wrong skills. As the bosses have shaken off the trade unions and captured both regulators and tax authorities, the distinction between the productive and rentier upper classes has broken down. Chief executives now behave like dukes, extracting from their financial estates sums out of all proportion to the work they do or the value they generate, sums that sometimes exhaust the businesses they parasitise. They are no more deserving of the share of wealth they've captured than oil sheikhs.

The rest of us are invited, by governments and by fawning interviews in the press, to subscribe to their myth of election: the belief that they are possessed of superhuman talents. The very rich are often described as wealth creators. But they have preyed on the earth's natural wealth and their workers' labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.

What has happened over the past 30 years is the capture of the world's common treasury by a handful of people, assisted by neoliberal policies which were first imposed on rich nations by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. I am now going to bombard you with figures. I'm sorry about that, but these numbers need to be tattooed on our minds. Between 1947 and 1979, productivity in the US rose by 119%, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population rose by 122%. But from 1979 to 2009, productivity rose by 80%, while the income of the bottom fifth fell by 4%. In roughly the same period, the income of the top 1% rose by 270%.

In the UK, the money earned by the poorest tenth fell by 12% between 1999 and 2009, while the money made by the richest 10th rose by 37%. The Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, climbed in this country from 26 in 1979 to 40 in 2009.

In his book The Haves and the Have Nots, Branko Milanovic tries to discover who was the richest person who has ever lived. Beginning with the loaded Roman triumvir Marcus Crassus, he measures wealth according to the quantity of his compatriots' labour a rich man could buy. It appears that the richest man to have lived in the past 2,000 years is alive today. Carlos Slim could buy the labour of 440,000 average Mexicans. This makes him 14 times as rich as Crassus, nine times as rich as Carnegie and four times as rich as Rockefeller.

Until recently, we were mesmerised by the bosses' self-attribution. Their acolytes, in academia, the media, thinktanks and government, created an extensive infrastructure of junk economics and flattery to justify their seizure of other people's wealth. So immersed in this nonsense did we become that we seldom challenged its veracity.

This is now changing. On Sunday evening I witnessed a remarkable thing: a debate on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral between Stuart Fraser, chairman of the Corporation of the City of London, another official from the corporation, the turbulent priest Father William Taylor, John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network and the people of Occupy London. It had something of the flavour of the Putney debates of 1647. For the first time in decades – and all credit to the corporation officials for turning up – financial power was obliged to answer directly to the people.

It felt like history being made. The undeserving rich are now in the frame, and the rest of us want our money back.

Living The American Dream

2011-11-10T04:44:00.000-08:00

I just Received the Following Correspondence from "Anonymous", and I Believe it is So Fantastic that I Must Make it a Separate Post of its Own for All to See. CJP

So as the title says I absolutely cannot stand working. I'm soon to be 32 years old and have pretty much been working since I was 11 years old(paper route) with a few breaks over the years. Most recently I was unemployed for a lil over 2 years until a neighbor got tired of seeing me in the neighborhood during the day and gave me a job. This was back in April of this year and I am still employed with him at the moment. Prior to this job I was doing electrical construction. Now I am doing carpentry work, building, remodeling. At first I was thankful to be getting back to work even though I would have been happy if I never found another job ever again. Now I feel like I'm trapped in hell.

I'm working harder than I have ever worked before in my life making the same hourly wage I worked for when I was 24 minus benefits(no bennys at all). At first I didn't mind the job as I was actually doing something productive, now I can't stand it. I have to force myself out of bed in the morning and at night I sit in pain thinking about waking up the next morning. My boss is an absolute slave driver, treats and talks to me like I'm 12 years old. ABSOLUTE HELL. Friday can't come soon enough but I can't even look forward to Friday because now I'm expected to work Saturdays for straight time(I'm paid under the table and he doesn't pay time and a half for overtime). He doesn't even ask, just expects me to work. 2 weeks ago it was Friday morning and we were on our way to the job when he looked at me and said you're working tomorrow. I said it ain't happening as I had stuff to do and he started screaming at me basically saying that from that day forward to plan on working Saturdays with no exceptions.

I can't take it anymore. Not just this job but working in general. When I think of work I think of slavery. At 32 I still have NO CLUE what I want to do with my life. I don't have much of an education other than a high school diploma and some trade school. I have no interest in going back to school and piling on thousands of dollars in debt. I don't even wanna wake up anymore if this is how the next 40 years are gonna be.

I try to tough it out but I'm just getting to nerves end. I'm in debt and have been hammering away at paying off my last balance. I try to tell myself that once I'm free of this debt and save up a little emergency fund I can tell my boss to screw and be done with the job. I get out of my car everyday at the shop repeating to myself "end game.......end game" so I can muster up the strength to keep walking to the shop and not turn around and get back into my car and drive home.

I keep being told to look for another job if I don't like this one.........find something you would like to do. Told that "I HAVE to work" and there are no other options other than that. I don't want to be a SLAVE. I don't to be like everyone else. The Jones'. No thanks. I'd rather sleep on a beach someplace and eat at soup kitchens rather than be trapped in a job I hate, up to my eyeballs in debt with a 30 year mortgage, car payments, nagging wife, and crying kids(the american dream?). That's not me.

I dunno what to do. How to keep my head up and look forward. I'm probably not even making any sense to anybody and just ranting but I needed to get this out other than letting it build up inside. Arggggggggggggggggggg * * * What do I do? No matter what job I take on I will be in the same spot after a month or 2 hating life.

The Occupy Movement Swamped the Tea Party Pygmies Last Night

2011-11-09T05:22:00.000-08:00

From The Daily Beast -- November 9, 2011:

Election Day Backlash

By John Avlon

Voters rejected Mississippi’s anti-abortion ‘personhood’ amendment but chose a GOP governor, and struck down Ohio’s anti-union bill and part of Obama’s health-care reform. John Avlon on populist anger’s new direction. Plus, join The Daily Beast's live chat during tonight's GOP debate.

Swing voters asserted their independence on Election Day 2011, repudiating Republican ideological overreach in key votes but denying Democrats clear-cut victories heading into 2012.

In Mississippi, the anti-abortion “personhood” amendment to the state constitution was decisively defeated 58 percent to 42 percent, while at the same time Republican gubernatorial nominee Phil Bryant won 59 percent of the vote over Democrat Johnnie Dupree. The two votes are evidence of significant ticket-splitting, even in this bastion of the Bible belt—a recognition that some measures are simply too extreme, and Republicans do not automatically vote in lockstep with the religious right.

The wisdom of the effort to have fetuses declared full human beings was questioned by national right to life groups and even Jacksonville’s Catholic bishop as going too far and undercutting the long-term chances of overturning Roe v. Wade.

For those keeping score at home, the personhood amendment has now been rejected in three consecutive elections—Colorado in 2008 and 2010, and Mississippi in 2011. If it could not succeed in a low-turnout, off-cycle election in one of the most conservative states in the nation, this particular attempt to do an end run around Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose seems to have come to an end, though supporters will no doubt keep trying in other states.

In Ohio, Republican Gov. John Kasich’s collective bargaining reform was decisively defeated by a margin of 63 percent to 36 percent, marking a major victory for union forces in a test of their ability to get out the vote in advance of 2012.

In Ohio, Republican Governor John Kasich’s collective bargaining reform was decisively defeated by a margin of 62% to 37% - marking a major victory for union forces in a test of their ability to get out the vote in advance of 2012., Amy Sancetta / AP Photo

The Buckeye State’s public-sector collective-bargaining reform followed the same lines as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial measures. Advocates said they were necessary to rein in long-term costs, while opponents called them ideologically driven union-busting legislation. In the end, there seemed to be broad recognition that the Republicans had overreached with the scope of this legislation, even as specific portions of the bill—such as requiring government workers to pay in a bit more for their health care—retained broad-based support and may be resuscitated in the next legislative session.

But before Democrats break out the Champagne with talk about how the Ohio vote, and Kasich’s unpopularity, indicates the likelihood of a pivotal win in the state in 2012, the same voters rejected a key provision of President Obama's signature health-care legislation by a similar margin, giving Ohio the ability to opt out of the individual mandate. In other words, many swing voters who rejected the collective-bargaining reform also voted against the individual mandate. So while the union ground game has been successfully tested, opposition the health-care law has its nose under the swing-state tent. This is not a clear-cut liberal victory.

One final note on Ohio: these two ballot initiatives spurred more than $40 million in special-interest spending, including more than $30 million by unions seeking to overturn collective bargaining. Tip O’Neill’s maxim that all politics is local has been turned on its head—increasingly, all local politics is national.

To round out the swing-voter theme of the night, Kentucky reelected its Democratic governor, Steve Bashear, with 56 percent of the vote over his Republican rival, a conservative populist clown who spent the last week of his campaign trying to make Hinduism an election issue. This marks the second off-cycle gubernatorial election Democrats have won this fall in the Appalachian region, following West Virginia Democratic incumbent Earl Ray Tomblin’s win last month. These Democratic wins have not drawn much attention, despite running counter to conventional wisdom. Yes, these states are overwhelmingly likely to vote Republican in 2012, but the fact that Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul’s home state reelected a Democrat as governor shows that voters are not pulling the lever in lockstep with one party.

So what are the lessons that Election Night 2011 held for 2012?

First, the conservative landslide of 2010 has hit its limits and is beginning to inspire a broad-based backlash. The rejection of the personhood amendment and collective-bargaining reform reflects a pushback against ideological overreaches. It follows the current unpopularity of swing state Republican governors like John Kasich, Wisconsin’s Walker, and Florida’s Rick Scott, who narrowly rode the 2010 wave into office and quickly inspired buyer’s remorse. In the high turnout 2012 election, it is hard to see how experience with these executives will inspire these swing-state voters to endorse unified conservative control of Washington.

The fact that Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul’s home state re-elected a Democrat as governor shows that voters are not pulling the lever in lockstep with one party.
The union mobilization in Ohio does reflect a resurgent ability to find common cause with moderates and the middle class. But the rejection of the individual mandate makes the vote a split decision in the Buckeye State.

In past recessions, populist anger was directed at either big business or big government. Now voter anger is directed at both, and the two parties are having a hard time adjusting their left/right playbooks to account for this shift. The anti-incumbent narrative likewise failed last night, as Kentucky Democrat Beshear was easily reelected. Instead, there seem to be a consistent impulse to reject ideological overreach, a reassuring sign of rational ticket-splitting even in this overheated political environment. Neither party should feel false confidence heading into 2012.

America Has Been Bought and Sold By the U. S. Supreme Court -- Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie

2011-11-09T04:52:00.000-08:00

From The Washington Post -- November 8, 2011:

Stanching the flow of corporate dollars into campaigns

By Katrina Vanden Heuvel

In the first two quarters of 2011, President Obama raised $155 million dollars, an amount that is substantially more than what all the Republican candidates raised combined. And yet, thanks to the Roberts Supreme Court we don’t (and probably won’t ever) know who among the candidates has the most money behind their candidacy and where exactly that money comes from. This is just one of the many consequences of the Citizens United decision, a dramatic assault on American democracy that overturned more than a century of campaign finance precedent.

It’s been nearly two years since Chief Justice John Roberts and his band of right-wing brothers held that corporations had the same right as individuals to contribute directly to political campaigns and to participate in direct advocacy on their behalf. It was in that same case that the court decided such contributions should have no limits and need not be disclosed. Not only did the court turn the spigot on full blast; it hid its source almost entirely from view. Though the court upheld the concept of disclosure, the ruling allowed 501(c)(4) organizations to raise and spend unlimited corporate money — and those organizations, by law, need not disclose.

Of course, we saw some of the effect of Citizens United in 2010, when 15 percent of all money raised came from contributions that were only made possible by the court’s ruling. But as I noted in January, the midterm elections, because they were the first to be held in the wake of the ruling, were just a test case. Conservatives and their corporate allies were dipping their toes in the water, gauging the legal boundaries of the new landscape. They liked what they found. Now that they know there are essentially no boundaries to speak of, undisclosed money raised in unlimited sums has come to define how elections work.

For example, American Crossroads, the group headed by Karl Rove, intends to raise and spend $240 million for the Republican Party in 2012. Groups with the backing of the Koch brothers plan to raise an additional $200 million for the party. That represents substantially more than what John McCain spent on his entire candidacy in 2008. According to the New York Times, in addition to spending substantially on television advertising, these groups plan “to put far more money into voter contact, social media and grassroots outreach, hoping to buttress the [Republican] party’s own get-out-the-vote work.”

Of course, this kind of corporate overreach doesn’t just affect presidential politics. In just a six-week period, the 12-member supercommittee, appointed by Congress to cut the deficit by more than $1 trillion, has been lobbied by nearly 200 companies, which have raised untold sums to fill committee members’ coffers. In the 20 days in August after members were appointed, 19 major PACs contributed $83,000 to all but two members of the committee, according to the Sunlight Foundation. And that’s just the tip of an iceberg, much of which will remain hidden from view.

This toxicity seeps into state-level politics, too. In Ohio, where voters will have the chance to overturn anti-labor legislation today, millions of out-of-state dollars have poured in. There’s Liz Cheney’s group, Alliance for America’s Future, which according to the Nation’s John Nichols, is part of a shadowy network of campaign organizations, most of which do not have to disclose their donors. Cheney herself has said that her groups may spend as much as $15 million in the battle.

Because the Supreme Court has endorsed allowing the nation’s most powerful economic interests to manipulate electoral contests, there is little that Congress or the president can do to reverse what former Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold called a “lawless decision,” save for advocating a constitutional amendment. Fortunately, there is a wide array of public-interest groups ready to step up to the challenge; and amendments have been proposed by Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Maryland) and Sens. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.). These would once again give Congress the authority to limit how money is raised and spent in elections.

A constitutional amendment strategy is, as always, an incredibly difficult vehicle for reform, requiring approval from two-thirds of both chambers of Congress and 38 states. But as Jamin Raskin, professor of constitutional law at American University, points out “American citizens have repeatedly amended the Constitution to defend democracy when the Supreme Court acts in collusion with democracy’s enemies.” An amendment campaign can offer extraordinary value as a tool for education and mobilization, serving as the fuel for a powerful movement that can force the political class to shift its priorities.

With thousands already gathered around the country as part of Occupy Wall Street, an amendment strategy could sharpen their rallying cry. Many regional Occupy movements, including Occupy Minneapolis and Occupy Boulder, have already made a constitutional amendment ending corporate personhood one of their key demands.

Taking corporate money and power head-on is the goal of the We the People campaign, which aims to bring progressive media and advocacy groups together to challenge the Citizens United status quo (a campaign I started with Jim Hightower and Jay Harris). The idea behind We the People, and central to the many groups that are participating, is simple: When our nation arrives at a level of corruption we cannot bear, we shouldn’t.

Editor and Publisher of The Nation magazine, Vanden Heuvel writes a weekly column for The Washington Post.

The Garbage Offal Party (GOP) Is Deliberately Destroying Jobs and Destroying America to Defeat Obama

2011-11-01T16:05:00.000-07:00

The Daily Beast -- October 31, 2011:

LaHood: GOP Doesn't Care About Jobs

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, the lone Republican in Obama’s Cabinet, says his party wants to do nothing in Washington, and is more committed to defeating the president than creating jobs.

Democrats aren’t alone anymore in sounding the alarm about the paralysis gripping Congress these days. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a former congressman and the lone Republican in the Cabinet, says he believes his own party has put defeating President Obama ahead of creating jobs in America.

“I’ve been in Washington 35 years… and I’ve never seen a time when people have put their own personal political feelings over how we can get the economy moving,” LaHood told Newsweek and The Daily Beast in a wide-ranging interview.

Even in the wake of a national report declaring 200 bridges structurally deficient, including one that brings tens of thousands of commuters from Virginia into Washington each day, and one that spans the home states of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner, Republicans are expected to maintain their wall of opposition to a new round of stimulus spending on infrastructure. The infrastructure bill would put thousands of people to work, says LaHood, “but because of their own personal political feelings against the president, they don’t want to hand him a victory.”

LaHood has been dropping hints for some time about his frustration, and last week he unloaded in the interview.

“The crowd that was elected the last time not only came here to do nothing, they also came to put down the president,” he says. “And the way to put him down is not to give him any kind of opportunity to be successful.”

He faults the Tea Party freshmen, but doesn’t let the GOP leadership off the hook, recalling McConnell’s remark that his No. 1 goal was to defeat Obama.

“Republicans made a decision right after the election—don’t give Obama any victories. The heck with putting people to work, because we can score points,” LaHood says.

Republicans dispute their former colleague’s assessment. “The president spent all summer calling on Congress to pass the trade agreements, the trade adjustment assistance, the patent-reform bill, an extension of the highway bill and an extension of the FAA legislation. Guess what? All of those were passed on a bipartisan basis and signed into law,” says Don Stewart, McConnell’s spokesman.

A gregarious politician with a working man’s sensibility and a gift for putting people at ease, LaHood seems genuinely baffled by the sharp turn away from the across-the-aisle lawmaking he was accustomed to. Not that he’s a pushover when it comes to partisanship, he first won election in 1994 as part of the Gingrich revolution, though he points out that he was one of only three Republican members who won that year who didn’t sign Gingrich’s “Contract With America.”

There were sharp edges in that GOP freshman class, but the difference is, “They didn’t come here to do nothing. They came here to vote on things, to make change for the positive…That’s not the fact with this crowd [Tea Party].”

The then-newly Republican House passed legislation at such break-neck speed that a Saturday Night Live skit memorably spoofed Gingrich wielding the gavel with lookalike Chris Farley playing the speaker. Much of that legislation died in the Senate, but LaHood’s point is that the ’94 revolutionaries saw their role as shaping legislation with Bill Clinton in the White House, not just blocking the president’s proposals.

LaHood says in the 235-year history of the Republic, a few issues have always been bipartisan: agriculture, intelligence, and transportation. When he was a member of Congress representing Peoria, Ill., he recalls, two major transportation bills passed, each with almost 400 votes in the House, and more than 80 votes in the Senate. As a congressional staffer in 1982, he watched a conservative Republican president, Ronald Reagan, working to pull the country out of a recession, appeal to a Democratic Congress to pass a transportation bill. “And by the end of the year it was on his desk… that’s been the tradition of Congress.”

Pressed for a prediction as to how the current impasse will be resolved, LaHood says there is a debate inside the Republican caucus. One side is the Tea Party members “who want to do zero. They came here to do nothing, and they’ve done nothing.” The other side is much smaller, he concedes, as he names two of his former colleagues first elected, as he was, in ’94—Ohio Rep. Steve LaTourette and New Jersey Rep. Frank LoBiondo. Members of the moderate Republican Main Street Partnership, they’re pushing Boehner hard for a jobs bill, but the math is challenging. Subtract 87 Tea Partiers and for a bill to pass, it would have to attract a lot of Democrats.

“Now, whether that package includes enough for Democrats to vote for is obviously the $64,000 question,” says LaHood.

LaHood calls himself a proud Republican and doesn’t see a conflict between his party loyalty and being a member of the president’s team. He says he hasn’t been ostracized by his party, and that Republicans recognize that what he’s saying is the truth. “I don’t have any heartburn about any of this.” The way he looks at it, he has enjoyed a rare chance to serve at a high level on both major political teams, and while he doesn’t plan to run for elective office again, he clearly relishes the combat.

Though he declined to comment on the GOP presidential field, he did note at the end of the interview, in response to a question about whether Obama had gotten credit for bailing out the car companies, that if Mitt Romney had been president, GM and Chrysler might not be with us today. “And to turn your back on the American automobile industry is something people will remember in the next election.”

LaHood wants his colleagues to think about the consequences of those no votes.

The Republican War Against America -- Prevent Americans From Voting

2011-11-01T05:33:00.000-07:00

From The Progress Report -- October 31, 2011:

What States Are Doing To Restrict Voting Rights

By Scott Keyes

Perhaps the most nefarious legislation to pop up in states over the past year have been new laws intended to make it more difficult for people to vote. In an unprecedented move, Republican-controlled legislatures have passed a wide range of new bills in 2011 that will restrict, rather than broader, access to the ballot box. As a result, the Brennan Center for Justice estimates that as many as 5 million voters could be disenfranchised in the 2012 election. These new laws could be enough, Rolling Stone writes, “to shift the outcome in favor of the GOP.” Indeed, with poorer voters and minorities hit hardest by the new restrictions, Republicans could see an electoral windfall in 2012 simply by changing election rules. Thirty-one years after Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and father of the modern conservative movement, told a Dallas crowd that “I don’t want everybody to vote,” Republicans are making good on his call to making voting more difficult in the United States. Let’s take a closer look at the different ways in which states are make voting significantly more difficult.

WAR ON VOTING: Perhaps the most sweeping change in voting rights since the 2010 election is the proliferation of state laws requiring citizens to present photo identification in order to vote. First introduced in Indiana in 2008, new “photo ID” laws have the potential to disenfranchise 3.2 million voters, mostly poorer residents and minorities. This was plainly evident when a group of retired nuns in the Hoosier State were turned away from voting in the 2008 primary election because they lacked proper photo identification. Three years later, half a dozen new states have followed Indiana’s lead: Georgia, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin. Rather than each state independently concluding that they needed a photo ID law, model legislation was pushed to state lawmakers by the right-wing corporate front group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). In South Carolina alone, a new study warns that “nearly 180,000 voters – most of whom are elderly, student, minority or low-income voters – will be disenfranchised as a result of this discriminatory bill.” Meanwhile, a 96-year-old Tennessee woman named Dorothy Cooper attempted to comply with her state’s new photo ID law this month, only to be denied a voter ID because she didn’t have her marriage certificate. Cooper later told MSNBC that her experience now is worse than in the Jim Crow era. Unperturbed, some politicians like Herman Cain and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have thrown their support behind a national photo ID law. The war on voting isn’t just restricted to new photo ID laws; five states – Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia – have reduced their early voting periods as well.

RESTRICTING REGISTRATION: The war on voting isn’t simply resigned to Election Day. Instead, a number of Republican-controlled states are making it more difficult to even get registered in the first place. Such restrictions generally come in three forms: new requirements for individuals attempting to register, onerous regulations on non-profit organizations that conduct voter registration drives, and restrictions on when people are permitted to register. In Kansas and Alabama, those wishing to register to vote must now provide proof of citizenship first. Other states like Florida and Texas have opted to make it significantly harder for groups like the League of Women Voters to register people to vote. Project Vote said the new Florida law, which requires “complicated, onerous filings” including a mandate to turn in completed voter registration forms within 48 hours of completion, will “make it next to impossible” for nonprofit voting groups to continue their work. As a result, the League of Women Voters chose to suspend its voter registration drives in the Sunshine State. Michigan is currently considering a bill similar to Florida’s, but with just a 24-hour window to submit voter registration forms. In Maine, the Republican-controlled legislature has taken a different path, choosing to repeal the state’s 38-year-old law allowing citizens to register to vote at the polls on Election Day. The law worked remarkably well for decades, making Maine the top state in 2010 voter turnout without benefiting either particular party. Fortunately, the repeal of Election Day Registration is now subject to a citizen’s veto and will come up for a vote on Tuesday, Nov. 8.

PHANTOM MENACE OF FRAUD: Conservatives’ justification for the new restrictions on voting rights is that they are necessary to head off voter fraud. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus underscored this argument, claiming that non-profit voter organizations like ACORN submitted 400,000 fraudulent registrations in 2008. This zeal to restrict voting rights in the name of preventing fraud was also evident in Maine last month, where the state Republican Party Chairman Charlie Webster drew up a list of 206 University of Maine students with out-of-state home addresses and accused them of voter fraud. The Republican Secretary of State subsequently took this list and sent threatening letters to the students, complete with a form to cancel their voter registration in Maine. In fact, as the Brennan Center for Justice notes in two new reports, electoral voter fraud is largely a myth. In a heralded paper titled “The Truth About Voter Fraud“, the Brennan Center notes that “It is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.” Indeed, most cases of voter fraud “can be traced to causes far more logical than fraud by voters,” including clerical or typographical errors, mismatched entries, and simple mistakes on either end. In Wisconsin, for instance, approximately 3 million votes were cast in 2004, of which just seven were ultimately deemed invalid – all from felons who were unaware of their ineligibility. Comedian Stephen Colbert recently mocked the need for photo ID laws, noting that fraud occurs in “a jaw dropping 44 one-millionths of one percent” of votes.

Republicans Treat the American People like Morons -- and They're Right! Look out how many Moronic Americans Keep Voting for Republicans

2011-10-31T20:48:00.000-07:00

From Media Matters for America -- October 31, 2011:

Trick Or Treat! Obama Derangement Syndrome Is At The Door

In the latest round of Obama Derangement Syndrome, right-wing media attacked the Obamas for handing out fruit along with candy to trick-or-treaters at the White House. Previously, right-wing media have attacked the president over Hurricane Irene, the East Coast earthquake, healthy eating, the White House Easter Egg Roll, and the death of Osama bin Laden.

Obama Derangement Syndrome: Halloween Candy Edition

Fox Nation: "TRICK: Obamas Hand Out Dried Fruit At WH Halloween." An October 30 Fox Nation post rewrote the headline of an Associated Press (AP) article to say: "TRICK: Obamas Hand Out Dried Fruit at WH Halloween." The original AP headline stated, "Things get seasonal at the White House; Obamas hand out Halloween treats." [Fox Nation, 10/30/11, via Media Matters; AP, 10/29/11, via The Washington Post]

Hoft: "Obama Goes Trick-Or-Treating ... They Handed Out Fruit." In a Gateway Pundit post titled, "288,000 Lose Power in Earliest Snowstorm in a Century... Obama Goes Trick-or-Treating," blogger Jim Hoft wrote:

An historic early season snow hit the New England area today knocking out power to at least 288,000 homes. It is the earliest snow in New York City since the Civil War.

Meanwhile... Obama went trick-or-treating.

They handed out fruit. [Gateway Pundit, 10/29/11, emphasis in original]
Drudge: "Treat Or Trick: Obamas Pass Out Halloween -- 'Fruit'?..." An October 30 post to the Drudge Report read:

And This Is Just The Latest Edition Of Obama Derangement Syndrome

Obama Derangement Syndrome: Earthquake Edition. Following an earthquake that struck the East Coast on August 23, right-wing media attacked Obama for being on a golf course during a family vacation when the earthquake struck. [Media Matters, 8/24/11]

Obama Derangement Syndrome: Michelle Obama Uses An iPod. Right-wing media figures highlighted a photograph of first lady Michelle Obama using headphones while in her husband's presence, writing that this signified that she "doesn't seem all that happy with the man she married 19 years ago." [Media Matters, 8/22/11; The Washington Times, via Media Matters, 8/29/11]

Obama Derangement Syndrome: Happy Meals. Following McDonald's decision to offer "more nutritionally-balanced" Happy Meals and Michelle Obama's praise of its move, the right-wing media jumped to attack McDonald's for supposedly bending to the will of the "fat police" and making Happy Meals "less happy." [Media Matters, 7/27/11]

Obama Derangement Syndrome: Dijon Mustard. In May 2009, conservative media attacked Obama as an elitist because he ordered a hamburger with Dijon mustard. [Media Matters, 5/7/09]

Obama Derangement Syndrome: The Color Purple. In March 2010, conservative blogger Pamela Geller incited outrage over Obama "Flying The Gangsta Colors At The White House: SEIU, The Color Purple." Geller went on to criticize Obama's purple tie color choice, despite the fact that Obama's tie appeared to be blue, not purple. [Media Matters, 3/26/10]

Obama Derangement Syndrome: Wal-Mart Healthy Foods Initiative. In January, right-wing media accused the Obama administration of threatening or "bullying" Wal-Mart when the company announced a healthy food initiative that would make "thousands of the packaged food items that it sells more healthful and affordable by 2015," according to The Washington Post. [Media Matters, 1/21/11]

Obama Derangement Syndrome: Latin America Jobs Trip. In March, the right-wing media attacked Obama's long-planned jobs trip to Latin America as a "vacation," even though the trip was focused on economic opportunities for the U.S. and trade relationships with Latin American nations. [Media Matters, 3/18/11]

Obama Derangement Syndrome: Children's Easter Egg Roll. Also in March, Fox & Friends attacked the White House Easter Egg Roll, a family event, for making the souvenir eggs more environmentally friendly and encouraging children to exercise. [Media Matters, 3/30/11]

Obama Derangement Syndrome: Osama Bin Laden's Death. In May, The Washington Times attacked Obama following the successful raid in Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden, complaining that he golfed before the mission took place and that he "snub[bed] Bush" in his speech following bin Laden's death. [Media Matters, 5/3/11]

The Death Throes of the Republican Party

2011-10-31T06:12:00.000-07:00

From The Washington Post -- October 30, 2011:

Paul Ryan’s frown should make Democrats smile

By E.J. Dionne Jr.

We may be reaching an inflection point, the moment when the terms of the political argument change decisively. Three indicators: an important speech last week by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the increasingly sharp tone of President Obama’s rhetoric and the success of Occupy Wall Street in resisting attempts to marginalize the movement.

The most telling was Ryan’s address at the Heritage Foundation. House Republicans regard Ryan as their prophet, their intellectual and their resident wonk. Usually, he carefully lays out the numbers and issues visionary promises of how cutting government (and taxes on the wealthy) will lead us down a blissful path to prosperity.

He’s sunny when everyone else is grumpy.

So it was jarring to see Ryan used as the principal counter-attacker against the president, who has been making the injuries of class inequality clear and pointing to the costs of the Republicans’ just-say-no strategy in Congress.

Ryan spoke of his “disappointment” that “the politics of division are making a big comeback.” He accused Obama of using “divisive rhetoric” and of “going from town to town, impugning the motives of Republicans, setting up straw men and scapegoats, and engaging in intellectually lazy arguments.”

“Instead of working with us on . . . common-sense reforms,” Ryan declared, “the president is barnstorming swing states, pushing a divisive message that pits one group of Americans against another on the basis of class.”

Now it takes some temerity for a Republican to charge Obama with divisiveness, given the GOP’s willingness to promote or countenance assaults on the president as “a socialist,” as someone not even born in the United States, as a supporter of “death panels,” and on and on. Republicans calling Obama divisive is the equivalent of those of us who are Red Sox fans criticizing another team for folding under pressure.

But what’s most instructive is that Ryan would not have given this speech if the Republican Party were not so worried that it is losing control of the political narrative. In particular, growing inequalities of wealth and income — which should have been a central issue in American politics for at least a decade — are now finally at the heart of our discourse. We are, at last, discussing the social and economic costs of concentrating ever more resources in the hands of the top sliver of our society.

Ryan offered the classic defense of inequality, arguing that what really matters is upward mobility, and that the United States has more of it than those horrible welfare states in Europe. “Class is not a fixed designation in this country,” he declared. “We are an upwardly mobile society with a lot of movement between income groups.”

The only problem is that upward mobility has declined as inequality has grown, and social mobility is now higher in Europe than it is in the United States. That’s shameful. And don’t believe me on this: Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum brought this up at a recent debate, backed by a study from the Economic Mobility Project.

It’s hard to justify more tax cuts for the wealthy in a country that is becoming more rigidly stratified by class. And if it is class warfare simply to acknowledge the facts, does this make Santorum a class warrior?

All of this explains why efforts to taint Occupy Wall Street as nothing more than a bunch of latter-day hippie radicals haven’t worked. It’s also why Obama, by sharpening his arguments about what’s fair and what’s unfair, has finally stopped his slide in the polls.

A recent survey by The Washington Post and the Pew Research Center showed Occupy Wall Street to be more popular now than the Tea Party, which keeps losing ground. The poll also showed that these two movements are quite distinct — they are not part of some generalized protest. Only 10 percent of those surveyed supported both Occupy Wall Street and the tea party. And, as my colleague Greg Sargent has documented tirelessly, on many of Occupy’s core issues (favoring higher taxes on millionaires and believing in a more even distribution of income and wealth), public opinion strongly supports the anti-Wall Streeters.

Obama’s aides have a habit of congratulating themselves too much when things start going well. The president has a long way to go, and he is pursuing a strategy now that he resisted for a long time. But it ought to encourage him that Paul Ryan is terribly upset. Telling the truth about inequality is politically wise, and morally necessary.

Fascist Fox News' Smear Queen, Bill O'Reilly, Uses Lies and Myths to Attack Planned Parenthood

2011-10-28T23:17:00.000-07:00

From Media Matters for America -- October 29, 2011:

O'Reilly Pushes Dubious Charges Against Planned Parenthood Made By Ethically-Challenged Attorney Phill Kline

Bill O'Reilly and Megyn Kelly suggested that Planned Parenthood conspired with the state of Kansas to shred evidence implicating Planned Parenthood in covering up statutory rapes. But the charges are based on accusations by attorney Phill Kline who has been found to have engaged in "dishonest conduct" during his crusade to prove that Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers are violating Kansas law.

O'Reilly And Kelly Hyped Allegations Kansas Officials Destroyed Evidence Of Wrongdoing By Planned Parenthood

O'Reilly And Megyn Kelly Suggest Planned Parenthood And Kansas Officials Conspired To Cover Up Wrongdoing. On the October 28 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, Bill O'Reilly hosted Fox "straight news" anchor Megyn Kelly to discuss charges leveled against Planned Parenthood by ex-attorney general Phill Kline. From The O'Reilly Factor:

O'REILLY: Now, State of Kansas and Planned Parenthood. Kansas is ground zero for the late-term abortion debate in this country. And Planned Parenthood is up to that to its neck. So they wanted to get some records from Planned Parenthood. Referrals. Abortion referrals to see how late they were, what the situation was. And Kansas destroyed the records.

KELLY: What happened was, you know, Planned Parenthood needs to keep records if it performs abortions in particular if you've got young girls going in there under the age of 14

O'REILLY: Because of statutory rape.

KELLY: That's right. And when they perform an abortion like that, they have to keep a record to let the state know. And the prosecutor at the time the attorney general Phill Kline, who the viewers may know by this point, says that he had proof that there was up to 166 abortions performed, and they only had a record of one from Planned Parenthood.

O'REILLY: And the reason that Kline alleges that Planned Parenthood didn't turn that over to him when he asked for it is because they were statutory rape cases which are mandated to be reported to the authorities in Kansas.

KELLY: Right. So he is saying where are the other records?

O'REILLY: Where are the 165?

O'REILLY: Does the state of Kansas routinely shred documents after a certain amount of time?

KELLY: They do, but, but the question here is whether you would ever do that when you knew --

O'REILLY: There's a criminal activity going on -- investigation.

KELLY: Yeah that there was a criminal investigation going on? That's highly unusual, there are rules.

O'REILLY: So you, Megyn Kelly, think something may be wrong.

KELLY: I think something stinks.

O'REILLY: Do you really?

KELLY: Something stinks here. I don't know who's got their fingerprints on it, but I think one of the things I find most highly suspicious is that why didn't the Department of Health go to the DA -- he's been litigating over those documents for, you know, months and years now -- and say, "don't argue over those. We destroyed them in 2005." Why did they wait?

O'REILLY: Because they were afraid that this whole investigation was going to blow up.

KELLY: Yeah, you tell me. [Fox New, The O'Reilly Factor, 10/28/11]

Case Is Based On Allegations Made By Former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline

Kline Alleged That Planned Parenthood Had Falsified Documents About Abortion. From the Kansas City Star:

The destroyed records were critical in establishing the authenticity of records from 2003 that Kline obtained when he investigated Planned Parenthood as attorney general. Planned Parenthood also provided copies of the records, but Kline contended that those did not match the ones he had in his possession.

In 2007, after he became Johnson County prosecutor, Kline filed a 107-count complaint against the abortion provider.

In addition to the 23 felonies, the complaint also charged Planned Parenthood with multiple misdemeanor counts of failing to maintain the pregnancy termination reports, failing to perform viability tests on fetuses and unlawful late-term abortions.

Prosecutors contended that Planned Parenthood had not kept the documents five years as required by law and falsified copies to cover it up.

The current Johnson County district attorney, Steve Howe, picked up the case after he defeated Kline in the 2008 Republican primary and went on to win the general election.

Howe declined to comment on the case Friday. It was unclear when he discovered that the records were destroyed. He subpoenaed them last month, according to a response filed Friday by Planned Parenthood.

The records in question deal with reports that Planned Parenthood must file under state law for each abortion it performs. One copy is kept by Planned Parenthood in the patient files, and another is sent to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.

Prosecutors wanted to prove the records obtained by Kline were the same as those filed with the state and different from alleged copies provided later by Planned Parenthood.[Kansas City Star, 10/21/2011]

Kansas Authorities Have Rebuked Kline For "Dishonest Conduct"

Kansas Disciplinary Panel Recommended Kline Be Indefinitely Suspended Because Of "Dishonest Conduct" Related To His Investigations Of Clinics That Perform Abortion. At no point during the segment did Kelly or O'Reilly question the credibility of Kline's allegations. However, on October 12, the Kansas Board for Discipline of Attorneys unanimously recommended that Kline should be indefinitely suspended from the practice of law based on Kline's violations of Kansas attorney ethics rules during his investigations of clinics that performed abortions. The Kansas Supreme Court will make the final determination on whether Kline violated ethics rules and, if so, what his punishment should be. In coming to its recommendation, the board stated:

The Hearing Panel concluded that the Respondent has repeatedly violated many of the Kansas Rules of Professional Conduct, including the most serious of the rules, the rules that prohibit engaging in false or dishonest conduct

Part of an attorney's oath in Kansas is:

You do solemnly swear or affirm that you will support and bear true allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Kansas; . . . that you will neither do, nor consent to the doing of any falsehood in court; and that you will discharge your duties as an attorney and counselor of the Supreme Court and all other courts of the State of Kansas with fidelity both to the Court and to your cause, and to the best of your knowledge and ability. So help you God.

(Kan. Sup. Ct. R. 720). In addition to the rule violations, as mentioned by the Review Committee in ruling on the Respondent's motion for reconsideration, it also appears that the Respondent violated the oath of attorneys by consenting to the commission of numerous falsehoods. [Kansas Board for Discipline of Attorneys, 10/12/11, via WatchdogMedia.org]

KS Supreme Court Sanctioned Kline For "Inexcusable" Behavior During Investigation Of Clinics That Perform Abortions. From a Kansas Supreme Court decision in Comprehensive Health of Planned Parenthood, in which the court ruled that Kline had improperly retained some Planned Parenthood documents after losing his bid to be reelected as Kansas attorney general:

An obvious and sorry pattern emerges from the foregoing examples and from Kline's performance at oral argument before us. Kline exhibits little, if any, respect for the authority of this court or for his responsibility to it and to the rule of law it husbands. His attitude and behavior are inexcusable, particularly for someone who purports to be a professional prosecutor. It is plain that he is interested in the pursuit of justice only as he chooses to define it. As already noted in Alpha, he has consistently disregarded the clear import of this court's directions, instead doing what he chose because "he knew best how he should behave, regardless of what this court had ordered, and [believed] that his priorities should trump whatever priorities this court had set."

In light of all of the foregoing and because Kline and his subordinates have, during their time in Johnson County, capitalized on what they learned while Kline was Attorney General, we hereby order the following sanction:

Kline shall produce and hand deliver to the Attorney General's office no later than 5 p.m. on December 12, 2008, a full and complete and understandable set of any and all materials gathered or generated by Kline and/or his subordinates in their abortion-related investigation and/or prosecution since Kline was sworn in as Johnson County District Attorney. Neither Kline nor any of his subordinates or lawyers may make any exceptions whatsoever for any reason or on any rationale to the foregoing order. "Full, complete, and understandable" means exactly what it says. This set of materials shall be organized and labeled exactly as organized and labeled in the files or repositories maintained by and/or for Kline and his subordinates in the discharge of their duties on behalf of the Johnson County District Attorney's office. The cost of the production and delivery of the set of materials described in this paragraph shall be borne by the Johnson County District Attorney's office.

We also hereby order as an additional sanction that Kline, Rucker, Maxwell, Williams, Reed and any other employee of the Johnson County District Attorney's office requested by the Attorney General shall meet with the Attorney General and/or his designee(s) on whatever date(s) and at whatever time(s) designated by the Attorney General up to and including noon on January 10, 2009, and at whatever place(s) designated by the Attorney General for the purpose of explaining all of the materials turned over by 5 p.m. on December 12, 2008, pursuant to the relief and sanction orders contained in this decision by this court. [Supreme Court of Kansas, 12/5/08]

KS Supreme Court Previously Criticized Kline For "Troubling," "Defiant" Answers To The Court. In a 2006 case also involving Kline's investigation of a clinic that provided abortions, Alpha Medical Clinic v. Anderson, the Kansas Supreme Court stated:

Kline's initial responses were troubling. He admitted that he attached sealed court records to a brief he knew would be unsealed; that he did so knowingly because, in his sole estimation, he believed it to be necessary to further his arguments; that he held a press conference on this criminal matter merely because he determined that petitioners had painted his previous actions in an unflattering light; and that he later permitted his staff to provide electronic copies of the sealed transcript to anyone who requested them. In essence, Kline has told this court that he did what he did simply because he believed that he knew best how he should behave, regardless of what this court had ordered, and that his priorities should trump whatever priorities this court had set. Furthermore, although there is conflict between the parties on exactly what was said in the press conference, i.e. whether the actual content of the sealed documents was discussed, Kline's stated reason for holding the conference-to combat what he saw as unflattering earlier press coverage-does not appear to be among the permissible reasons for an attorney in his position to engage in extrajudicial statements under Kansas Rule of Professional Conduct 3.6 (2005 Kan. Ct. R. Annot. 473). This too is troubling. [Supreme Court of Kansas, 2/3/06]

Kansas Supreme Court Later Said That In This Case, Kline "Narrowly Escaped A Contempt Citation." In Comprehensive Health of Planned Parenthood, the court stated that Kline had "persisted in his attitude and behavior despite the fact Alpha made clear that he had already narrowly escaped a contempt citation." [Supreme Court of Kansas, 12/5/08]

Officials Say They Shredded Planned Parenthood Records As Part Of Their Routine Policies On Document Destruction

Kansas Officials Said Planned Parenthood Document Destruction Was Routine. From the Kansas City Star:

Johnson County prosecutors asked a judge to delay a Monday hearing to decide if there's enough evidence to try Planned Parenthood on 23 felony counts of falsifying pregnancy termination reports.

Prosecutors say the records, which are central to making their case, were shredded sometime in 2005, roughly two years before charges were brought against Planned Parenthood by former Johnson County District Attorney Phill Kline.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment shredded the records as a "routine" destruction of state documents, court files said. [Kansas City Star, 10/12/2011]

O'Reilly Has A Long History Of Smears And Falsehoods Regarding Abortion:

O'Reilly Falsely Claimed That A Pregnant Woman's Life Could "Never" Be "In Danger" From Pregnancy Complications. [Media Matters, 10/16/06]
O'Reilly Claimed "Women's Privacy" Is "The New Mantra" Which Allows For "Infanticide." [Media Matters, 10/30/08]
O'Reilly Said Sebelius Is "Pro-Abortion, She Wants The Babies Done For." [Media Matters, 10/11/09]
O'Reilly On Kansas Abortion Provider Tiller: "[I]F I Could Get My Hands On Tiller -- Well, You Know. Can't Be Vigilantes. Can't Do That. It's Just A Figure Of Speech." [Media Matters, 6/1/09]
O'Reilly Asked Anti-Choice Activist If She "Believes That Planned Parenthood Is An Abortion Mill." [Media Matters, 11/11/09]
O'Reilly Promoted Myth That Planned Parenthood Is "Aiding And Abetting Child Sex Rings." [Media Matters, 4/19/11]

The GOP Has Turned Itself into the Garbage Offal Party -- It's the Offal Tower and -- A National Disgrace

2011-10-27T20:53:00.000-07:00

From Media Matters for America -- october 27, 2011:

Right-Wing Media Go On Attack Against Student Debt Relief

Fox News and the right-wing media are attacking President Obama's student loan relief plan as a "campaign speech" and an attempt to "buy votes." Obama's plan is designed to help ease the burden of student loans for millions of people by lowering interest rates, consolidating outstanding student loans, and providing debt relief to students after they spend 20 years paying off their loans.

Obama Announces Student Loan Relief Plan

AP: "Obama Announces Help For Student Loan Borrowers." From an October 26 Associated Press article:

President Barack Obama recalled his struggles with student loan debt as he unveiled a plan Wednesday that could give millions of young people some relief on their payments.

Obama's plan will accelerate a measure passed by Congress that reduces the maximum required payment on student loans from 15 percent of discretionary income annually to 10 percent. He will put it into effect in 2012, instead of 2014. In addition, the White House says the remaining debt would be forgiven after 20 years, instead of 25. About 1.6 million borrowers could be affected.

He will also allow borrowers who have a loan from the Federal Family Education Loan Program and a direct loan from the government to consolidate them into one. The consolidated loan would carry an interest rate of up to a half percentage point less than before. This could affect 5.8 million borrowers.

Student loans are the No. 2 source of household debt. The president's announcement came on the same day as a new report on tuition costs from the College Board. It showed that average in-state tuition and fees at four-year public colleges rose $631 this fall, or 8.3 percent, compared with a year ago. Nationally, the cost of a full credit load has passed $8,000, an all-time high.

White House: "Obama Administration To Lower Student Loan Payments For Millions Of Borrowers." In an October 25 press release, the White House outlined the Obama administration's plan to help Americans "manage student loan debt." The press release stated that the plan will "offer recent graduates an opportunity to consolidate loans and reduce interest rates." From the press release:

Today, the Obama Administration announced it is taking steps to increase college affordability by making it easier to manage student loan debt. The announcement is part of a series of executive actions to put Americans back to work and strengthen the economy because we can't wait for Congressional Republicans to act.

The Administration is moving forward with a new "Pay As You Earn" proposal that will reduce monthly payments for more than one and a half million current college students and borrowers. Starting in 2014, borrowers will be able to reduce their monthly student loan payments to 10 percent of their discretionary income. But President Obama realizes that many students need relief sooner than that. The new "Pay As You Earn" proposal will allow about 1.6 million students the ability to cap their loan payments at 10 percent starting next year, and the plan will forgive the balance of their debt after 20 years of payments. Additionally, starting this January an estimated 6 million students and recent college graduates will be able to consolidate their loans and reduce their interest rates.

Conservatives Attack Student Loan Relief Plan

Guilfoyle: Obama's Student Loan Relief Plan Is "Campaigning, It's Politics .... He Wants To Buy Some Votes Of The Youth." During the October 26 edition of Fox News' The Five, co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle suggested Obama's plan to provide some relief to people with student loans was actually an attempt to "buy some votes of the youth." From Fox News' The Five:

GREG GUTFELD (co-host): Kimberly, I want to ask you, though. The real problem here is tuition. It's not the loans. If the tuitions were lower you wouldn't have this problem with the loans. But because you have the loans, the tuition goes up.

KIMBERLY GUILFOYLE: Right, but where's the incentive then to lower the tuition? Some people in colleges and institutions, they like their money. But what this is about is campaigning, it's politics, it's 2012. He wants to buy some votes of the youth. It makes sense.

GUTFELD: Yeah.

GUILFOYLE: These are the people who were very popular, came out for him, supported his presidency. He needs them again. Even more so this time. So this a way to rally them kind of speak to the people that are protesting and the college students. [Fox News, The Five, 10/26/11]
Bolling: Obama's Plan To Help Americans With Student Loan Debt Is An Attempt To "Buy The Young Vote." During the October 25 edition of The Five, co-host Eric Bolling attacked Obama's plan to help Americans consolidate and lower their payments on student loans after college before it was even announced. Bolling proclaimed the administration was attempting to "buy the young vote" and asserted that it "should be illegal." [Fox News, The Five, 10/25/11]

Lou Dobbs Claimed Obama's Plan Offering Relief To Student Loan Recipients Is About "Getting Re-Elected." In an October 26 Facebook post about Obama's new student loan relief plan, Fox's Lou Dobbs wrote, "this is more about getting re-elected than it is spurring economic growth." [Facebook, 10/26/11]

Perino Called Obama's Announcement Of Student Loan Relief Plan A "Campaign Speech." In an October 26 Twitter post, co-host for Fox News' The Five Dana Perino wrote:

Hoft: "Obama's Plan To Bailout Student Loan Recipients Is His Latest Attempt To Buy Votes At The Expense Of The American Taxpayer." From an October 26 blog post on Jim Hoft's Gateway Pundit blog:

Obama's plan to bailout student loan recipients is his latest attempt to buy votes at the expense of the American taxpayer. It also happens to be the latest move in his Cloward Piven strategy to destroy the US economy.

Free Obama Money for ... special interest groups.

Obama announced a new plan today that will add billions to his record debt and erode the US economy by giving free money to students who borrowed their way through college.[Gateway Pundit, 10/26/11]
Student Loan Debt Is A Growing Burden

Data Shows Average Debt For Students Graduating From College Is Rising At A Staggering Rate. Data analysis by The Project on Student Debt found that the average debt for graduating seniors at public universities is "$22,200 -- 20% higher than in 2004." The average debt for graduating seniors at private for-profit universities was "$33,050 - 23% higher than in 2004." From the January 2010 study titled Quick Facts about Student Debt:

Average debt levels for graduating seniors with student loans rose to $23,200 in 2008 -- a 24% increase from $18,650 in 2004.

In 2008:

• At public universities, average debt was $20,200 -- 20% higher than in 2004, when the average was $16,850.

• At private nonprofit universities, average debt was $27,650 -- 29% higher than in 2004, when the average was $21,500.

• At private for-profit universities, average debt was $33,050 -- 23% higher than in 2004, when the average was $26,850. [The Project On Student Debt, Quick Facts about Student Debt, January 2010]

U.S. Department Of Education: Student Loan Default Rate At 8.8 Percent -- The Highest It Has Been In More Than A Decade. The U.S. Department of Education announced in September that the latest national student loan cohort default rate is at "8.8 percent." This is an increase from the 7.0 percent rate from the previous fiscal year, and is the highest rate in more than a decade. The cohort default rate is defined as "the percentage of borrowers who enter repayment in a fiscal year and default by the end of the next fiscal year." From the announcement:

The U.S. Department of Education today released the official FY 2009 national student loan cohort default rate, which has risen to 8.8 percent, up from 7.0 percent in FY 2008. The cohort default rates increased for all sectors: from 6.0 percent to 7.2 percent for public institutions, from 4.0 percent to 4.6 percent for private institutions, and from 11.6 percent to 15 percent at for-profit schools.

The rates announced today represent a snapshot in time, with the FY 2009 cohort consisting of borrowers whose first loan repayments came due between Oct. 1, 2008, and Sept. 30, 2009, and who defaulted before Sept. 30, 2010. More than 3.6 million borrowers from 5,900 schools entered repayment during this window of time, and more than 320,000 defaulted. Those borrowers who defaulted after the two-year period are not counted as defaulters in this data set.

The Republican Party Has Turned Itself into a Piece of Crap and a National Disgrace

2011-10-27T20:04:00.000-07:00

From The Progress Report -- October 27, 2011

Survey Says: The Public Supports the 99% Movement

The Verdict Is In

As the Occupy Wall Street protest and growing 99 Percent Movement enters its second month, poll after poll shows public support for the movement.

Here’s the Rundown.

82… percent of New York State voters think it’s OK for the Occupy Wall Street protesters to protest.

70… percent of Americans have heard “a lot” or “some” about the 99 Percent Movement.

67… percent of Americans think it would be a “bad idea” to lower taxes on large corporations.

66 …percent of Americans think the distribution of money and wealth in this country should be “more evenly distributed among more people.”

65 …percent of Americans think taxes should be raised on millionaires.

66 …percent of New York State voters support a millionaire’s tax.

58 …percent of New York State voters agree with the views of the Wall Street protesters.

46 …percent of Americans think the 99 Percent Movement “reflect[s] the views of most Americans,” compared to just 34 percent who say it does not.

43 …percent of Americans agree with the views of protesters, compared to just 27 percent who disagree.

The 1% Wants Higher Taxes on Millionaires Too

68 …percent of millionaire investors support raising taxes on millionaires.

61 …percent of investors with a net worth of more than $5 million support raising taxes on millionaires.

Americans Understand the GOP is Only Looking Out for the 1%

69 …percent of Americans think that the policies of the Republicans in Congress “favor the rich.”

9 …percent of Americans think that the policies of the Republicans in Congress “favor the middle class.”

2 …percent of Americans (who apparently don’t get out much) think that the policies of the Republicans in Congress “favor the poor.”

Fascist FOX News Tries to Convince Americans That We Are All As Fascist as FOX is -- Tell It to Mussolini

2011-10-26T20:49:00.000-07:00

From Media Matters for America -- October 26, 2011:

Fox Revives Myth That "America Is A Center-Right Country"

This year, Fox has continued to push the right-wing talking point that "America is a center-right country." In fact, on issue after issue, polls are clear that Americans favor progressive policies.
Fox Again Claims America Is "Center-Right"

Doug Schoen: "America Is A Center-Right Country." On the October 19 edition of America Live, Fox News contributor Doug Schoen said:

SCHOEN: America is a center-right country, Megyn. Forty percent of America are conservatives, 36 are moderates, 20 percent are liberals, and if the Democrats throw in so closely with a group whose values are inimical to those of swing voters, I think that they will be dangerously out of step with the broad base of American opinion, which, after all, the congressional elections rebutted and refuted the Obama policies and endorsed small government. [Fox News, America Live, 10/19/11]

Brit Hume: Obama Advisers Were Wrong To Declare That America "Was No Longer A Center-Right Country." On Fox News' Special Report, senior political analyst Brit Hume stated:

HUME: For an incumbent president seeking re-election to say publicly that people are not better off than they were before he took off is to say the least unorthodox. Voters are not in the habit of returning to office president who admit that things got worse on their watch.

But one begins to suspect that the president and his political advisers are not the wizards they've once seen, recalled right after Mr. Obama's election, David Plouffe, his senior political strategist then and now declared that America was no longer a center right country but had turned center left. You might think that he and the president would have changed their minds after the historic repudiation they and their party received in the midterm election. [Fox News, Special Report with Bret Baier, 10/4/11, via Nexis]

Bernie Goldberg: "America Is A Center-Right Country." On Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, discussing why Fox News is "now dominating the information flow in America," Fox News media analyst Bernie Goldberg said to host Bill O'Reilly:

GOLDBERG: Well, it's -- let me tell you -- let me -- this is my take on it. America is a center-right country. Fox tilts to the right. Every single person, if not literally 99.9 percent of the people watching us right now, used to, before Fox, watch the evening news at CBS, NBC, or ABC. They came over to Fox. [Fox News, The O'Reilly Factor, 9/27/11]

Fox Hosted Andrew Breitbart To Claim That "We're A Center-Right Nation." On Fox Business, David Asman hosted right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart to claim that the United States has a "2-1 ratio of conservatives to liberals." From the broadcast:

ASMAN: There was a narrative you don't remember, but I do. I was there in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was running for president, and the narrative back then from the entire media was that if Reagan is elected, we'll be at war with the Soviets in a couple of months. The economy, as bad as it was back then, is going to be much worse. And this was with no Fox News, no Rush, no Internet, no Breitbart. And yet, the American public didn't buy it.

All of the media and all of the -- the conservative media and the fair and balanced media didn't exist back then. But despite that, the American people went against the mainstream media. So how do you account for that?

BREITBART: Well, look -- well, first of all, we're a center-right nation that's -- and the media's controlled by the people on the elite coasts. So they -- the way that the minority in this country -- and according to Gallup, we're still a 2-to-1 ratio of conservatives to liberals. Yet, we have these squeakers every election cycle. They're squeakers and it's 50-50, it's so close, because of the media being able to frame who the good guys and who the bad guys are. [Fox Business, America's Nightly Scoreboard, 8/24/11]

Laura Ingraham Suggested "Most Of The Country Is A Little Bit More Conservative" Than The Media. From the August 15 edition of The O'Reilly Factor:

INGRAHAM: [W]hat politician out there today would pass your litmus test on your point. That's a legitimate point that you just made. You know, speak the same way to every person.

GOLDBERG: Not many.

INGRAHAM: Who in the Republican field would pass that litmus test?

GOLDBERG: Not many. I acknowledge that.

INGRAHAM: The point is, the questions always go one way, right, the media they are not going to ask questions from another point of view when, you know, when probably most of the country is a little bit more conservative on some of these social issues than the media. But they are not going to ask the questions the other way around, right.

They are always going to put -- try to put the conservative in the box by asking them these questions, oh, you are a hateful person. You are not a nice person or whatever. [Fox News, The O'Reilly Factor, 8/15/11, via Nexis]

Fox Panelist Charles Krauthammer: America "Has Remained" Center-Right "For Over Four Decades." On his show, O'Reilly argued that the media "will all be trying to get President Obama re-elected." Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer replied:

KRAUTHAMMER: You've got to remember this: The left, the Democrats always have the press on their side. They've had it for 40 years. Nonetheless, the Republicans have won the presidency seven out of the last 11 elections. And that's because what Republicans have, what conservatives have is the country, which is a center-right country, has remained so almost unchangingly for four decades.

So what the media bias does is it slightly -- it gives an advantage. It's a major advantage, but it's undoing the deficit that Democrats and liberals already have, because it's a country that is not essentially conducive to a liberal message. [Fox News, The O'Reilly Factor, 5/24/11]

Bill O'Reilly: "We Are A Center-Right Nation." Claiming that The New York Times "is crushed" and is "lamenting, wailing their guy is not doing the liberal thing," O'Reilly asserted: "If Obamacare is thrown out, the left will have pretty much lost everything. The why behind all of this is that President Obama badly underestimated the American public. We are a center-right nation." [Fox News, The O'Reilly Factor, 4/5/11]

The Majority Of Americans Are Progressive On Issues Ranging From The Economy...

Major National Polls Show That Americans Believe We Need To Raise Taxes. In a September 19 post on the Capital Gains And Games blog, Fiscal Times columnist Bruce Bartlett wrote:

I have previously posted a table showing that people support raising taxes as part of deficit reduction by a 2-to-1 margin over the Grover Norquist/Club for Growth/Tea Party position that the deficit must be reduced only by spending cuts without a penny of higher taxes. In light of President Obama's new budget plan, which includes higher taxes, I am posting an updated table, including a poll on Friday showing that three-fourths of people support higher taxes and only 21 percent support the doctrinaire right-wing position. [Capital Gains And Games, 9/19/11]

Gallup: 70 Percent Of Americans Want To End Wasteful Tax Giveaways To Corporations. In a recent Gallup poll, 70 percent of respondents favored "increasing taxes on some corporations by eliminating certain tax deductions." [Gallup, 9/20/11]

Three Out of Four Voters Support Tax Increases On Oil And Gas Companies, Private Jet Owners, And The Wealthy. In a July CNN poll, 73 percent of those questioned, supported "increasing the taxes paid by oil and gas companies" and "people who make more than $250,000/yr." Seventy-six percent supported increasing taxes "paid by businesses that own private jets." [CNN, 7/21/11]

Nearly Three-Fourths Of Americans Disapprove Of GOP's Handling Of Default Crisis. Following this summer's debt crisis, a CBS News/New York Times poll found that 72 percent of Americans disapproved of congressional Republicans' handling of the issue. [CBS News/The New York Times, 8/4/11]

Time: Americans Agree With Occupy Wall Street Movement. A Time poll from this month found that among Americans familiar with the Occupy Wall Street movement, 79 percent agree that "the gap between the rich and poor in the U.S. has grown too large," and 86 percent agree that "Wall Street and its lobbyists have too much influence in Washington." [Time, 10/13/11]

To Education...

Committee for Education Funding: Polls Show Americans Overwhelmingly Oppose Education Cuts. In March, the Committee For Education Funding reported: "Results from nine different public opinion polls since January make clear that the American public strongly opposes cutting federal spending for education programs for both K12 and higher education." From Bloomberg News:

A March 2011 Bloomberg National News poll found that by an almost four to one margin (77-21 percent) the public opposes proposals to "significantly cut education programs, including No Child Left Behind, Head Start, and subsidies for college loans". [Committee for Education Funding, 3/11]

To Public Workers And Labor Issues...

CNN: Three Out Of Four Americans Support Using Federal Funds To Hire More Public Workers. In a September CNN Poll, 74 percent of respondents said they favored "providing federal money to state governments to allow them to hire teachers and first responders." [CNN, 9/14/11]

Gallup: A Majority Of The Public Supports Unions And Public Employees. From Gallup:

Wash. Post On Wisconsin Labor Dispute: "The Verdict Is Clear: Americans Support Public Employees In This Standoff." In a March 2 post, The Washington Post's Greg Sargent reported on the public's consistent support of public employee bargaining rights:

Indeed, the verdict is clear: Americans support public employees in this standoff. Whether that will impact the outcome of the fight, of course, remains to be seen. But the bigger story here -- one that will ripple far beyond what happens in Wisconsin -- is that public employees are not proving the easy scapegoat many predicted they would be, and when faced with the question of whether their fundamental union rights should be taken away, Americans have stepped up and answered with a firm No. [Washington Post, 3/2/11]

To Social Benefits...

CNN: Americans Overwhelmingly Oppose Cuts To Social Security, Medicare, And Medicaid. Eighty-seven percent of Americans don't want the government to make cuts to Medicare and 84 percent oppose cuts to Social Security in order to reduce the deficit. [CNN, 7/21/11]

Pew: Three Out Of Five Americans Feel The Government Needs To Honor Medicare Benefits. Pew found that 62 percent of Americans feel that "the government needs to keep its promises to older people" by maintaining their Medicare benefits, "even for those who are well-off." [Pew Research Center, 6/11]

CNN: Nearly Three Out Of Four Americans Don't Believe Social Security Is A Failure. From the CNN/ORC poll released on September 13:

The Social Security system has been described as a "monstrous lie" and as a failure. Do you think those phrases are an accurate description of the Social Security system, or don't you think so?

Accurate 27%

Not accurate 72%

No opinion 1% [CNN, 9/13/11]

Pew: 87 Percent Of Americans Say Social Security Has Been Good For Our Country. From the poll:

[Pew Research Center, 7/7/11]

Pew: Americans Also Oppose "Allowing States To Limit Medicaid Eligibility." From the same Pew article:

The public also opposes making Medicare recipients more responsible for their health care costs and allowing states to limit Medicaid eligibility. About six-in-ten (61%) say people on Medicare already pay enough of their own health care costs, while only 31% think recipients need to be responsible for more of the costs of their health care in order to make the system financially secure. [Pew Research Center, 7/7/11]

To Environmental Issues...

Sixty-Nine Percent Of Americans Support Stricter Limits On Air Pollution. According to a Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll, 69 percent of respondents favored the EPA "updating standards with stricter limits on air pollution." [Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, 2/11]

Only 18 Percent Of Americans Agree With GOP Attempts To Block The EPA From Keeping Corporate Polluters In Check. From an ORC International polling memo:

Americans do not want Congress to kill the EPA's anti-pollution updates. Only 18 percent of Americans -- including fewer than a third of Republicans (32 percent) -- believe that "Congress should block the EPA from updating pollution safeguards," after being told: "Some members of Congress are proposing to block the Environmental Protection Agency from updating safeguards to protect our health from dangerous air pollution, saying they will cost businesses too much money." More than three out of four Americans (77 percent) -- including 61 percent of Republicans -- say "Congress (should) let the EPA do its job." [ORC International, 2/2/11]

The Hill: "Even The Most Hardened Conservatives" Support Investing In Solar. A series of polls conducted by Public Opinion Strategies and Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates testing the impact of the Solyndra scandal reportedly found that "even the most hardened conservatives" showed overall support for the solar industry. From The Hill:

In addition to the Ohio survey, FM3 conducted focus groups in California on behalf of the Sierra Club, finding that awareness of the Solyndra issue was higher there.

The memo states that male GOP swing voters in California voiced "strong faith" about the solar industry's viability.

"These voters were quick to condemn the federal government for failing to do its due diligence in evaluating Solyndra's business prospects, and for squandering taxpayer dollars on what they saw as a bad bet. But even the most hardened conservatives in that group strongly agreed that the solar industry is strong, growing, and worthy of future investment," it states. [The Hill, 9/28/11]

Sixty-One Percent Of Americans Agree That Government Regulations Keep Businesses Ethical. From the Public Religion Research Institute:

Overall most (61%) Americans disagree that most businesses would act ethically on their own without regulation from the government. Less than 4-in-10 (37%) believe that they would. This holds true across political and religious lines, with the lone exception of those who identify with the Tea Party movement (53% agree). [Public Religion Research Institute, 4/20/11]

...And Social Issues

Gallup: "A Majority Of Americans (53%) Believe Same-Sex Marriage Should Be Recognized By The Law As Valid." From the May 20 Gallup memo:

For the first time in Gallup's tracking of the issue, a majority of Americans (53%) believe same-sex marriage should be recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages. The increase since last year came exclusively among political independents and Democrats. Republicans' views did not change. [Gallup, 5/20/11]

CNN Poll Found That 78 Percent Of Americans Favored Repealing DADT. From The Hill article:

More than three-fourths of Americans favor repealing "Don't ask, don't tell," according to a new CNN poll.

A full 78 percent of respondents said that "people who are openly gay or homosexual" should be able to serve in the armed forces. The results are similar to what CNN found in December of 2008 (81 percent) and May of 2007 (79 percent). [The Hill, 5/25/10]

Gallup: A "Record-High" Number Of Americans Favor Legalizing Marijuana. From the October 17 article:

A record-high 50% of Americans now say the use of marijuana should be made legal, up from 46% last year. Forty-six percent say marijuana use should remain illegal. [Gallup, 10/17/11]

CNN: Three Out Of Four Americans Support A Woman's Right To Choose In "Any Or Some Circumstances." In a September CNN poll, 25 percent of respondents agreed that abortion should be legal under "any circumstances" and an additional 53 percent said it should be legal under "some circumstances." [CNN Poll, 9/15/11]

Media Figures Attempted To Push The Same "Center-Right" Claim In 2008

Newsweek's Jonathan Darman insisted America is a "center-right country." [Newsweek, 9/19/08]

Newsweek's Jon Meacham: "America remains a center-right nation -- a fact that a President would forget at his peril." [Newsweek, 10/17/08]

On CNN Newsroom, Republican strategist Bay Buchanan said, "No question this country is center-right." [CNN, CNN Newsroom, 11/6/08, via Media Matters]

During the November 5, 2008, edition of America's Election HQ, Fox News contributor Karl Rove said: "Barack Obama understands this is a center-right country, and he smartly and wisely ran a campaign that emphasized that." [Fox News, America's Election HQ, 11/5/08, via Media Matters]

Republicans Are Showing Al Quaida How to Destroy America

2011-10-26T20:24:00.000-07:00

From Media Matters for America -- October 26, 2011:

"The Most Exciting Tax Plan Since Reagan's": Right-Wing Media Tout Perry's Flat Tax

Following the release of Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry's (TX) tax plan, conservative media have hyped the plan, claiming it is "exciting" and a "radical improvement" over the current system. However, economists from across the spectrum have criticized Perry's plan, noting that it will lead to "substantial" revenue loss and "draconian cuts" while "undermin[ing]" the need to make the tax code simpler.

Conservative Media Hype Rick Perry's Tax Plan As "A Radical Improvement"

Weekly Standard's Steve Hayes: Perry's Plan Is "Very Strong" And "Has A Lot Of Very Appealing Pro-Growth Aspects To It." From the October 25 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier:

BAIER: OK, Steve, thoughts on this plan and the rollout?

HAYES: Very strong. I like the plan a lot. I think it has a lot of very appealing pro-growth aspects to it. I particularly like the 20 percent tax. There have been already complaints that this is too complicated, that the phase-in or the opt-in and opt-out will make things too complicated. I think that's nonsense. You have basically the option for people to choose whether they want to pay higher taxes. Who's going to choose whether to pay higher taxes? [Fox News, Special Report, 10/25/11]
Steve Forbes: Perry's Tax Reform Proposal Is "The Most Exciting Tax Plan Since Reagan's." An October 20 Yahoo News article reported that Steve Forbes stated that he "helped devise Perry's plan" and heaped lavish praise on that plan. From the article:

Steve Forbes, whose flat tax plan helped make him an unlikely contender for the Republican presidential nomination 15 years ago, is praising a new version of the idea from Rick Perry. And Forbes, who says he helped devise Perry's plan, left little doubt that he'll formally back the Texas governor before long.

In an interview with Yahoo News, Forbes called Perry's proposal, announced in a speech Wednesday, "the most exciting tax plan since Reagan's," in 1980.

Asked whether that included his own 1996 plan, Forbes said it did, because unlike him in 1996, when he fell short of upsetting front-runner Bob Dole, Perry "is going to win."

Forbes, the chief executive of his family's eponymous publishing empire, said the Perry camp reached out to him for help in crafting their plan. "We got into discussions of basic principles--how the thing might be shaped," he said. "The candidate concluded it ought be a simple rate. Make it as simple and bold as possible."

Asked whether the Perry plan would immediately raise as much tax revenue as the current system, Forbes did not answer directly. But he said that in the long-run, it would increase revenue, by spurring economic growth.

Many on the left argue that a flat tax would increase the tax burden on the poor, while easing the load on wealthier Americans. Forbes dismissed those concerns.

"It's gonna be good for all taxpayers," he said.

Forbes Reiterated His Support On Fox: The Flat Tax Is "A Tax Cut For Most People, Not A Tax Increase."

Big Government's Dan Mitchell: Perry's Plan Has "Some Missing Homework, But [Is] A Solid B+" And "A Radical Improvement Compared To The Current Tax System." In an October 25 post on Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com headlined "Grading Perry's Flat Tax: Some Missing Homework, But A Solid B+," contributor and Cato Institute economist Dan Mitchell wrote:

As a long-time advocate of a pure flat tax, I'm not happy that Perry has deviated from the ideal approach. But the perfect should not be the enemy of the very good. If implemented, his plan would dramatically boost economic performance and improve competitiveness.

Depending on the answers to these questions, the grade for Perry's flat tax could be as high as A- or as low as B. Regardless, it will be a radical improvement compared to the current tax system, which gets a D- (and that's a very kind grade). [Big Government, 10/25/11]
Hoft Hypes Perry's Tax Plan. From an October 24 post on Jim Hoft's Gateway Pundit blog:

Governor Rick Perry unveiled his 20% flat tax and spending plan tonight. The plan will give individuals the option of paying a 20% flat-rate income tax. It will also cap federal spending at 18% of GDP. Another selling point - the simple 20% flat tax will allow Americans to file their taxes on a postcard, saving up to $483 billion in compliance costs.

Sounds good.

Steve Forbes was impressed. He endorsed the plan on Monday. [Gateway Pundit, 10/24/11, emphasis original]
However, Experts Describe The Plan As "Delusional" And Claim It Will Lead To "Draconian Cuts" And "Substantial" Revenue Loss

Syracuse University Economics Professor: Perry's Plan Is "Delusional Policy" And "The Race To The Bottom On Tax Policy Is Getting Scary." In an October 25 post on Forbes magazine's website titled "Perry Optional Alternative Flat Tax -- Good Politics, Delusional Policy," Len Burman, Professor of Practice, Public Administration and Economics at Syracuse University, wrote:

Here's a quick note on Perry's actual plan, as outlined in his Wall Street Journal op ed today. Yesterday, I noted that a flat tax would be regressive and potentially raise taxes on low- and middle-income people. I was assuming, erroneously as it turns out, that Perry's plan would be designed to raise at least as much revenue as current law. But it would actually amount to a giant tax cut.

Here's what he said in the WSJ:

The plan starts with giving Americans a choice between a new, flat tax rate of 20% or their current income tax rate. The new flat tax preserves mortgage interest, charitable and state and local tax exemptions for families earning less than $500,000 annually, and it increases the standard deduction to $12,500 for individuals and dependents.

The plan is optional, meaning that low- and middle-income families that benefit from refundable credits will stay in the current system. High-income taxpayers will jump at the chance to avoid paying tax on interest, dividends, capital gains, rents, royalties, and other capital income. That is a large share of their income, and it would be exempt under Perry's plan. And the 20% rate is much lower than the current top rate of 35%. And, moderately well off people get to keep the most popular deductions.

The idea of an optional alternative tax system is not new. John McCain proposed one in 2008 and it would have added $7 trillion to the debt over a decade. It's virtually always true that if you offer taxpayers a choice, it will cost the Treasury money.

I have no idea how big a tax cut Perry's plan is, but there's no way this plan will come close to raising 18% of GDP (Perry's spending target) unless there are hidden revenue raisers that I missed. The idea of adding to our enormous deficits to provide giant tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires just blows my mind.

And, by the way, an optional alternative tax system is not simple. Millions of middle-income taxpayers will have to figure their taxes two ways to figure out which plan is better for them. Will it be called the Alternative Maximum Tax?

The race to the bottom on tax policy is getting scary.

CBPP: Perry's Plan Would Require "A Dismantling Of Federal Programs" And "Draconian Cuts In Virtually Every Kind Of Spending." From a New York Times article headlined "Perry Calls His Flat Tax Proposal 'Bold Reform' ":

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas unveiled a plan on Tuesday to scrap the graduated income tax and replace it with a 20 percent flat rate. By throwing out rates as high as 35 percent and eliminating estate and investment taxes, the plan would grant a major tax cut for the wealthy.

The plan also proposes reducing the scope of the federal government by requiring drastically austere federal budgets -- compared with what exists now -- that spend no more than 18 percent of the nation's gross domestic product, which analysts said would most likely force big cuts in government spending at almost every level. That would equate to a cut of one-quarter of the budget from 2011 expected levels, and it would mark the lowest level of spending relative to G.D.P. since the mid-1960s, though rising tax receipts during the roaring economy of a dozen years ago temporarily brought the level close to 18 percent.

To address the projected long-term financial shortfall within Social Security, Mr. Perry suggested raising the retirement age and potentially changing the age eligibility for Medicare and using a sliding scale to limit benefits based on income -- two proposals that could face significant opposition in Congress. Mr. Perry, who said his plan would balance the budget by 2020, also proposed letting younger workers divert some of their Social Security taxes into private investment accounts, a longtime goal of economic conservatives.

Analysts said it would take time to examine the effects of the Perry plan. But Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, said: "There are two things we can say with certainty: It will lower revenue and be a great benefit to the wealthy."

He said the poor who have children would most likely do better under the current system, because refundable tax credits provide some with net payments from the government. But Mr. Williams said it was unclear how many among the middle class would benefit -- though families with more children or bigger mortgages would be more likely to opt for his proposal.

Mr. Perry pledged to not cut any benefits of current Social Security retirees or those about to tap into the system. But to do that, and cut the budget to 18 percent of G.D.P., would require cutting at least one-third of the remaining federal budget, said James R. Horney, the vice president for federal fiscal policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group in Washington. It would require "a dismantling of federal programs," Mr. Horney said, and "draconian cuts in virtually every kind of spending." [The New York Times, 10/25/11]
Brookings Senior Fellow: Perry's Plan "Undermines" The Idea That The Tax Code Should Be Made Simpler While Leading To A " 'Substantial' Decrease In Revenues." From a CBSNews.com article:

Perry is offering taxpayers two choices -- either stick with the current tax system or opt into a new system in which they pay a 20 percent flat income tax. That incentivizes those who would pay less under the current system to stick with it, and those who would pay less under the flat tax plan -- largely Americans on the upper end of the income scale - to opt for the new plan.

That would add up to a "substantial" decrease in revenues, says Ted Gayer, the co-director of the Economic Studies program and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Perry has yet to lay out all the specifics of the plan, which makes it difficult to estimate its full impact. But "it's clearly going to be a reduction in revenues, I think fairly substantial," said Gayer. Many conservative Republicans want to reduce the role of government in society in part by starving it of funds.

What Perry's plan boils down to is a tax cut for the highest-income Americans, who currently pay a top marginal income tax rate of 35 percent, and no tax change for those who don't opt for the new system.

Perry argues that his plan simplifies the tax code, saying Tuesday that taxpayers will simply need to fill out a postcard to file their taxes. But since they will need to decide between the old system and the new one, it won't be quite so simple for many Americans.

"It kind of undermines the whole we're making your taxes simpler argument, because you still have to go through both systems to see which one is best for you," said Gayer.

Perry vowed to balance the budget by 2020 and cap on federal spending at no more than 18 percent of Gross Domestic Product. Under current policy forecasts, the United States will be spending 26 percent of GDP in 2020 and 34 percent of GDP by 2035. Perry would need to dramatically slash federal spending to meet his 18 percent goal. [CBSNews.com, 10/25/11]
Even Conservative Economists Have Called Perry's Plan "Fiscally Irresponsible" And "A Disaster"

Economist Peter Morici: "Rick Perry's Tax Plan Would Be A Disaster For America." In a post on FoxNews.com, Peter Morici, Professor of Logistics, Business and Public Policy at the University of Maryland, wrote:

Seeking to jump start his flagging presidential campaign and establish his pro-growth and fiscal responsibility credentials, Governor Rick Perry is unveiling a tax plan that will not jump start the economy and is fiscally irresponsible.

In a nutshell, Mr. Perry would give taxpayers a choice between filing under the current income tax system -- with all its flaws -- and an alternative flat tax 20 percent system. Under the latter, families could maintain their mortgage deductions if they earn less than $500,000, which is about 99 percent of taxpayers, and could declare exemptions of $12,500 for each family member.

It seems appealing -- a simplified tax system, fewer IRS agents, and so forth. But the plan falls short in two important respects -- it won't encourage many better investment decisions and foster growth, and it will spin the federal deficit permanently into the stratosphere.

The whole purpose of a flat tax is to encourage individuals and corporations to invest more in sound business opportunities, instead of prospecting for tax breaks by buying homes bigger than they need or spending on government hobby horse projects like solar panels. By giving tax payers the option of filing under the old system, however, the Perry plan will encourage the wealthy and near-wealthy to continue prospecting for loopholes and credit. Most of those folks don't pay 20 percent now, so don't count on them to volunteer for Mr. Perry's plan.

With less revenue in hand, Gov. Perry proposes slashing government spending to 18 percent of GDP--that would require $900 billion in annual spending cuts, when the Congress is having trouble agreeing on an additional $100 billion.

Such cuts are possible by increasing the retirement age to 70 and slashing Medicare and Medicare spending and gutting the defense budget.

If Gov. Perry wants to slash taxes that's fine but let's go to a real flat tax. Let Gov. Perry tell Americans how he is going to tame the monster that ate Washington--created through escalating health care spending--and rationalize social security and defense spending. [FoxNews.com, 10/25/11]
Former Chief Economist For House Committee: "Perry's Plan Would Preserve Crony Capitalist Tax Code." In an October 25 blog post titled "Perry's plan would preserve crony capitalist tax code," Alex Brill, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former chief economist for the House Ways and Means Committee, wrote:

Governor Perry's new proposal for an optional pro-growth tax code will do little for our economy while increasing the complexity of the tax code. A flat rate income tax would lead to positive economic growth, but making it optional as Governor Perry has proposed preserves the opportunities for "crony capitalism" and other existing distortions in the code.

This is because an optional flat tax is only appealing to those taxpayers who see it as a tax cut. Taxpayers who can reduce their tax liability by exploiting an existing tax break will do just that. In other words, an optional flat tax is appealing only to those who can't get a good break elsewhere in the code.

In one sense, an optional flat tax is the polar opposite of the AMT: a mandatory, parallel tax system that hits those taxpayers who are "too effective" at lowering their tax burden. But in another sense, it's quite similar: yet another tax code. [American Enterprise Institute, The Enterprise Blog, 10/25/11]
AEI "Resident Scholar": Perry's "Optional Tax Code Worse Than A Gimmick." In an October 25 blog post titled "Optional tax code worse than a gimmick," Andrew Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote:

Jim Pethokoukis points out what he calls a "gimmick" in Governor Rick Perry's proposed flat tax plan: taxpayers would get the choice to file under the current tax code or under the new flat tax plan. While I agree that this is a bit silly from a policy point of view, the problems go deeper than that. Why? Well, the flat tax is supposed to do three things: raise sufficient revenue, reduce compliance costs, and reduce economic distortions.

But if you can choose which tax code to file under then, to a first approximation, people will choose whichever costs them the least. In theory at least, to raise the same revenue in a static analysis the flat tax would have to be set such that no one could pay lower taxes than under current law, since if they could pay lower taxes they will pay lower taxes. It's easy to respond that people would choose the flat tax for its simplicity even if it costs them more, but they can already have a simple tax code under current law: just don't bother hunting down all your deductions.

The same goes for compliance costs: to know which tax code to file under you need to do your taxes under both, undermining the simplicity of the flat tax. One of the reasons compliance costs are so high today is that there can be such a reward for figuring out strategies to minimize your taxes; it's not clear that Perry's flat tax fixes this problem. And finally, if people have the option of filing under the current tax code then all the economic distortions embedded in it will remain, at least for that significant portion of the population who would do better under current law than the flat tax. A person may say to himself, "I can pay lower taxes than under the flat tax plan so long as I [insert governmentally imposed distortion here]." Marginal tax rates for high earners would be lower, reducing economic distortions, but it's unclear where you'll make up the revenue if low and middle earners get to file under current law where they pay next to nothing.

AEI's Director Of Economic Policy Studies: Under Perry's Plan Government Would Have To Drastically Slash Spending. From the Associated Press:

By design, Perry's plan "must lose revenue" for the government, said Kevin Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute. To avoid higher deficits, Hassett said, the government would have to slash spending in ways not seen since the steep military drawdown after World War II.

Is Rick Perry Dumb or a Liar? He Can't Even Count Pages Correctly -- Three Pinnochios for Rick

2011-10-26T06:22:00.000-07:00

From The Washington Post -- October 26, 2011:

Reported by Glenn Kessler, the Fact Checker “truth squads” statements by political figures regarding issues of great importance, be they national, international. As the 2012 campaign heats up, Glenn will increasingly focus on statements made by the candidates.

Rick Perry’s flat tax plan, built on misleading statistics

By Glenn Kessler

“Central to my plan is giving every American the option of throwing out that 3 million words of the current tax code and, I might, add, the cost of complying with all of that code in order to pay a 20 percent flat tax on their income. You know, the size of the current code is more than 72,000 pages. That's represented by this pallet right over here and the reams of paper. That's what the current tax code looks like.”

— Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Oct. 25, 2011

Rick Perry, trying to relaunch his sagging campaign, on Tuesday announced that he would push for an optional 20-percent flat tax. We will leave the merits of such a system to other analysts, but the key to his argument is that such a system would be so simple that taxpayers could file their return on a post card.

So we were struck by his use of two figures — 72,000 pages and the 3 million words of the tax code — as a way to illustrate the complexity of the current system. He even pointed to 72,000 pages of paper before holding up a post card he had stuffed in his jacket pocket.

We are always suspicious when politicians mention page numbers. Are these numbers correct?

The Facts:

Anyone with basic math skills would instantly notice there is a disconnect between those numbers. If you divide 3 million words by 72,000 pages, that would mean 42 words per page. That’s rather big type.

It turns out that Perry is talking about two different things — and one of them is wrong. The 72,000-page figure comes from the number of pages for something called the CCH Standard Federal Tax Reporter, a 25-volume set of binders with loose-leaf pages.

The Tax Reporter includes the tax code but also regulations, court rulings and analysis by CCH editors discussing the impact of those laws and regulations. Court rulings still in effect from 1913 would be there, as would any new case law. Every year, new pages are added as new court cases and statutes affect the current tax law.

“It is much more than the code,” said Mark Luscombe, principal tax analyst at CCH.

CCH, the company that publishes the Tax Reporter, does publish a chart showing that the “tax law keeps piling up.” But, again, that’s not the tax code.

The “tax code” is Title 26 of the United States Code, which is the codification of federal laws. There are various organizations, including CCH, that publish the code, often in small type with double columns. The CCH version is 5,280 pages, another version by RIA is 4,052 pages. The number of pages really depends on the size of the type and the pages.

According to an on-line version of Title 26, it totals about 3.4 million words.

We sought a comment from the Perry campaign but did not receive one.

The Pinocchio Test
We’re always suspicious when politicians start talking about how many pages are in a law. It’s really pretty meaningless, and dependent on so many factors. And, let’s face it, the United States is a big country and is likely to have a complex tax code. It certainly can be made simpler, but a word count and page count is not an indication of complexity.

In this case, Perry also managed to mix up his facts, taking a word count for the tax code and page count for something completely different. The overall effect is pretty misleading. Even a relaunched campaign needs better staff work than that.

Three Pinocchios

The Right-Wing's Phony Anti-Semitism Smears

2011-10-26T05:51:00.000-07:00

From The Daily Beast -- October 25, 2011:

The Right's Failed Protest Smear

Right-wing figures like Bill Kristol are pushing the idea that Occupy Wall Street is anti-Semitic to scare Jews and embarrass politicians like Obama, but the tactic is not gaining traction.

When your cries of anti-Semitism fail to rile the Anti-Defamation League, you might be on the wrong track.

That, however, has not stopped various right-wing figures from pushing the idea that Occupy Wall Street is a hotbed of Jew hatred. A group called the Emergency Committee for Israel, co-founded by Bill Kristol, is running television ads designed to scare Jews about the movement and embarrass politicians who’ve been sympathetic to the protesters. They feature footage of three men saying hateful things about Jews, before a voiceover asks: “Why are our leaders turning a blind eye to anti-Semitic, anti-Israel attacks? Tell President Obama and Leader Pelosi to stand up to the mob.” Since then, other conservatives have ceaselessly amplified the message, while complaining that the rest of the media is ignoring rampant bigotry on the left.

But the Anti-Defamation League, which no one can accuse of ignoring anti-Semitism, has been less than alarmed. In a statement, ADL head Abraham H. Foxman expressed concern about a few anti-Semites who’ve showed up at the protests, but said, “There is no evidence that these anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are representative of the larger movement or that they are gaining traction with other participants.” Indeed, when Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen went to the demonstrations searching for bigots, he failed to find any. “This was my second visit to the Occupy Wall Street site and the second time my keen reporter’s eye has failed to detect even a hint of the anti-Semitism that had been trumpeted by certain right-wing websites and bloggers, most prominently Bill Kristol,” he wrote.

This is not to say that there is no one at Occupy Wall Street, or its many national offshoots, expressing despicable views. Protests always attract fringe characters, particularly when they provide free food and warm clothes to all comers. The footage that the Emergency Committee for Israel used is real, though somewhat disingenuous. For example, one of the ad’s anti-Semites, a guy holding a sign saying “Google: Zionists Control Wall Street,” has since been identified as a homeless man known to picket the area with such placards before the protests even began. Occupy Wall Street has tried desperately to get rid of him, but the police have (correctly) refused to eject him, citing his free-speech rights. “This guy with the Google Zionist banker sign, nobody wants him there,” says Daniel Sieradski, a Jewish activist who organized an open-air Yom Kippur service at Occupy Wall Street, attended by almost 1,000 people. “Everybody is harassing him, screaming at him, totally flipping out on him. Everybody wants him gone, and the police say if you have a right to freedom of assembly so does he.”

This is not the first time that the Emergency Committee for Israel, which Kristol co-founded with the evangelical leader Gary Bauer, has run a misleading ad. In 2010, it put out a commercial accusing Democratic Senate candidate Joe Sestak of raising money for “an anti-Israel organization the FBI called a ‘front-group for Hamas.'” It was a reference to a speech Sestak gave to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Muslim civil-rights group, an organization anodyne enough that George W. Bush met with its leaders after the 9/11 attacks.

In September, even as the Obama administration announced its determination to veto the Palestinian statehood initiative in the U.N. Security Council, the Emergency Committee for Israel took out a full-page ad in The New York Times attacking the president. “Over the past two and a half years, President Obama has built a record that is not pro-Israel,” it said. “He tells Jews they cannot build in Jerusalem; he has criticized Israel at the U.N.; he has pressured Israel to apologize to terrorists; he seeks the division of Jerusalem.” The American Jewish Committee, a nonpartisan, fiercely Zionist organization, denounced the ad as “highly objectionable, indeed counterproductive, to its stated aim of supporting Israel… [it] makes us wonder what are the true goals of the sponsoring group."

Nevertheless, the uproar over the Emergency Committee for Israel’s latest bit of propaganda has succeeded in drawing attention to one dangerous hatemonger—Rachel Decter Abrams, one of the Emergency Committee’s three board members. On October 18, as the Emergency Committee was warning of “Hate at Occupy Wall Street,” Abrams, wife of former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, published a rant on her blog that seemed to call for the mass murder of Palestinians. Coupled with her group’s attacks on Occupy Wall Street, it tells us something about who the real extremists are.

Right-Wing Media Love Rick Perry's New Tax Plan Since It Lowers Taxes on Billionaires and Destroys Everyone Else

2011-10-26T00:52:00.000-07:00

From Media Matters for America -- October 26, 2011:

"The Most Exciting Tax Plan Since Reagan's": Right-Wing Media Tout Perry's Flat Tax

Following the release of Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry's (R-TX) tax plan, conservative media have hyped the plan, claiming it is "exciting" and a "radical improvement" over the current system. However, economists from across the spectrum have criticized Perry's plan, noting that it will lead to "substantial" revenue loss and "draconian cuts" while "undermin[ing]" the need to make the tax code simpler.

Conservative Media Hype Rick Perry's Tax Plan As "A Radical Improvement"

Weekly Standard's Steve Hayes: Perry's Plan Is "Very Strong" And "Has A Lot Of Very Appealing Pro-Growth Aspects To It." From the October 25 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier:

BAIER: OK, Steve, thoughts on this plan and the rollout?

HAYES: Very strong. I like the plan a lot. I think it has a lot of very appealing pro-growth aspects to it. I particularly like the 20 percent tax. There have been already complaints that this is too complicated, that the phase-in or the opt-in and opt-out will make things too complicated. I think that's nonsense. You have basically the option for people to choose whether they want to pay higher taxes. Who's going to choose whether to pay higher taxes? [Fox News, Special Report, 10/25/11]

Steve Forbes: Perry's Tax Reform Proposal Is "The Most Exciting Tax Plan Since Reagan's." An October 20 Yahoo News article reported that Steve Forbes stated that he "helped devise Perry's plan" and heaped lavish praise on that plan. From the article:

Steve Forbes, whose flat tax plan helped make him an unlikely contender for the Republican presidential nomination 15 years ago, is praising a new version of the idea from Rick Perry. And Forbes, who says he helped devise Perry's plan, left little doubt that he'll formally back the Texas governor before long.

In an interview with Yahoo News, Forbes called Perry's proposal, announced in a speech Wednesday, "the most exciting tax plan since Reagan's," in 1980.

Asked whether that included his own 1996 plan, Forbes said it did, because unlike him in 1996, when he fell short of upsetting front-runner Bob Dole, Perry "is going to win."

Forbes, the chief executive of his family's eponymous publishing empire, said the Perry camp reached out to him for help in crafting their plan. "We got into discussions of basic principles--how the thing might be shaped," he said. "The candidate concluded it ought be a simple rate. Make it as simple and bold as possible."

Asked whether the Perry plan would immediately raise as much tax revenue as the current system, Forbes did not answer directly. But he said that in the long-run, it would increase revenue, by spurring economic growth.

Many on the left argue that a flat tax would increase the tax burden on the poor, while easing the load on wealthier Americans. Forbes dismissed those concerns.

"It's gonna be good for all taxpayers," he said. [Yahoo News, 10/20/11]

Forbes Reiterated His Support On Fox: The Flat Tax Is "A Tax Cut For Most People, Not A Tax Increase." [Fox News, America Live, 10/25/11, via Media Matters]

Big Government's Dan Mitchell: Perry's Plan Has "Some Missing Homework, But [Is] A Solid B+" And "A Radical Improvement Compared To The Current Tax System." In an October 25 post on Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com headlined "Grading Perry's Flat Tax: Some Missing Homework, But A Solid B+," contributor and Cato Institute economist Dan Mitchell wrote:

As a long-time advocate of a pure flat tax, I'm not happy that Perry has deviated from the ideal approach. But the perfect should not be the enemy of the very good. If implemented, his plan would dramatically boost economic performance and improve competitiveness.

Depending on the answers to these questions, the grade for Perry's flat tax could be as high as A- or as low as B. Regardless, it will be a radical improvement compared to the current tax system, which gets a D- (and that's a very kind grade). [Big Government, 10/25/11]

Hoft Hypes Perry's Tax Plan. From an October 24 post on Jim Hoft's Gateway Pundit blog:

Governor Rick Perry unveiled his 20% flat tax and spending plan tonight. The plan will give individuals the option of paying a 20% flat-rate income tax. It will also cap federal spending at 18% of GDP. Another selling point - the simple 20% flat tax will allow Americans to file their taxes on a postcard, saving up to $483 billion in compliance costs.

Sounds good.

Steve Forbes was impressed. He endorsed the plan on Monday. [Gateway Pundit, 10/24/11, emphasis original]

However, Experts Describe The Plan As "Delusional" And Claim It Will Lead To "Draconian Cuts" And "Substantial" Revenue Loss

Syracuse University Economics Professor: Perry's Plan Is "Delusional Policy" And "The Race To The Bottom On Tax Policy Is Getting Scary." In an October 25 post on Forbes magazine's website titled "Perry Optional Alternative Flat Tax -- Good Politics, Delusional Policy," Len Burman, Professor of Practice, Public Administration and Economics at Syracuse University, wrote:

Here's a quick note on Perry's actual plan, as outlined in his Wall Street Journal op ed today. Yesterday, I noted that a flat tax would be regressive and potentially raise taxes on low- and middle-income people. I was assuming, erroneously as it turns out, that Perry's plan would be designed to raise at least as much revenue as current law. But it would actually amount to a giant tax cut.

Here's what he said in the WSJ:

The plan starts with giving Americans a choice between a new, flat tax rate of 20% or their current income tax rate. The new flat tax preserves mortgage interest, charitable and state and local tax exemptions for families earning less than $500,000 annually, and it increases the standard deduction to $12,500 for individuals and dependents.

The plan is optional, meaning that low- and middle-income families that benefit from refundable credits will stay in the current system. High-income taxpayers will jump at the chance to avoid paying tax on interest, dividends, capital gains, rents, royalties, and other capital income. That is a large share of their income, and it would be exempt under Perry's plan. And the 20% rate is much lower than the current top rate of 35%. And, moderately well off people get to keep the most popular deductions.

The idea of an optional alternative tax system is not new. John McCain proposed one in 2008 and it would have added $7 trillion to the debt over a decade. It's virtually always true that if you offer taxpayers a choice, it will cost the Treasury money.

I have no idea how big a tax cut Perry's plan is, but there's no way this plan will come close to raising 18% of GDP (Perry's spending target) unless there are hidden revenue raisers that I missed. The idea of adding to our enormous deficits to provide giant tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires just blows my mind.

And, by the way, an optional alternative tax system is not simple. Millions of middle-income taxpayers will have to figure their taxes two ways to figure out which plan is better for them. Will it be called the Alternative Maximum Tax?

The race to the bottom on tax policy is getting scary. [Forbes.com, 10/25/11]

CBPP: Perry's Plan Would Require "A Dismantling Of Federal Programs" And "Draconian Cuts In Virtually Every Kind Of Spending." From a New York Times article headlined "Perry Calls His Flat Tax Proposal 'Bold Reform' ":

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas unveiled a plan on Tuesday to scrap the graduated income tax and replace it with a 20 percent flat rate. By throwing out rates as high as 35 percent and eliminating estate and investment taxes, the plan would grant a major tax cut for the wealthy.

The plan also proposes reducing the scope of the federal government by requiring drastically austere federal budgets -- compared with what exists now -- that spend no more than 18 percent of the nation's gross domestic product, which analysts said would most likely force big cuts in government spending at almost every level. That would equate to a cut of one-quarter of the budget from 2011 expected levels, and it would mark the lowest level of spending relative to G.D.P. since the mid-1960s, though rising tax receipts during the roaring economy of a dozen years ago temporarily brought the level close to 18 percent.

To address the projected long-term financial shortfall within Social Security, Mr. Perry suggested raising the retirement age and potentially changing the age eligibility for Medicare and using a sliding scale to limit benefits based on income -- two proposals that could face significant opposition in Congress. Mr. Perry, who said his plan would balance the budget by 2020, also proposed letting younger workers divert some of their Social Security taxes into private investment accounts, a longtime goal of economic conservatives.

Analysts said it would take time to examine the effects of the Perry plan. But Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, said: "There are two things we can say with certainty: It will lower revenue and be a great benefit to the wealthy."

He said the poor who have children would most likely do better under the current system, because refundable tax credits provide some with net payments from the government. But Mr. Williams said it was unclear how many among the middle class would benefit -- though families with more children or bigger mortgages would be more likely to opt for his proposal.

Mr. Perry pledged to not cut any benefits of current Social Security retirees or those about to tap into the system. But to do that, and cut the budget to 18 percent of G.D.P., would require cutting at least one-third of the remaining federal budget, said James R. Horney, the vice president for federal fiscal policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group in Washington. It would require "a dismantling of federal programs," Mr. Horney said, and "draconian cuts in virtually every kind of spending." [The New York Times, 10/25/11]

Brookings Senior Fellow: Perry's Plan "Undermines" The Idea That The Tax Code Should Be Made Simpler While Leading To A " 'Substantial' Decrease In Revenues." From a CBSNews.com article:

Perry is offering taxpayers two choices -- either stick with the current tax system or opt into a new system in which they pay a 20 percent flat income tax. That incentivizes those who would pay less under the current system to stick with it, and those who would pay less under the flat tax plan -- largely Americans on the upper end of the income scale - to opt for the new plan.

That would add up to a "substantial" decrease in revenues, says Ted Gayer, the co-director of the Economic Studies program and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Perry has yet to lay out all the specifics of the plan, which makes it difficult to estimate its full impact. But "it's clearly going to be a reduction in revenues, I think fairly substantial," said Gayer. Many conservative Republicans want to reduce the role of government in society in part by starving it of funds.

What Perry's plan boils down to is a tax cut for the highest-income Americans, who currently pay a top marginal income tax rate of 35 percent, and no tax change for those who don't opt for the new system.

Perry argues that his plan simplifies the tax code, saying Tuesday that taxpayers will simply need to fill out a postcard to file their taxes. But since they will need to decide between the old system and the new one, it won't be quite so simple for many Americans.

"It kind of undermines the whole we're making your taxes simpler argument, because you still have to go through both systems to see which one is best for you," said Gayer.

Perry vowed to balance the budget by 2020 and cap on federal spending at no more than 18 percent of Gross Domestic Product. Under current policy forecasts, the United States will be spending 26 percent of GDP in 2020 and 34 percent of GDP by 2035. Perry would need to dramatically slash federal spending to meet his 18 percent goal. [CBSNews.com, 10/25/11]

Even Conservative Economists Have Called Perry's Plan "Fiscally Irresponsible" And "A Disaster"

Economist Peter Morici: "Rick Perry's Tax Plan Would Be A Disaster For America." In a post on FoxNews.com, Peter Morici, Professor of Logistics, Business and Public Policy at the University of Maryland, wrote:

Seeking to jump start his flagging presidential campaign and establish his pro-growth and fiscal responsibility credentials, Governor Rick Perry is unveiling a tax plan that will not jump start the economy and is fiscally irresponsible.

In a nutshell, Mr. Perry would give taxpayers a choice between filing under the current income tax system -- with all its flaws -- and an alternative flat tax 20 percent system. Under the latter, families could maintain their mortgage deductions if they earn less than $500,000, which is about 99 percent of taxpayers, and could declare exemptions of $12,500 for each family member.

It seems appealing -- a simplified tax system, fewer IRS agents, and so forth. But the plan falls short in two important respects -- it won't encourage many better investment decisions and foster growth, and it will spin the federal deficit permanently into the stratosphere.

The whole purpose of a flat tax is to encourage individuals and corporations to invest more in sound business opportunities, instead of prospecting for tax breaks by buying homes bigger than they need or spending on government hobby horse projects like solar panels. By giving tax payers the option of filing under the old system, however, the Perry plan will encourage the wealthy and near-wealthy to continue prospecting for loopholes and credit. Most of those folks don't pay 20 percent now, so don't count on them to volunteer for Mr. Perry's plan.

With less revenue in hand, Gov. Perry proposes slashing government spending to 18 percent of GDP--that would require $900 billion in annual spending cuts, when the Congress is having trouble agreeing on an additional $100 billion.

Such cuts are possible by increasing the retirement age to 70 and slashing Medicare and Medicare spending and gutting the defense budget.

If Gov. Perry wants to slash taxes that's fine but let's go to a real flat tax. Let Gov. Perry tell Americans how he is going to tame the monster that ate Washington--created through escalating health care spending--and rationalize social security and defense spending. [FoxNews.com, 10/25/11]

Former Chief Economist For House Committee: "Perry's Plan Would Preserve Crony Capitalist Tax Code." In an October 25 blog post titled "Perry's plan would preserve crony capitalist tax code," Alex Brill, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former chief economist for the House Ways and Means Committee, wrote:

Governor Perry's new proposal for an optional pro-growth tax code will do little for our economy while increasing the complexity of the tax code. A flat rate income tax would lead to positive economic growth, but making it optional as Governor Perry has proposed preserves the opportunities for "crony capitalism" and other existing distortions in the code.

This is because an optional flat tax is only appealing to those taxpayers who see it as a tax cut. Taxpayers who can reduce their tax liability by exploiting an existing tax break will do just that. In other words, an optional flat tax is appealing only to those who can't get a good break elsewhere in the code.

In one sense, an optional flat tax is the polar opposite of the AMT: a mandatory, parallel tax system that hits those taxpayers who are "too effective" at lowering their tax burden. But in another sense, it's quite similar: yet another tax code. [American Enterprise Institute, The Enterprise Blog, 10/25/11]

AEI "Resident Scholar": Perry's "Optional Tax Code Worse Than A Gimmick." In an October 25 blog post titled "Optional tax code worse than a gimmick," Andrew Briggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote:

Jim Pethokoukis points out what he calls a "gimmick" in Governor Rick Perry's proposed flat tax plan: taxpayers would get the choice to file under the current tax code or under the new flat tax plan. While I agree that this is a bit silly from a policy point of view, the problems go deeper than that. Why? Well, the flat tax is supposed to do three things: raise sufficient revenue, reduce compliance costs, and reduce economic distortions.

But if you can choose which tax code to file under then, to a first approximation, people will choose whichever costs them the least. In theory at least, to raise the same revenue in a static analysis the flat tax would have to be set such that no one could pay lower taxes than under current law, since if they could pay lower taxes they will pay lower taxes. It's easy to respond that people would choose the flat tax for its simplicity even if it costs them more, but they can already have a simple tax code under current law: just don't bother hunting down all your deductions.

The same goes for compliance costs: to know which tax code to file under you need to do your taxes under both, undermining the simplicity of the flat tax. One of the reasons compliance costs are so high today is that there can be such a reward for figuring out strategies to minimize your taxes; it's not clear that Perry's flat tax fixes this problem. And finally, if people have the option of filing under the current tax code then all the economic distortions embedded in it will remain, at least for that significant portion of the population who would do better under current law than the flat tax. A person may say to himself, "I can pay lower taxes than under the flat tax plan so long as I [insert governmentally imposed distortion here]." Marginal tax rates for high earners would be lower, reducing economic distortions, but it's unclear where you'll make up the revenue if low and middle earners get to file under current law where they pay next to nothing. [American Enterprise Institute, The Enterprise Blog, 10/25/11]

AEI's Director Of Economic Policy Studies: Under Perry's Plan Government Would Have To Drastically Slash Spending. From the Associated Press:

By design, Perry's plan "must lose revenue" for the government, said Kevin Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute. To avoid higher deficits, Hassett said, the government would have to slash spending in ways not seen since the steep military drawdown after World War II. [Associated Press, 10/25/11, via ABCNews.com]

FOX News, The Voice of American Fascism -- Fascist FOX -- Attacks Obama's Mortgage Relief Plan Because It Helps People Instead of Billionaires

2011-10-26T00:20:00.000-07:00

From Media Matters for America -- October 25, 2011:

"Bribes" And "Farce": Fox Rushes To Attack Obama's Mortgage Relief Plan

Fox has rushed to attack President Obama's plan to assist homeowners who are underwater on their mortgages as a "re-election ploy," an offer of "bribes," and "purely a political stunt."

AP: "Obama Offered Mortgage Relief On Monday To Hundreds Of Thousands Of Americans." From an October 24 Associated Press (AP) article:

President Barack Obama offered mortgage relief on Monday to hundreds of thousands of Americans, his latest attempt to ease the economic and political fallout of a housing crisis that has bedeviled him as he seeks a second term.

"I'm here to say that we can't wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job," the president declared outside a family home in Las Vegas, the epicenter of foreclosures and joblessness. "Where they won't act, I will."

Making a case for his policies and a new effort to circumvent roadblocks put up by Republican lawmakers, Obama also laid out a theme for his re-election, saying that there's "no excuse for all the games and the gridlock that we've been seeing in Washington."

While the White House tried to avoid predicting how many homeowners would benefit from the revamped refinancing program, the Federal Housing Finance Administration estimated an additional 1 million people would qualify. Moody's Analytics say the figure could be as high as 1.6 million.

Under Obama's proposal, homeowners who are still current on their mortgages would be able to refinance no matter how much their home value has dropped below what they still owe. [AP, 10/24/11, via MSNBC]

"Purely A Political Stunt": Fox Attacks Obama's Mortgage Relief Plan

Tantaros: Obama's Mortgage Plan Is "Purely A Political Stunt." During the October 25 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom, co-host Bill Hemmer asked Fox News contributor Andrea Tantaros, "How vulnerable is this president on the issue of housing going into an election year?" Tantaros replied that Obama is "very vulnerable" and later said that "his plan is purely a political stunt."

Morici: Obama's Plan Is "A Re-Election Ploy." On the October 25 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, co-host Steve Doocy interviewed economist and professor Peter Morici about Obama's mortgage relief plan. Doocy said, "You know, the president is trying to not only keep people in their houses, but to try to keep him in the White House as well with this." Morici agreed, saying, "This is really a re-election ploy, because it's going to create new problems down the road."

Krauthammer: "[Obama] Knows That This Is A Farce." On the October 24 edition of Fox News' Special Report, Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer said of Obama's plan, "But Obama is not here about fixing stuff. This is all about framing the debate. This is an appearance of motion. ... He knows that this is a farce." Fox Nation later hyped Krauthammer's commentary in an October 24 post.

Dobbs: Obama's New Plan To Help Homeowners Is "Offering Up ... Bribes" So He Can "Get Re-Elected." On the October 24 edition of Fox News' America Live, host Megyn Kelly discussed Obama's plan with Fox Business host Lou Dobbs. Dobbs attacked Obama's plan, saying it was "one of the most irresponsible initiatives [Obama] could take" and later claiming that Obama is "offering up billions -- hundreds of billions of dollars in bribes" so that he can "get re-elected."

Conservatives Latest Lies About Anti-Semitism

2011-10-25T05:40:00.000-07:00

From The Washington Post -- October 24, 2011:

Where are the anti-Semites of Occupy Wall Street?

By Richard Cohen

Reckless Jew that I am, I muscled my way into the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Lower Manhattan despite multiple reports of virulent and conceivably lethal anti-Semitism. Projecting an unvarnished Semitism, I circled the place, encountering nothing and no one to suggest bigotry — not a sign, not a book and not even the guy who some weeks ago held up a placard with the instruction to Google the phrase “Zionists control Wall St.” Google “nut case” instead.

This was my second visit to the Occupy Wall Street site and the second time my keen reporter’s eye has failed to detect even a hint of the anti-Semitism that had been trumpeted by certain right-wing Web sites and bloggers, most prominently Bill Kristol. He is a founder of the Emergency Committee for Israel, which has been running cable TV ads alleging a virtual hate rally at the Occupy Wall Street site and calling on President Obama and other important Democrats to denounce what is — as it happens — not happening there. The commercial ran on Fox News the very day I was at the site.

Kristol’s cri de wolf (a French term of my own invention) was taken up by Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post’s conservative blogger, who noted the Kristol group’s “eye-popping ad.” Citing an article from Israel Today that linked a single statement by someone named Patricia McAllister in Los Angeles with some vitriol on the American Nazi Party’s Web site and a reference to the editor of Adbusters, she fashioned a veritable pogrom out of pretty close to thin air and demanded, “Where is the outrage?” I have a better question: Where are the anti-Semites?

The Anti-Defamation League has managed to find a paltry few. But even this watchdog Jewish organization, while noting the odd Jew-hater on the periphery of the anti-Wall Street group, found that “anti-Semitism has not gained traction . . . nor is it representative of the larger movement at this time.” Possibly more representative is the fact that Jewish religious services were held at the protest site for the holidays of Yom Kippur and Simchat Torah. If these were disrupted by roving bands of contemporary Cossacks, the local media have failed to mention it — yet another cause for outrage, no doubt.

This right-wing attempt to discredit both the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Democratic Party’s hesitant embrace of it is reprehensible. It’s made possible, however, because no one this side of the moon knows precisely what the Occupy Wall Street movement is trying to do. On a daily basis it marches off to some location to highlight what we all know — that Wall Street guys are rich — and their slogans suggest a tired socialism that is as repugnant to me as the felonious capitalism that produced the mortgage bubble and the impoverishment of millions of Americans. Given our fastidiousness regarding vigilante justice, not much can be done.

Occupy Wall Street has become an event for its own sake, a destination for the aimless. It is something that occurs on countless iPhone cameras, a tourist attraction with the usual vendors, the usual zaftig young women doing the usual arrhythmic dance, somehow missing the beat of many drums. The nostalgic scent of pot wafts occasionally through the air, and I feel so much younger. This, I’m sure, will bring an end to the Vietnam War.

On a given day, I decide that Occupy Wall Street is about nothing and then I decide it is the Herman Cain campaign in aggregate, just a media event that has captured the flea-thoughts of many Americans. Then I decide it is an incoherent articulation of anger at the institutions that have failed us, including — by way of both self-pity and self-flagellation — the media. It seems, above all, a conspiracy to have left-leaning writers make jackasses of themselves by imparting grave and grand meaning to what is little more than a vast sleepover.

The imputation of anti-Semitism, however, adds gravitas to this lighthearted event. The smear is in deadly earnest, a reminder that the devious tactics of the Old Left have been adopted by the New Right. (No accident, maybe, that the practitioners are the descendants of lefties.) It produced alarm on the Internet, Jewish smoke signals alerting the ethnically twitchy to the presence of enemies and the demand that Obama, already suspected of harboring furious anti-Israel sentiments, do something. But there is nothing to be done — except to condemn anyone who uses anti-Semitism to advance a political agenda. To quote some of them: Where’s the outrage?

Vote Republican -- Help Al Quaida Finish the Job of Destroying America -- Help Al Quaida Say "Mission Accomplished"

2011-10-24T22:17:00.000-07:00

FOX News, The Laughing Hyenas of American Fascism, Ridicule Obama's Jobs Plan In an Effort to Keep Americans Unemployed and Broke

2011-10-24T20:39:00.000-07:00

From Media Matters for America -- October 24, 2011:

Fox Business Fails In Attempt To Discredit Economists Who Predict Obama Jobs Plan Will Create Jobs

Fox Business is questioning the credibility of Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi after he estimated that President Obama's jobs plan would create nearly two million jobs, arguing that "every other economist in the world" disagrees. In fact, many economists have said that the American Jobs Act would create millions of jobs.

Fox Business: "Every Other Economist In The World" Thinks Mark Zandi's Estimate Is "Absurd"

Fred Barnes And Lou Dobbs Laugh At Zandi's Prediction Of American Jobs Act Impact. On Lou Dobbs Tonight, Fox contributor Fred Barnes and host Lou Dobbs discussed the fact that Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi predicted that the President Obama's jobs bill would create nearly two million jobs:

BARNES: President Obama has been going around saying that independent economists -- and that's plural, economists -- agree with him that his jobs bill will create nearly two million jobs and create more growth by 2 percent. Well, the White House actually produced the name of only one economist today who actually agrees with those numbers, and I think every other economist in the world thinks they're absurd.

DOBBS: Who is that one economist?

BARNES: Ah, it was the one you -- I'm sure you expected, Mark Zandi.

DOBBS: [Laughing] The pride of Moody's.

BARNES: [Laughing] Yes. [Fox Business, Lou Dobbs Tonight, 10/21/11]
Bolling Dismisses Zandi's Evaluation Of Obama's Jobs Plan Because Of Zandi's Positive Statements On Stimulus Bill. From Eric Bolling's Fox Business show:

BOLLING: Doc, is it time to just throw in the towel on the Obama economic policies?

CAROLINE HELDMAN (Occidental College professor): Well, I'm sure that's -- I mean, Republicans intended to throw in the towel before it even made it to Congress. The American public should be up in arms about the fact that Republicans are practicing partisan politics over the wealth and the health of the nation. President Obama's plan, according to Moody's, is going to create 1.9 million new jobs and boost the economy by 2 percent.

BOLLING: Time out. Time out. Let's do it --

HELDMAN: I mean, it doesn't make sense that they're not allowing to this go through.

BOLLING: -- let's do it this way. Let's do it this way. Let's stay factual, and when we steer off the factual highway, I'll bring you back on through the on ramp.

HELDMAN: Is Moody's not factual? I'm sorry, you're challenging Moody's?

BOLLING: No. It's not Moody's. It's Mark Zandi who works at Moody's, the same guy who was all for stimulus one. So goodbye on that one. Now the other one, you said, it's partisan politics. Unfortunately --

HELDMAN: Stimulus one worked. It's a myth that stimulus one didn't work. It's a myth. [Fox Business, Follow the Money, 10/21/11]
In Fact, Zandi Is Only One Of Many Economists Who Say Obama's Jobs Plan Will Create Jobs, Boost Economy

Bloomberg: Economists Conclude Jobs Act Would "Help Avoid A Return To Recession." Economists surveyed by Bloomberg News concluded that the jobs plan "would help avoid a return to recession by maintaining growth and pushing down the unemployment rate next year." From Bloomberg:

President Barack Obama's $447 billion jobs plan would help avoid a return to recession by maintaining growth and pushing down the unemployment rate next year, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

The legislation, submitted to Congress this month, would increase gross domestic product by 0.6 percent next year and add or keep 275,000 workers on payrolls, the median estimates in the survey of 34 economists showed. The program would also lower the jobless rate by 0.2 percentage point in 2012, economists said. [Bloomberg, 9/28/10]
Zandi: American Jobs Act Would Add Nearly 2 Million Jobs. UPI reported:

President Barack Obama's $447 billion job-creation plan would likely add 1.9 million payroll jobs and grow the U.S. economy 2 percent, a leading economist said.

The plan, which Obama outlined before a joint session of Congress Thursday, would likely cut the unemployment rate by a percentage point, Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi said as Obama prepared to tout the plan at Virginia's University of Richmond. [United Press International, 9/9/11]
Macroeconomic Advisers: American Jobs Act Would Be "A Significant Boost To GDP And Employment." From the blog of Macroeconomic Advisers LLC:

We estimate that the American Jobs Act (AJA), if enacted, would give a significant boost to GDP and employment over the near-term.

The various tax cuts aimed at raising workers' after-tax income and encouraging hiring and investing, combined with the spending increases aimed at maintaining state & local employment and funding infrastructure modernization, would:
Boost the level of GDP by 1.3% by the end of 2012, and by 0.2% by the end of 2013.

Raise nonfarm establishment employment by 1.3 million by the end of 2012 and 0.8 million by the end of 2013, relative to the baseline.

The program works directly to raise employment through tax incentives and support to state & local governments for increasing hiring; it works indirectly through the positive boost to aggregate demand (and hence hiring) stimulated by the direct spending and the increase in household income resulting from lower employee payroll taxes and increased employment.

EPI: American Jobs Act Would "Increase Employment By About 4.3 Million Jobs." Economic Policy Institute research and policy director John Irons provided a "preliminary breakdown of the package and a first pass look at the job impact" of Obama's jobs plan:

Overall the package would increase employment by about 4.3 million jobs over the next couple of years. The new initiatives would boost employment by about 2.6 million jobs, while the continuation of the two temporary provisions (EUI and the payroll tax holiday) would prevent a backslide of over 1.6 million jobs.

There's still a big hole left to fill, but every step matters.

IHS Global Insight: American Jobs Act Could Grow GDP By 1.4 Percentage Points, Create 900,000 Jobs. From IHS Global Insight chief U.S. economist Nigel Gault's estimate of the American Jobs Act's impact:

Adding the different elements of the programme would generate a 2012 (calendar-year) impact on GDP growth--compared to our baseline--of about 0.8 percentage point. Passing none of the programme would cut about 0.6 percentage point off our projected growth rate. Thus, the overall swing in growth between not passing any of it and passing the whole thing would be about 1.4 percentage points. The corresponding swing for employment (also calendar-year average) would be around 900,000 (from down 400,000 to up 500,000).

We will watch the debate over the proposals carefully, to see what parts of it the Republicans might go along with. Our expectation at this point is that not much beyond the extension of the existing payroll tax cut and the extension of emergency unemployment insurance benefits will be passed. For now, we have no plans to adjust our 2012 forecast based on the president's proposal.

Ameriprise Financial Services Senior Economist: Obama Jobs Plan Could Add Up To 1.2 Million Jobs. CNNMoney reported:

Economists gave generally positive reviews to President Obama's jobs plan Friday, with some estimating that at least 1 million jobs could be added in the next year if Congress passes the package.

The payroll tax holiday for workers and small businesses was cited specifically for having a relatively good "bang for the buck." And that part of the plan may have the most bipartisan support.

"This additional spending capacity in the hands of consumers should continue to foster improvements in aggregate domestic demand. And ultimately, it is demand and demand alone that will lead to more business hiring," said Russell Price, senior economist for Ameriprise Financial Services.

Price estimates the increased payroll tax holiday for workers by itself is likely to add between 750,000 to 1 million jobs, and that the new break on payroll taxes for employers could add an additional 100,000 to 200,000 jobs.

He added that gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the nation's economic activity, could get a 1.5 percentage point boost as well. [CNNMoney, 9/9/11]
Nuveen Asset Management Chief Economist: American Jobs Act Could Add A Million Jobs. CNNMoney further reported:

Economists say one big problem with assessing the program is figuring out its chance of passage in the face of Republican criticism.

Keith Hembre, chief economist for Nuveen Asset Management, said he thinks the package could lift GDP by 1.5 percentage points and add 1 million jobs, but doubts Congress will approve Obama's proposal.

"It seems much more like a wish list than anything that is likely become law," he said.

Another Republican Lackey Attempts to Justify Bush's Disaster in Iraq -- Rice Spills the Beans

2011-10-24T06:25:00.000-07:00

From The New York Daily News -- October 24, 2011:

Condoleezza Rice joins George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld & Dick Cheney on Iraq spin patrol

By MIKE LUPICA

Now here comes Condoleezza Rice, the latest from the Bush White House trying to rewrite history on Iraq, make it out to be some kind of triumph for all of them, make herself a hero of a war that cost this country so many young lives and so much money and so much prestige.

So a war started under false pretenses becomes one given over to this kind of false past tense.

George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and now Rice all panhandle for a better place in history, trying to make the Bush administration into something so much more better and noble and high-minded than it actually was.

Rice is no better than Cheney trying to sell not just her book but this idea that somehow the decision to start a war and take out a regional thug who had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 has somehow been vindicated. That it has turned all of them into great statesmen after the fact, and after they are all mercifully out of the room.

Asked about the cost of the war by the writer Christopher Dickey, this is what Rice says on the eve of the publication of her book:

"I don't think you put a price on a Middle East that will look very different without Saddam Hussein and with movement toward freedom."

She knows better, knows the price was nearly 4,500 dead American soldiers. The price was more than 30,000 American wounded and 100,000 dead Iraqis. And somehow after all that, after moving on a country that had no weapons of mass destruction, that was never going to pose a threat to this country, Rice not only wants to validate Bush's "Freedom Agenda" in Iraq, she wants to give Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld - and herself, of course - credit for the uprisings of Tunisia and Egypt and Libya in this year's Arab Spring.

It makes her one more lightweight from Bush's eight years in the White House trying desperately to move up in class now.

Regrets? Oh, Rice has a few, starting with the regrets over a shopping trip to this city during Hurricane Katrina, and a trip to the theater, even though as secretary of state she had no real role to play in helping out the people of New Orleans.

But then again, neither did the President of the United States at the time.

Now that she knows everything about how things in the Middle East have worked out, at least for now, you do want to ask her how she knows that the people of Iraq would not eventually have had their own Arab Spring, risen up against Saddam Hussein the way the rebels in Libya finally rose up against Khadafy. No matter. She defends the invasion of Iraq to the end, even though the blood of our dead soldiers goes on her hands the way it goes on the rest of them who had anything to say about things during the Bush/Cheney years.

Rice apparently thinks she can grow in stature now because war lovers like Cheney and Rumsfeld were mean to her, because Cheney said in his own doorstop of a book that she came into his office in tears once. Only she can't. And cannot take some kind of victory lap now that President Obama is finally getting our ground troops out of Iraq the way he promised he would as a candidate, after all the dead and broken bodies that came home over the past eight years.

Yesterday, the current secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, appeared on every television program except NFL pregame shows defending Obama's decision to bring home U.S. ground troops by Christmas against Republican criticism.

And when Clinton, who voted for the war when she was still in the Senate in 2003, who got carried along by the same wave of misguided patriotism as so many others who voted for the war, was asked if Iraq was worth it, she would not say that it was. She said that she preferred to look forward.

Of course Clinton was another one who bought into the cockeyed notion in 2003 that if you voted against going to war with Iraq that somehow you were a bad American. She found out differently. Everybody did. Now all these books come out of the Bush administration, hustling their own version of things the way they hustled war on us in the shadow of 9/11.

Rice wants to be better than Cheney because she didn't like torture as much as he did. But she is no better, and now has her own book to prove it. Putting one more price tag on the Iraq War the way Cheney did:

Thirty-five dollars in bookstores, 22 on Amazon.

Republicans -- The "Thank America Last" Party

2011-10-23T21:10:00.000-07:00

From The Washington Monthly -- October 20, 2011

The GOP’s ‘Thank America Last’ Crowd

By Steve Benen

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) appeared on Fox News this morning to respond to reports of Moammar Gadhafi’s demise. His first instinct wasn’t to thank American troops, but rather, to thank French troops.

“Today’s not a day to point fingers,” the right-wing Florida senator said. “I’m glad it’s all working out. Ultimately this is about the freedom and liberty of the Libyan people. But let’s give credit where credit is due: it’s the French and the British that led in this fight, and probably even led on the strike that led to Gadhafi’s capture, and, or, you know, to his death.

“So, that’s the first thing. The second thing is, you know, I criticize the president, for, he did the right things, he just took too long to do it and didn’t do enough of it.”

In the mind of this rising Republican star, the American military that helped drive Gadhafi’s regime from power deserves no credit at all. Marco Rubio is comfortable crediting the French, but not American men and women in uniform.

Wow.

Remember hearing about the “blame America first” crowd? Well, say hello to the “thank America last” crowd.

Rubio, by the way, isn’t the only member. In August, when Gadhafi’s government fell, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) issued a joint statement in which the Republicans commended the “British, French, and other allies, as well as our Arab partners, especially Qatar and the UAE.” McCain and Graham eventually said Americans can be “proud of the role our country” played, but nevertheless condemned the administration’s “failure” to act the way the GOP senators wanted.

Republicans hate the president so much, they just can’t bring themselves to credit him for the success of the mission, or even thank American servicemen and women for their service in completing the mission.

I realize Rubio is a reflexive partisan, but even for him, his comments on Fox News this morning were just cheap. When the fear of Obama getting some credit for success is stronger than the satisfaction that comes with Gadhafi’s demise, there’s a problem.

As for Rubio complaining about the way in which Obama’s policy came together, it’s worth noting that the president assembled an international coalition with surprising speed and won approval from the United Nations extremely quickly.

If Rubio and his ilk don’t want to applaud the president for getting the results they claim to have wanted, the least they can do is have the decency to acknowledge the efforts of U.S. troops. Is that really too much to ask from the right?

Al Quaida Wasted Its Time Destroying the World Trade Center -- Al Quaida Could Have Destroyed All of America By Simply Electing More Republicans

2011-10-22T20:39:00.000-07:00

From The Christian Science Monitor -- October 17, 2011:

The Rise of the Regressive Right and the Re-Awakening of America

By Robert Reich

A fundamental war has been waged in this nation since its founding, between progressive forces pushing us forward and regressive forces pulling us backward. But whenever privilege and power conspire to pull us backward, the nation eventually rallies and moves forward.

We are going to battle once again.

Progressives believe in openness, equal opportunity, and tolerance. Progressives assume we’re all in it together: We all benefit from public investments in schools and health care and infrastructure. And we all do better with strong safety nets, reasonable constraints on Wall Street and big business, and a truly progressive tax system. Progressives worry when the rich and privileged become powerful enough to undermine democracy.

Regressives take the opposite positions.

Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and the other tribunes of today’s Republican right aren’t really conservatives. Their goal isn’t to conserve what we have. It’s to take us backwards.

They’d like to return to the 1920s — before Social Security, unemployment insurance, labor laws, the minimum wage, Medicare and Medicaid, worker safety laws, the Environmental Protection Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities and Exchange Act, and the Voting Rights Act.

In the 1920s Wall Street was unfettered, the rich grew far richer and everyone else went deep into debt, and the nation closed its doors to immigrants.

Rather than conserve the economy, these regressives want to resurrect the classical economics of the 1920s — the view that economic downturns are best addressed by doing nothing until the “rot” is purged out of the system (as Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, so decorously put it).

In truth, if they had their way we’d be back in the late nineteenth century — before the federal income tax, antitrust laws, the pure food and drug act, and the Federal Reserve. A time when robber barons — railroad, financial, and oil titans — ran the country. A time of wrenching squalor for the many and mind-numbing wealth for the few.

Listen carefully to today’s Republican right and you hear the same Social Darwinism Americans were fed more than a century ago to justify the brazen inequality of the Gilded Age: Survival of the fittest. Don’t help the poor or unemployed or anyone who’s fallen on bad times, they say, because this only encourages laziness. America will be strong only if we reward the rich and punish the needy.

The regressive right has slowly consolidated power over the last three decades as income and wealth have concentrated at the top. In the late 1970s the richest 1 percent of Americans received 9 percent of total income and held 18 percent of the nation’s wealth; by 2007, they had more than 23 percent of total income and 35 percent of America’s wealth. CEOs of the 1970s were paid 40 times the average worker’s wage; now CEOs receive 300 times the typical workers’ wage.

This concentration of income and wealth has generated the political heft to deregulate Wall Street and halve top tax rates. It has bankrolled the so-called Tea Party movement, and captured the House of Representatives and many state governments. Through a sequence of presidential appointments it has also overtaken the Supreme Court.

Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Roberts (and, all too often, Kennedy) claim they’re conservative jurists. But they’re judicial activists bent on overturning seventy-five years of jurisprudence by resurrecting states’ rights, treating the 2nd Amendment as if America still relied on local militias, narrowing the Commerce Clause, and calling money speech and corporations people.

Yet the great arc of American history reveals an unmistakable pattern. Whenever privilege and power conspire to pull us backward, the nation eventually rallies and moves forward. Sometimes it takes an economic shock like the bursting of a giant speculative bubble; sometimes we just reach a tipping point where the frustrations of average Americans turn into action.

Look at the Progressive reforms between 1900 and 1916; the New Deal of the 1930s; the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s; the widening opportunities for women, minorities, people with disabilities, and gays; and the environmental reforms of the 1970s.

In each of these eras, regressive forces reignited the progressive ideals on which America is built. The result was fundamental reform.

Perhaps this is what’s beginning to happen again across America.

The Biggest Lies from Corporate America about Why the USA Has an Enormous Lack of Jobs

2011-10-21T21:39:00.000-07:00

From Common Dreams -- Octobewr 21, 2011:

Published on Friday, October 21, 2011 by In These Times

Alleged ‘Skills Gap’ Takes Spotlight Off Who’s to Blame for Massive Jobs Shortage

by Roger Bybee

Lately, the usual stream of stories about America’s jobs crisis has been displaced by a story about the shortage of crucial skills among the jobless.

"In short," writes Bybee, "the Education, Training and Skills "frame” on our economic problems plays several useful functions for the CEOs and the rest of the richest 1 percent. It takes the spotlight off CEOs' decisions to wipe out decent-paying job opportunities."

This new narrative—fed by new studies from corporate sources like Deloitte & Touche—has seemingly displaced information about the plight of the unemployed. Suddenly, stories about the unemployed—except for jobless college graduates who are carrying part of the country's $1 trillion in outstanding student debt—have virtually disappeared from the mainstream media.

What’s happening to the growing numbers of “99-ers,” people whose unemployment benefits have expired? How are families and communities coping with a rising tide of mortgage foreclosures—that, as GOP presidential hopeful Michelle Bachmann of all people reminded us—painfully force families from the security of their “nests”?

Worry not, a new hook for economic coverage has arrived. A major study on the perils posed by the "skill gap" to our economy warns:

American manufacturing companies cannot fill up to 600,000 skilled positions, even as unemployment numbers hover at historic levels, according to a survey released Monday from Deloitte & Touche and The Manufacturing Institute.

…Some companies are not bidding for projects because they lack skilled manpower to do the work, according to Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce.

It's the "jobs paradox," said WMC President and CEO Kurt Bauer.

"We have high unemployment, yet companies can't find the skilled help they need," he said.
Another report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce National Chamber Foundation and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce received prominent play in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, as have a number of other recent stories on the predicted shortage of skilled workers looming soon in Wisconsin’s future:

The report also warns that the state's workforce is aging, an ominous sign for a labor market that faces an ongoing shortage of skilled workers.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman quotes the CEO of Caterpillar about the dangers of inadequate education in what Friedman calls “The Age of Austerity”:

Doug Oberhelman, the C.E.O. of Caterpillar, which is based in Illinois, was quoted in Crain’s Chicago Business on Sept. 13 as saying: “We cannot find qualified hourly production people, and, for that matter, many technical, engineering service technicians, and even welders, and it is hurting our manufacturing base in the United States. The education system in the United States basically has failed them, and we have to retrain every person we hire.”
The highly influential Fareed Zakaria, columnist, TV host and "apostle of globalization..., who has long argued that free trade and globalization are win-win propositions and good for America, now argues that while globalization has been good for American companies, the way it has been operating has not been so good for American workers and job creation,” notes former globalization enthusiast Clyde Prestowitz. Prestowitz goes on to point out:

Astoundingly, Zakaria says this is because the U.S. workforce is not well enough educated. He quotes Pimco bond fund founder Bill Gross as saying that: "Our labor force is too expensive and poorly educated for today's market place."

One could easily conclude from these stories and accompanying headlines that a substantial part of America’s unemployment problem is caused by jobless workers’ individual failures to update their skills.

Further, the public schools and the unionized teachers—under attack not just from Republicans like Scott Walker, but also Education Secretary Arne Duncan (see here, and here) and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (see here and here)—have been failing to properly provide 21st century skills to their students.
Perhaps far too much attention has been devoted to the government role in job creation and retention, when American CEOs need to demand more from their employees and from the U.S. educational system to solve the jobless problem over the long term, this narrative suggests.

But in reality, this whole “Education, Training, and Skills” narrative serves to divert attention from the massive shortage of jobs and Corporate America's misdeeds to “failing” teachers and supposedly under-educated workers. Corporate America has failed to produce virtually any net gain in U.S. jobs since 1999; the period was the only decade when U.S. employment grew by less than 20 percent.

In short, the Education, Training and Skills "frame” on our economic problems plays several useful functions for the CEOs and the rest of the richest 1 percent. It takes the spotlight off CEOs' decisions to wipe out decent-paying job opportunities. As Gordon Lafer writes in The Training Charade,

Workers are encouraged not to blame corporate profits, the export of jobs aboard, or eroding wage standards—that is, anything that they can fight—but rather to look inward for the source of their misfortune and the seeds of their resurrection.
It also distracts from a few other things:

THE PROBLEM IS MICROSCOPIC

With 15 million Americans officially unemployed (the number rises to about 25 million when you include the discouraged jobless and those involuntarily working part-time), the relative number of positions going unfilled is infinitesimal in comparison. Just 5 percent of all current manufacturing jobs are unfilled due to a lack of qualified applicants.

Conceivably, a firm commitment by Corporate America and the federal government to maintaining and expanding America’s industrial base, accompanied by an equitable sharing of the massive productivity gains accruing almost solely to corporations, would make work in skilled manufacturing once again attractive. But as illustrated by the direction of leading corporations like General Electric, major firms seem less committed than ever to keeping their manufacturing production in the US. Moreover, leading figures in both political parties resist the notion of an “industrial policy” to foster U.S. manufacturing, as economist Jeff Faux has emphasized.

THE LIMITED VALUE OF TRAINING

When displaced workers successfully complete retraining programs, they are generally unable to find jobs comparable in pay and benefits to the ones they lost. "Out of a hundred laid-off workers," says New York Times economics writer Louis Uchitelle in his book The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences, "27 are making their old salary again, or more, and 73 are making less, or not working at all."

COMPANIES DON'T WANT TO PAY FOR BETTER SCHOOLS

CEOs like Caterpillar’s Oberhelmer feel free to demand that our schools produce well-trained workers. However, corporations like Caterpillar and GE are unwilling to pay the taxes necessary to support quality education for all children. These and other corporations have skillfully avoided paying any federal taxes in some years, and paying minimal taxes in others.

Caterpillar’s Oberhelmer used a frequent corporate ploy in response to tax increases in Illinois. Despite massive increases in profits for the Peoria-based firm, he sent a letter to Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn with a thinly-veiled threat to relocate the corporate headquarters because of a 2 percent tax increase for wealth executives.

Without corporations paying their fair share of taxes, how can they expect a top-notch workforce?

Let us be clear: more education, training, and skills for the unemployed will not produce job opportunities when Corporate America is unwilling to invest in new U.S. jobs, despite the deceptive arguments presented by corporations and allies like Friedman and Zakaria. Nor will public education be able to improve for the children of poor and working-class children when corporations like General Electric and Caterpillar use blackmail threats of relocation to reduce their taxes.

Lafer offers a cold splash of reality on the whole Education, Skills, and Training charade:

Whatever the problem, it seems job training is the answer. The only trouble is, it doesn't work, and the government knows it. . . . Indeed, in studying more than 40 years of job training policy, I have not seen one program that, on average, enabled its participants to earn their way out of poverty.

FOX NEWS (THE VOICE OF AMERICAN FASCISM) --Read This and Weep, Fox-Heads

2011-10-21T20:34:00.000-07:00

From Media Matters for America -- October 21, 2011;

After Smearing Obama For Years, Fox Decries Supposed "Insults," "Scare Tactics" From Obama, Biden

Fox News has recently expressed outrage over alleged "insults" and "scare tactics" that President Obama and Vice President Biden have used during speeches around the country, with Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy asking if such strategies are "turning off the independent voters." But Fox News has spent years relentlessly insulting and smearing both Obama and Biden, and have used scare tactics to attack Obama.

Fox Decries Supposed "Insults" And "Scare Tactics" From Obama And Biden

Doocy: "You've Got To Wonder Whether The Use Of The Insult[s] And The Scare Tactics Is Turning Off The Independent Voters." On the October 20 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, co-host Steve Doocy discussed President Obama and Vice President Biden's remarks on the American Jobs Act. Doocy claimed that "it sounds like [Biden has] been using some scare tactics" and that Obama "has been insulting Republicans" and asked "whether the use of the insult and the scare tactics is turning off the independent voters." From the broadcast:

DOOCY: Let's talk a little bit about this. The president of the United States and the vice president have been all over the country pushing their $35 billion jobs bill. And if you've been watching, the vice president in particular, it sounds like he's been using some scare tactics. Either pass the bill or rape is going to go up across the country, who knows? And the president of the United States himself has been insulting Republicans. And you've got to wonder whether the use of the insult and the scare tactics is turning off the independent voters who wind up putting people into the White House. Are they? Here are the president and vice president.

OBAMA: Maybe they just couldn't understand the whole thing all at once. So we're going to break it up into bite-sized pieces. So they can take a thoughtful approach to this legislation.

BIDEN: This is an emergency. Three-hundred thousand teachers have been laid off.

BIDEN: In many cities, the result has been, and it's not unique, murder rates are up. Robberies are up. Rapes are up. [cut] Ladies and gentlemen, response times have gone from five minutes to over an hour in some of your cities.

OBAMA: And then you got their plan, which is let's have dirtier air, dirtier water. [cut] They want to gut regulations. They want to let Wall Street do whatever it wants. They want to drill more.

BRIAN KILMEADE (co-host): Now, I mean, you know the counterargument to that, because this is not the picture dictionary section of life. You know that the Republicans aren't going on the dirt -- running on the dirty water, dirty air platform. You just know that regulation seems to be stifling the economy. And you also know that it's not a matter of people not wanting to hire cops and retain teachers. It's wondering if we're running in a deficit, is it worth putting $35 billion into the black hole after you did that three years ago? But in the big picture, do independents look at that and hear the counterargument? Do they understand that that necessarily isn't the fact?

DOOCY: That's the question.

GRETCHEN CARLSON (co-host): I don't know. It's obviously a strategy that this administration has come up with, and maybe they have some internal polling that shows them that this works, to vilify other Republicans, and maybe it works with independents when they just hear those quick little pieces of sound, that they think, "Oh, Republicans do want to make water dirtier." I don't know. They must have some research -- or, this is the only campaign strategy left with 9.1 percent unemployment.

Hannity: Biden "Upping The Ante When It Comes To Absurd And Irresponsible Scare Tactics." On the October 20 edition of Fox News' Hannity, host Sean Hannity claimed that "the vice president is now upping the ante when it comes to absurd and irresponsible scare tactics." Fox News contributor Ann Coulter called it "part of the theme with the Democrats" to try to "produce mobs when they don't get their way politically." From Hannity:

HANNITY: And the president has trumpeted the fact that the GOP jobs bill will bring you dirtier air, dirtier water. But his vice president is now upping the ante when it comes to absurd and irresponsible scare tactics. Now, without stimulus two, according to the vice president, rapes and murders will skyrocket. Take a look.

HANNITY: Hey, don't screw around with me on this. Rape and murder is going to go up unless you pass the president's bill. Your reaction?

COULTER: I'm so glad you played that for me. Because I'd heard about it, I had no idea how completely crazy it was.

COULTER: This is part of the theme with the Democrats. I mean, for 30 years they have been trying to get, you know, be able to miraculously produce mobs when they don't get their way politically. Back in 2004, Elizabeth Edwards warned that there would be riots if John Kerry didn't win. Al Gore specifically speaking to a black audience warned them not to react with violent acts if Kerry/Edwards ticket didn't win.

HANNITY: Wait, I can one-up you. He also said to predominantly black audience "Republicans don't even want to count you in the census."

COULTER: No, but what I'm talking about - yes, he said a lot of stupid things. What I'm talking about is specifically trying to get blacks to riot. You know, how about you riot, white boy?

HANNITY: Oh, boy.

COULTER: I mean, they aren't rioting. It's always Democrats trying to gin up this mob by threatening.

Yet Fox Has Spent Years Insulting And Smearing Obama And Biden ...

OBAMA WAS NOT BORN IN THE U.S.

Hannity On Obama's Birth Certificate: "Can't They Just Produce It, And We Move On?" On the March 23 edition of his Fox News show, Hannity asked, "What do you think about this birth certificate issue? I mean, it has not been my main issue, but it kind of does get a little odd here after a while. Can't they just produce it and we move on?"

Doocy: Birth Certificate Produced By Obama's Campaign "Is Not The Exact Birth Certificate." After airing Donald Trump's birther claims from his March appearance on ABC's The View, Doocy stated during the March 24 edition of Fox & Friends that the Obama campaign "did produce -- before the election -- something called a certificate of live birth, which is not the exact birth certificate, but something that the state says indicates that he was born there."

Trump Told Unquestioning Fox & Friends Hosts, "I'm Starting To Wonder ... Whether Or Not [Obama] Was Born In This Country." On March 28, Fox & Friends hosted Trump, who stated, "I'm starting to wonder myself whether or not he was born in this country."

OBAMA IS ANTI-AMERICAN

On Fox & Friends, Dick Morris Says Obama "Might Be The First Anti-American President We've Ever Had." On the April 13, 2010, edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Gretchen Carlson asked guest and Fox News contributor Dick Morris about a nonproliferation treaty Obama had signed. Morris responded by attacking Obama for signing the treaty and went on to say that Obama "might be the first anti-American president we've ever had." [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 4/13/10, via Media Matters]

Beck: "A Lot Of People Would Speculate" That Obama Has "Contempt For The History Of America Or America Or Western Civilization." From the May 21, 2010, edition of Fox News' Glenn Beck:

GLENN BECK (host): Would you say -- because I never got the impression that FDR had contempt for America, but I think Woodrow Wilson did. And a lot of people would speculate that maybe Barack Obama has a little contempt for the history of America or America or Western civilization. Do you see a pattern or a similarity between the two of them in that?

BURTON FOLSOM (Hillsdale College history professor): I think in that instance you're right. Franklin Roosevelt, his ancestry went way back and he did in his own way had a love for America that Wilson and Obama simply do not quite share. At least they don't share any kind of respect -- deep respect for the Constitution. Wilson thought it was out-moded, and so does Barack Obama.

Fox Contributor Tammy Bruce: Obama Has "Some Malevolence Towards This Country Which Is Unabated." On the September 17, 2009, edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, Fox News contributor Tammy Bruce said:

BRUCE: If this man [Obama], if we captured Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri and the one-eyed Sheikh, the three stooges over there in Pakistan somewhere -- if Barack Obama captured those guys or killed them, I would be looking at this man slightly differently. But ultimately it comes down to his inability to govern and the fact that he seems to have, it seems to me, some malevolence towards this country which is unabated.

OBAMA SYMPATHIZES WITH TERRORISTS AND DICTATORS

Carlson: "Some Would Say" That Obama Is "Apologizing To These Muslim Terrorists ... Instead Of Taking Them Head On." On the January 7, 2010, edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Gretchen Carlson responded to a story that counterterrorism official Michael Leiter stayed on vacation after the attempted 2009 Christmas Day attack by saying "that would be the microcosm of what some people say is the macrocosm of this administration's viewpoints [sic] on the war on terror. That, some would argue, that if it's not taken seriously or if you have a different ideology about apologizing to these Muslim terrorists, some would say, instead of actually taking them on, head on, then this is the kind of action that you get from your top people."

Dobbs: Obama To Start Ruling "By Fiat" Because "This Has Been Too Complicated, This Democracy Thing." On the February 16, 2010, edition of Fox & Friends, guest Lou Dobbs responded to a story about Obama's ability to communicate his message by falsely claiming, "What I find interesting, Steve, is now they're announcing that they're going to do things by executive order, by fiat" because "this has been too complicated, this democracy thing."

OBAMA IS A "RACIST"

Beck: Obama Is A "Racist" With A "Deep-Seated Hatred For White People Or The White Culture." On the July 28, 2009, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, Beck called Obama a "racist" with a "deep-seated hatred for white people." From the show:

BECK: This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture. I don't know what it is, but you can't sit in a pew with Jeremiah Wright for twenty years and not hear some of that stuff, and not have it wash over.

BECK: I'm not saying that he doesn't like white people, I'm saying he has a problem. He has a -- this guy is, I believe, a racist. Look at the things that he has been surrounded by. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 7/28/09, via Media Matters]
Hannity Defends Beck's Claim That Obama Is "Racist." After guest Penny Lee noted on the March 9, 2010, edition of Hannity that Glenn Beck called Obama racist, Hannity stated: "But wait a minute. Wait, hang on a second. When the president hangs out with Jeremiah Wright for 20 years, I'm -- can one conclude that there are issues with the president, black liberation theology?" [Fox News, Hannity, 3/9/10, via Media Matters]

Murdoch On Beck's Claim That Obama Is "Racist": "He Was Right." In a November 6, 2009, interview with Sky News Australia political editor David Speers, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch said of Beck's allegation, "[Obama] did make a very racist comment, about, you know, blacks and whites and so on, and which he said in his campaign he would be completely above. And, you know, that was something which perhaps shouldn't have been said about the president, but if you actually assess what he was talking about, he was right." News Corp. spokesman Gary Ginsberg subsequently stated that Murdoch "does not at all, for a minute, think the president is a racist." [Media Matters, 3/19/10]

Laura Ingraham: Obama Administration "Has Set Back Race Relations In This Country, Perhaps A Generation." From the July 22, 2010, edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor:

LAURA INGRAHAM (Fox News contributor): This president was ushered into office with this great media concoction, unjustified, that he was going to be some racial healer, OK? That was created in the media. That was a fiction created by the media. Victor Davis Hanson writes a brilliant piece about this today. And he's absolutely dead on.

I believe much of what's been done in this administration, unfortunately, has set back race relations in this country, perhaps a generation. I predicted that would happen a year ago on my radio show. And I stand by that today. [Fox News, The O'Reilly Factor, 7/22/10, via Media Matters]
For more Fox News figures claiming that Obama has racial animosity or is biased because of his heritage, SEE HERE.

BIDEN'S MOTORCADE IS "MOWING PEOPLE DOWN"

Fox Nation Twists Motorcade Van Getting Rear-Ended To Claim That "Biden Motorcades Keep Mowing People Down." In February 2010, Fox Nation hyped an article about a traffic incident involving Biden's motorcade, which caused only minor injuries, under the headline, "Biden Motorcades Keep Mowing People Down." [Fox Nation, 2/16/10, via Media Matters]

BIDEN CONDONES "FORCED ABORTION"

Fox & Friends Twisted Biden's "One Child" Comment In China To Claim He "Len[t] Credence To Forced Abortion Law." During his August trip to China, Biden made remarks on the economic challenges faced by rapidly aging populations in the U.S. and China and also commented on China's "one child" policy. On the August 23 edition of Fox & Friends, guest and Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham claimed that Biden's remarks meant he "basically [said] it's OK to have, you know, government control of childbirth."

Fox's Andrea Tantaros Distorts Biden's "One Child" Comment To Claim He "Agrees" With China's Policy. On the August 23 edition of Fox News' The Five, co-host Andrea Tantaros claimed that Biden's comment on China's one child policy meant that he "agrees" with the law.

BIDEN CALLED AMERICANS "DENSE"

Fox Nation Claimed Biden Said Americans Are "Too Dense To Realize Obama's Accomplishments." A July 2010 headline on Fox Nation claimed that Biden said that "People [Are] Too Dense to Realize Obama's Accomplishments."

... And Have Used Scare Tactics To Attack Obama

OBAMA IS A SOCIALIST

Varney: "You're Asking Me, Is [Obama] A Socialist, And The Answer Is: He Sure Looks Like One." On the February 25, 2010, edition of Fox & Friends, Fox Business host Stuart Varney said, "You're asking me, is [Obama] a socialist, and the answer is: he sure looks like one." [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 2/25/10, via Media Matters]

Fox's Morris Said Obama Is A "Socialist" Who Wants To "Seize Private Property." On the December 15, 2010, edition of The O'Reilly Factor, Fox News contributor Dick Morris said that Obama is a "socialist" who wants to "seize private property." [Fox News, The O'Reilly Factor, 12/15/10, via Media Matters]

Fox Linked Obama To Socialism At Least 35 Times In The Week Before The 2008 Election. A March 29, Media Matters report found that Fox News hosts linked Obama to socialism 35 times in the week preceding the 2008 election. These references followed an October 27, 2008, email that Fox News executive Bill Sammon sent to Fox staff highlighting what he described as "Obama's references to socialism, liberalism, Marxism and Marxists" in his 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father. [Media Matters, 3/29/11]

OBAMA IS A MUSLIM OR NOT A REAL CHRISTIAN

Kilmeade Asks, "If [Obama] Was Worried" About People Thinking He's Muslim, "Wouldn't He Have ... Kept His Name As Barry And Not Barack?" On the August 30, 2010, edition of the show, Kilmeade reacted to news that "24 percent of this country thinks the president is a Muslim" by asking, "If he was worried about that, wouldn't he have changed -- kept his name as Barry and not Barack?" [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 8/30/10]

Hume Claimed Jerusalem Post Story Quoted Obama's Half-Brother About "Muslim Background." On the June 16, 2008, edition of Special Report, then-host Brit Hume stated that Malik Obama, Obama's half-brother, "tells The Jerusalem Post that 'if elected his brother will be a good president for the Jewish people, despite his Muslim background.' " [Fox News, Special Report, 6/16/08]

Hume Later Issued An On-Air Correction For The False Claim That Malik Obama Had Said Barack Obama Has Such A Background. From the June 24, 2008, edition of Fox News' Special Report:

HUME: And finally, last week, we quoted The Jerusalem Post in the story about Barack Obama's half-brother Malik Obama. The Post reported that in an interview with Israeli Army Radio, Malik Obama said his brother would be a good president despite his Muslim background. It now turns out that the Post did not quite understand what Malik Obama was saying in the interview and paraphrased him incorrectly. Malik Obama did not say that his older brother has a Muslim background. The Jerusalem Post has since removed the story from its website, and we regret the error.

Fox News' Special Report Asks Of Obama: "Islam Or Isn't He?" During a June 4, 2009, segment, Fox News' Special Report aired a quote by Obama national security official Denis McDonough, in which he talked about how Obama "experienced Islam on three continents" and grew up in Indonesia with a Muslim father, and asked: "Islam or Isn't He?" [Fox News' Special Report, 6/4/09]

Beck: Obama's Comments On His Christian Faith Are "Not Something That Most Christians Recognize." From the August 29, 2010, edition of Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday:

BECK: What does the president believe? Four different speeches since he's been president, he has told -- and mainly students -- that your salvation is directly tied to the collective salvation. That -- that's not something that most Christians recognize.

I don't -- I'm not demonizing it. I disagree with it. The pope has said -- he's actually demonized it. People aren't recognizing his version of Christianity, just like -- and 48 percent of the African American community doesn't recognize it either, by the way. They didn't recognize it with Jeremiah Wright. They don't recognize it now.

OBAMA ATTENDED A MADRASSA

Fox & Friends Pushed False Smear That Obama Attended A "Madrassa." On the January 19, 2007, editions of Fox & Friends First and Fox & Friends, Kilmeade, along with Doocy and Carlson, spent several segments advancing a false report that Obama was raised a Muslim and attended a madrassa, or Islamic school, as a child in Indonesia. At one point, Doocy asked: "When people find out this stuff, they're going to go, 'Why didn't anybody ever mention that that man right there was raised as -- spent the first decade of his life raised by his Muslim father as a Muslim and was educated in a madrassa?' " Kilmeade responded, "Yeah, is that a problem?" He added: "Evidently, when he was a little kid, he went over to Indonesia and went to a madrassa. He -- in his two best-selling books, he doesn't really mention this in detail." [Fox News' Fox & Friends First and Fox & Friends, 1/19/07]

Fox & Friends Had To "Clarify" Their Remarks. On the January 22, 2007, edition of Fox & Friends First, Doocy said he had to "clarify" the show's reporting on the fabricated madrassa story,stating that "Mr. Obama's people called and they said that that is absolutely false. They said the idea that Barack Obama went to a radical Muslim school is completely ridiculous."

On The O'Reilly Factor and Glenn Beck, Coulter Claimed Obama "Attended Madrassas." On the December 28, 2009, edition of The O'Reilly Factor and the December 30, 2009, edition of Glenn Beck, conservative columnist Ann Coulter said Obama attended madrassas as a child.

OBAMA'S HEALTH CARE REFORM CREATES "DEATH PANELS"

Fox News' Johnson: Health Care Reform "A Subtle Form Of Euthanasia." Fox News legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr. said on the July 27, 2009, edition of Fox & Friends:

JOHNSON: Some people are saying, well, this is a health care reform, other people say -- maybe me -- that this is a subtle form of euthanasia. And when you start looking at the proposals, you say, God, what's happening?

One of the proposals, Section 1233, talks about advanced care planning consultations. And that's a fancy term where a doctor goes to you every five years once you're 65, or more if you're chronically ill, and explains to you the benefits of so-called palliative care, of not giving active treatment. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 7/27/09, via Media Matters]
Johnson: Provision "Is Kind Of Our 2009 Brave New World, Soylent Green, 1984, Aldous Huxley Kind Of World." Johnson said on the July 28, 2009, edition of Fox & Friends:

JOHNSON: Advanced care planning consultation is kind of our 2009 Brave New World, Soylent Green, 1984, Aldous Huxley kind of world where you come in and see a doctor at age 65, and if you're chronically ill you come in every year, and your doctor who will be trained -- and they will spend billions of dollars on training doctors to be counselors -- that you have options. You don't have to go into a hospital.

Kilmeade Wonders If "Seniors [Are] Going To Be In Front Of The Death Panel." On the August 10, 2009, edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade said:

KILMEADE: [E]veryone's talking about seniors, and they're talking about the middle class and affordable health care. If the upper class is paying for the next two classes, and are seniors going to be in front of the death panel? And then just as you think, OK, that's ridiculous, then you realize there's provisions in there that seniors in the last lap of their life will be sitting there going to a panel possibly discussing what the best thing for them is. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 8/10/09, via Media Matters]
Morris: Medicare Advisory Board "Is Really The Death Panel That Sarah Palin Was Talking About."

MORRIS: The Medicare Advisory Board you speak about is a particularly dangerous thing, because it's going to set up for Medicare only, for the elderly only, protocols and standards of care where they are going to be saying no, you can't give this person a hip replacement, they are too old, and no, you can't treat this person with colon cancer with the best drug available. I know it increases the chance of his dying, but it's beyond the cost parameters that we are prepared to allow. And this will be done by this federal board, which is really the death panel that Sarah Palin was talking about. That's an oversimplification, but the basic concept isn't far wrong.