Tag: 2012

Compare and contrast with this exchange on NPR yesterday (emphasis added):

[NPR’s Melissa] BLOCK: Let’s move on to the budget questions that are pending here. You sent a rather lengthy letter to the Defense Secretary Leon Panetta about a month ago, making the case for the Marine Corps in a time of, what you called, considerable fiscal austerity. And the message to Secretary Panetta seemed to be, as you’re slicing an ever small, an ever shrinking pie, protect us, protect the Marines. I wonder if this becomes a battle essentially among the service branches of who is most worthy. And if that is the battle, what’s the case from the Marines?

[Marine Corps Commandant General James] AMOS: Well, I think in anybody budget crisis – when you’ve got multiple services – in some cases, it can relegate into roles or missions. In other words, what’s the role of this service, the mission of this service? I think it can happen that way. And if you’re not careful, it can break out probably the worst of behavior.

So, what I was really trying to say is that as we come down and reduce capabilities and capacity in our nation, one of the ways that you can – and you assume a level of risk when you do that. You know, we’re going from what we are down to something less. When that happens, how do you mitigate the risk?

Indeed, it’s going to take a lot of risk mitigation to even begin thinking about some smallish cuts to this budget. And but also: this is what they call a “budget crisis” and “considerable financial austerity.”

Source: ilovecharts

You have a one-half of one-percent surtax on the 1,000,0001th dollar – in other words it doesn’t affect anybody who makes $999,000, it doesn’t affect anybody making $999,999 – and if you want to find the guy who make $1,000,0001, it only affects that $1. That’s the only thing the rate goes up on. If you make $1.1 million, and god-willing this passes, you would pay next year, $500 more in taxes. […] I say to the American people: watch your senator. Watch him or her choose: Are you going to put 400,000 school teachers back in classrooms; are you going to put 18,000 cops back on the street, and 7,000 firefighters back into firehouses? OR are you going to save people with average income over $1 million a one-half of one-percent increase in tax on every dollar they make over a million.

Joe Biden and every other Democrat in Washington DC should’ve been talking like this since day one. But now is as good a time to start as any. More please.
Source: tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com

Wash it Off

CNN’s Piers MORGAN: let’s talk about homosexuality because — and is that wrong? Do you think it’s a sin?
GOP Presidential Hopeful Herman CAIN: I think it’s a sin because of my biblical beliefs and although people don’t agree with me, I happen to think that it is a choice.
MORGAN: You believe that?
CAIN: I believe that.
MORGAN: You believe people — seriously, you think people get to a certain age and go, I think I want to be homosexual?
CAIN: Let me turn it around to you. What does science show? You show me evidence other than opinion and you might cause me to reconsider that. […Crosstalk…] Where is the — where is evidence?
MORGAN: Just common — you’re a commonsense guy.
CAIN: Are you a common sense kind of guy? […]
MORGAN: Wait a minute, let me ask you. You genuinely believe millions of Americans wake up in their late teens normally and go, you know what, I quite fancy being a homosexual? You don’t believe that.
CAIN: Piers.
MORGAN: Do you?
CAIN: You haven’t given me any evidence to convince me otherwise nor has anyone else. […]
MORGAN: It would be like a gay person saying, Herman, you made a choice to be black.
CAIN: We know that’s not the case. I was born black.
MORGAN: Yes, maybe if they said that, you would find it offensive.
CAIN: Piers, this doesn’t wash off. I hate to burst your bubble.
Lemkin: The MSM eternally believes that the GOP field doesn’t actually believe any of this stuff. Inevitably, when they bother to probe what they assume is just bluster and/or red meat for the far right, they are shocked, SHOCKED to find that, yep, they all actually believe and plan to act on all this stuff and more. You’d think that on the 4 millionth occasion of this sort Serious People would start to see a pattern and begin to report on it accordingly. Herman Cain believes the gays should just wash it off and join “proper,” Herman Cain’s Christian God-fearing society. Perhaps this sort of incredibly unpopular, far right opinion both imparts important information about his dedication to personal liberty (that the GOP spends so very much time talking about but zero time actually implementing for anyone in the 99%) and furthermore speaks to how he’d govern on a host of similar wedge issues. A version of this country with a functioning media would be a very different place indeed.

Does that mean that you would raise taxes on the 47 percent of Americans who currently don’t pay taxes?

Anderson Cooper, buying into the entirely wrong, entirely Tea Klan promulgated notion that about half of Americans pay no taxes.
Anderson, and everyone else, everyone, every single adult citizen pays federal taxes in this country or they are breaking the law. Even this 47% to which you refer still pays payroll taxes related to Social Security, Medicare, and etc… if they are employed. However, they may well earn too little money to exceed the standard individual/married filing jointly deduction. Thus, they effectively pay no federal income tax. They do, however, still pay all the rest of it. Period. They do, however, still pay state and local taxes. Period. In any meaningful case: This adds up to a lot more than one dollar (which was Bachmann’s suggested “solution” to the “issue”). But that’s all too boring or too partisan to mention, apparently.
In a functioning society, the media individual selected to mediate this event might just see fit to mention this. Worth noting that, in our society, that sort of thing never, ever happens, and this tax thing is but one of literally hundreds of such opportunities for meaningful intervention in last night’s debate. The level of foreign aid, the current funding totals for defense (with regard to the suggested cut), the real impact of immigration on the economy of this country, foreclosures, and on and on and on.
And so the Republic crumbles.

Reblogged to note that an identical poll that instead targeted only Democratic “strategists” would produce the inverse result. They see none of these as “winning” issues, and plainly have no desire to get out of the defensive crouch on any issue of genuine importance, much less any of these. This is why they fail.

Herman Cain: If it’s good enough for Sim City, it’s good enough for America.

gonzodave:

Aside from being an egomaniac, Cain is a plagiarist.

~g

Long before Cain was running for president and getting attention for his 999 plan, the residents of SimCity 4 — which was released in 2003 — were living under a system where the default tax rate was 9 percent for commercial taxes, 9 percent for industrial taxes and 9 percent for residential taxes. (That is, of course, if you didn’t use the cheat codes to get unlimited money and avoid taxes altogether.)

Cut to: Bachmann press conference in which she breathlessly announces that she’s gained access to the secret government cheat codes which, when entered into a secret keypad in the Bible on the day of her inauguration, will allow for unlimited revenue on no taxes whatsoever. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new national GOP polls leader.

Herman Cain: If it’s good enough for Sim City, it’s good enough for America.

In the coming days we will force members of Congress to vote on the individual proposals in the American Jobs Act. They’ll have a chance to vote on whether they believe we should keep teachers out of work or whether we should put them back in the classroom where they belong. They’ll get to vote on whether they believe construction workers should stay unemployed while our roads and bridges fall apart, or whether we should put these men and women back to work rebuilding America. They’ll be forced to decide whether we should cut taxes for middle class Americans or let them go up next year.

Barack Obama talks tough. Finally. Imagine if we’d had this guy (and every other Democrat) out there saying words like these starting on January 21, 2009 and then continuing to say them every day since, each and every time a microphone turned on. The economic and legislative situation might well be very much the same, but the political situation would be very different indeed.

Most Republican voters believe, with good reason, that Romney stands a strong chance of winning the nomination and beating President Obama. The question is whether he would put repeal front and center—whether he would emphasize it in the general election campaign, and whether he would go to the mat for repeal once in office. Would Romney’s campaign build enough momentum for repeal to achieve 60 votes in the Senate and defeat a potential filibuster? If not, would Romney be willing to advance repeal in the Senate via reconciliation, the complicated and unconventional process that takes only 50 votes but which would also require a far greater expenditure of political capital?

Jeffery H. Anderson makes me wonder if he’s even been paying attention. If we assume that the posited chain of events occurs: GOP holds some kind of House majority and gains a new but non-60 vote majority in the Senate (and, of course, President Mittmentum) then it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to derive the complex psychohistorical formulas for what happens next?!?!?
The GOP eliminates (by simple majority) the filibuster on the first day of the new Congress. The MSM declares this an entirely reasonable, “sensible center” approach to governing. Wholesale dismantlement of the New Deal follows, coupled to and justified by the oncoming tax revenue collapse from a 0% effective tax rate on the rich and consumption-based, maximally regressive tax on everyone else.
It’s what they’ve been talking about for years. They are entirely serious. They mean to do it at the first opportunity, and this would be it. There will be no fiddling with reconciliation or anything approaching “normal order” as we define it in 2011. How many times do they have to say this stuff before someone in the MSM takes them seriously and asks a follow-up or two? Or, for that matter, before The Democrat starts using these positions against them. (Shrill! Class War!!).
The far-right GOP candidates and elected officials are not “blowing smoke” or “providing red meat” for the “true believers.” This is who they are. Everyone else can kindly go die in the streets.

Rick Perry’s candidacy is stuck up to its wheel-wells because he once did something decent for people unlike himself and, when challenged about it, on stage, by the rest of lightweights in his party, he told the truth. If you’re attempting to get the Republican party’s nomination for president of the United States in 2012 — or any time in the future, judging by the Triple-A Ostrogoths currently populating the country’s state legislatures — and if there is anything in your background that indicates that you were once decent to people unlike yourself, you should identify that problem immediately and then lie your ass off for the balance of your presidential campaign.

By the way, have you met Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney?

Charles Pierce, getting it exactly right at his still newish blogging perch.