Tag: 2012

It is as if the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination was about to fall into the hands of Paul Wolfowitz. What happened?

Jonathan Chait contemplates the seemingly quite favorable strategic position Mitt Romney (suddenly?) finds himself in despite being an occasionally outspoken pro-choice Mormon tightly associated with Taxachusetts and “Romneycare” and yet working to curry favor from an increasingly lunatic “base” that seems quite willing to start Civil War II over any and all of those issues.

Most important MSM/Serious Person fact about Romney: he once strapped a dog, inside its carrier, to the top of the family truckster. So you know.

Rick Perry: Constitutional Scholar

Q: The Constitution says that ‘the Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes… to provide for the… general Welfare of the United States.’ But I noticed that when you quoted this section on page 116 [of “Fed Up!”], you left ‘general welfare’ out and put an ellipsis in its place. Progressives would say that ‘general welfare’ includes things like Social Security or Medicare—that it gives the government the flexibility to tackle more than just the basic responsibilities laid out explicitly in our founding document. What does ‘general welfare’ mean to you?

Rick Perry: I don’t think our founding fathers when they were putting the term ‘general welfare’ in there were thinking about a federally operated program of pensions nor a federally operated program of health care. What they clearly said was that those were issues that the states need to address. Not the federal government. I stand very clear on that. From my perspective, the states could substantially better operate those programs if that’s what those states decided to do.

Q: So in your view those things fall outside of general welfare. But what falls inside of it? What did the Founders mean by ‘general welfare’?

Rick Perry: I don’t know if I’m going to sit here and parse down to what the Founding Fathers thought general welfare meant.

Q: But you just said what you thought they didn’t mean by general welfare. So isn’t it fair to ask what they did mean? It’s in the Constitution.

Rick Perry: [Silence.]

Q: OK. Moving on […]

It is wrong that in the United States of America, a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker who earns $50,000 should pay higher tax rates than somebody pulling in $50 million. Anybody who says we can’t change the tax code to correct that, anyone who has signed some pledge to protect every single tax loophole so long as they live, they should be called out. They should have to defend that unfairness — explain why somebody who’s making $50 million a year in the financial markets should be paying 15 percent on their taxes, when a teacher making $50,000 a year is paying more than that — paying a higher rate. They ought to have to answer for it. And if they’re pledged to keep that kind of unfairness in place, they should remember, the last time I checked the only pledge that really matters is the pledge we take to uphold the Constitution.

President Barack Obama, showing a little fight. It is very late in the game for them to start in on this (frankly, this sort of thing should have been said on January 20, 2009), but it should prove utterly devastating. If (and because it’s a big if) IF they stick to it. For decades. Win or lose. Year after year after poisonous year. Because that is what it is going to take. Repeating this every time a microphone is turned on. Every time.

Only Off by 3.3 million

Steve Benen notes the systematic nature of claiming “zero jobs” created from the stimulus despite the conclusion from the Congressional Budget Office that

“President Barack Obama’s stimulus package may have created or saved as many as 3.3 million jobs last quarter and lowered the unemployment rate by as much as 1.8 percentage points”

Let me make this as clear as I can: The Facts Do Not Matter. Unless and until Wolf Blitzer stops the debate and says “then how do you square that statement with the findings of the CBO and 99.9% of world economists who have all concluded…” we will make zero progress.

The modern GOP is entirely predicated on empty boilerplate, outright lies, and brazen platitudes specifically designed to play well for the low information, low attention voter. That is the essence of the Tea Klan: I want all the government services I prefer to be provided for free, everyone else can kindly go die in the streets; here is my entirely unsubstantiated “plan” to make that happen. The cheers at the notion that an under- or un-insured 30 year old in a coma should simply be allowed to die coupled with boos at any notion of immigration being a powerful and useful economic engine for the country say pretty much everything you need to know about the broader movement. God help us if these folks ever discover just how much of the “Texas Miracle” occurred at the hands of legal and illegal immigration into the state. Thus it should come as no surprise that the audience questions last night reflected this sort of poisonous vacuity relative to the actual state of affairs of numerous, seemingly straightforward issues facing the country.

By way of example, there was a long, multi-participant disquisition on how waste, fraud, and abuse totaling in the tens of millions and maybe even into THE BILLIONS could impact the deficit and debt of an approximately four trillion dollar budget. Not one candidate stepped in to even imply that these maximally estimated waste numbers were extraordinarily small potatoes in the context. And neither did Wolf Blitzer. So what was he doing there, exactly?

The same goes for Social Security. Interminable amount of discussion about a program that is largely self-funding and will not be a significant deficit driver for decades and need never drive the deficit should the government choose to make long-term, minor adjustments to the program. Cost growth within Medicare will have destroyed the federal government long before we ever have to think about Social Security as a threat to the solvency of the government. Did that merit a mention? Did Wolf hold anyone to account for that seeming incongruity?

The same goes for “Obamacare.” Each of the candidates begged for “market-based” private insurance solutions to health care delivery in this county. Precisely what, pray tell, do they think “Obamacare” is? Did Wolf bother to ask?

This is all before we even touch lengthy discussions of tax policies featuring 0% rates, 9% national sales taxes, and every other kind of pie-in-the-sky nonsense without even a whisper of how such a rate of collection could even partially pay for existing military budgets, much less everything else dread government does (but don’t cut my pet program!). Was any of this even tangentially addressed? Did anyone get asked what sort of total spending their wonderful tax plan would presage and how that would change federal priorities as we know them (assuming for the moment that the candidate pushing their idea got exactly what they were asking for)? Doesn’t that seem like the sort of thing a moderator should be doing, Wolf?

Of course not, because within our modern media construct the facts do not matter. The facts are the last thing they are concerned with. This was an event entirely predicated on and existing only to produce new sound and fury signifying nothing that will nonetheless be dissected and replayed purely from a horse-race perspective until the next one of these intellectual disasters transpires. It’s why they’re having 52 of them: to feed the mill. What, you thought it was to better understand the relevance and relative merits of the various platforms?

Until we in America force the broader media to start doing its job (by taking our eyes and ears elsewhere), we will continue to get exactly this kind of crap, which is precisely the sort of leadership such an electorate deserves. I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Only Off by 3.3 million

State of the Art

John Cole at Balloon Juice officially wins blogging for the week:

In the long term, assuming [some version of an Obama jobs] plan gets through the House (it won’t), then we get to go through our usual drama of the blue dogs from Red States (Manchin, Nelson, Landrieu, McCaskill, etc.), Lieberman just so he can continue to be the world’s preeminent douchenozzle, and some others I am sure I am missing. They’ll cockblock it on the Senate side, moaning about the program being a deficit buster while conveniently ignoring the fact that each one of them represents a welfare state sucking at the federal teat. Finally, at the 11th hour, Snowe and Collins will swoop in and offer tax cuts for the ultra-rich as a sweetener and they will support it. At this point, Bernie Sanders or whatever progressive hero of the moment will claim he can’t support anything with tax cuts for the rich in it. This will bring things to a standstill for a couple more weeks until another shitty jobs report comes out, and the Senate, acting in the fierce urgency of when-the-fuck-ever will pass some piece of shit that is too small, unfocussed, and does nothing other than provide the left with another opportunity to fracture and start flinging shit at each other. Republicans will have spent the entire time using procedural tricks to slow things down while having Frank Luntz work on the framing of the issue so that by the time it is about to hit the President’s desk, they will already have a cute name, the talking points will be distributed, and we’ll all be hearing about the new “Porkulus” or “Obamacare” or whatever the fuck childish name they come up with. In three months time, when employment hasn’t picked up because we are actually in the same god damned depression we’ve been in since 2007, Rick Perry can claim that Keynesian ideology has once again been disproven. Because everyone hates the bill, Friedman, Brooks, and other members of the Centrist jihad will claim this as proof that the bill is great.

Read the whole thing.

State of the Art

Job Killing Deregulation

Dean Baker, once again, pointing out an inconvenient truth:

… a study by Charles Rivers Associates suggests that the main impact of the regulation would be to hasten the replacement of old polluting power plants. This could help to create jobs in the private sector in the next few years, a period in which all projections show that the economy will still be suffering from substantial unemployment.

In other words, if Obama was interested in an action that he could take unilaterally that would create jobs, supporting the EPA on the ozone restrictions probably would have topped the list. In nixing the regulation, Obama went the job killing route.

This is precisely the sort of thing that happens when you adopt the framing of your opponent. You end up painted into a political corner, rhetorically speaking, and pretty soon it seems reasonable and even advantageous to make boneheaded moves like this one that are not only economically counterproductive, but work to dishearten your supporters and embolden those of your opponents. Well played, Democrat.

Job Killing Deregulation

Not Conservative Enough

danielholter:

A Come to Jesus Moment for American Religion

The Republican Party in the United States—15 months before the next presidential election—has already burdened itself with an array of front-running presidential candidates […] [and] it now seems a necessary qualification for the Republican nomination, at least at the present primaries stage, to be a born-again fundamentalist Protestant. Yet in the United States the majority of the electorate is not fundamentalist, evangelical or Protestant.

This last bit is key. If we assume that the economic situation gets no worse and, perhaps, even improves a bit between now and 2012, and we further simply take the polling of the GOP field as it stands today (giving the nomination to Perry in a walk), it’s very hard to see how he beats Obama. So: Perry gets crushed in the general election. In the inevitable “we lost because we weren’t conservative enough” aftermath, how exactly does one make that case? Because that’s the case that will be made. The “message of the American voter” in delivering a massive tidal wave of support to 2012-Obama will universally be seen to have been a clear, ringing demand for lower taxes on the rich, a dismantling of the social safety net, and that the poor and out of work should just go die in the streets already.

Perhaps you just blame Boehner. You’ve presumably lost some House seats (but retained the majority). Cantor wants to be Speaker, so you spin it as “Perry only lost because Boehner was too easygoing on radical urban liberal Obama.” Seems impossible that anyone would buy it, but then most of FOXnews’ more successful narratives seem pretty unlikely when viewed in the abstract.

As settings go, [addressing a joint session of Congress] is in the swing-for-the-fences category. Presidential speeches to joint sessions of Congress are not for routine issues. And if Obama intended to aim low with his plan, throwing out a few tax credits and warmed-over ideas, he would not pick this venue

Steve Benen reads the tea leaves on the venue choice for the upcoming Obama “jobs” speech.
I hope Steve realizes this is the very same spot the annual State of the Union address is given. Seems to me the admittedly august podium there in the House is precisely the place for warmed-over ideas presented in yawning succession and interspersed with meaningless boilerplate, all packaged amidst plenty of applause breaks that can be further analyzed by pundits and party faithful alike once even the boilerplate platitudes have been well and truly exhausted. Sound and fury signifying nothing.
I’m not sure what makes me sadder, that the administration’s key advisers and experts uniformly still think that “aiming low” will make any Obama policy acceptable to the House, that they will then use the “passable” argument as an excuse for their perennially low aim, or that they’ll then express surprise when even that meager proposal fails to get anywhere near passing (and probably won’t even be taken up by) the House. Then it’s straight into “you dirty fucking hippies out there on drugs just don’t understand that even this tepid package didn’t get taken up. We never could have gotten anywhere with the GigantorJobs 3000 Plan that you’ve all been screaming at us about” time… Newsflash, Axe: you won’t get anything taken up. Would you rather fail small or large? Appear to hide in your safe and comfortable yet utterly feckless defensive crouch –or– go down fighting the good fight and showing America that you actually give a shit? Sadly, I think we all know the answer currently sitting on the tip of all tongues belonging to crack Strategists for The Democrat who happen to be reading Lemkin right this very second.
It’s go big or go home time, Obama. If you don’t realize that by now then the country’s in even bigger trouble than it was before you took office. Start with the basics. Use your oratorical capability to explain in the simplest terms possible what you want to do, why that approach would be effective, how it has worked in the past, why you won’t be allowed to do it now, and how that situation can be changed in the very near future. And then hammer the GOP with that every day from now until November 2012. They are teeing it up for you, sir. Why not take a swing? Just this once.

Perry’s Millions

Rick Perry has quite a nose for land speculation:

Discharged from the Air Force in 1977 aged 27, he was elected to the Texas House of Representatives seven years later, in 1984. At that time, the Perry family reported income of $45,000, largely from Mrs. Perry’s work as a nurse.

[…]

in 1993, there was a piece of ground that computer billionaire Michael Dell needed to connect his new house near Austin to city water mains. Dell neglected to appreciate the land’s importance. But Perry did discern it. He bought the land for less than $120,000 – then sold it to Dell two years later for a $343,000 profit. Uncanny.

[in the 2000s] A Texas real estate developer sells land to a Texas state senator – the senator who happened to represent the development’s district. The state senator sold the land to Gov. Perry. Gov. Perry then sold then land – back to the real estate developer’s business partner. Perry scored a profit of $823,000.

These are his real GOP bona fides: living the concept that political power is only to be used for enrichment of self and then, where possible, your richest and therefore most generous supporters, be they actual biological persons or the frequently GOP-personified corporate interests. The policy outcomes of this stance, whatever they may be, are entirely beside the point beyond their utility in enriching self or key supporters.
After all, the GOP goes out of its way to prepare the populace for the repeated failure of government, it delights every time a corruption scandal comes to light, and it uses said failures and scandals to further weaken the operation of government, sand the legislative gears, and generally hamstring government oversight, all to better enable their preferred uses of political power: enrichment of self and key supporters. There is no third thing. Anybody not already in on the deal can kindly go die in the streets.

Perry’s Millions