Month: September 2012

I have to love the Fox wingnuts this morning doubling down on Mitt’s disdain and trying to explain why the Obama administration is once again playing class warfare by disagreeing with his comments. This is par for the course, but it’s always fun to see them spin so hard they look like they might upchuck right on TV.

Killing the Bush tax cuts–for the middle class

by David Atkins

Annie Lowrey explains where those 47% (really, 46%) of Americans who don’t pay federal income tax come from. Answer? Seniors, and the working poor, and beneficiaries of the Bush tax cuts:

[A]bout half of the households that do not pay federal income tax do not pay it because they are simply too poor. The Tax Policy Center gives as an example a couple with two children earning less than $26,400 a year: The household would pay no federal income tax because its standard deduction and other exemptions would simply erase its liability.

The other half, the Tax Policy Center found, consists of households taking advantage of tax credits and other provisions, mostly support for senior citizens and low-income working families.

Put bluntly, these are not households shirking their tax liabilities. The pool consists mostly of the poor, of relatively low-income working families and of old people. The tax code is specifically designed to reduce the burden on them.

Indeed, the recession and its aftermath have left tens of millions of workers out of a job or underemployed, removing more households from payment of federal income taxes. Moreover, the Bush tax cuts – the signature Republican economic policy of the 2000s, which doubled the child tax credit, increased a number of other deductions and exemptions, and lowered marginal tax rates – erased millions of families’ federal income tax liabilities.

It is also worth noting that though tens of millions of families do not pay federal income taxes, there are virtually no families that do not pay any taxes – between payroll taxes, sales taxes, state and local taxes, and on and on.

Especially interesting is the fact that the Bush tax cuts for the middle class, including and especially the doubling of the child tax credit, are largely responsible for the situation Mitt Romney and his plutocratic friends so deplore.

So in this election we have a battle between those who want to kill the Bush tax cuts for rich while keeping the ones for the middle class, and those who want to increase the Bush tax cuts for the rich, while eliminating the ones on the middle class.

There’s no question now that this is class warfare by the rich against the rest of us. At least it’s being waged out in the open where everyone can fight it.

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Wow, I knew the English tax collectors had pissed off the American colonists but I had no idea they were running around raping their wives and daughters:

Lulli Akin [Mrs Todd Akin] said that efforts to push her husband out of the race threaten to replace elections “by the people and for the people” with “tyranny, a top-down approach.” She added, “Party bosses dictating who is allowed to advance through the party and make all the decisions—it’s just like 1776 in that way.”

She cited colonists who “rose up and said, ‘Not in my home, you don’t come and rape my daughters and my … wife. But that is where we are again. There has been a freedom of elections, not tyranny of selections since way back. Why are we going to roll over and let them steamroll us, be it Democrats or Republicans or whomever?”

Well no wonder they declared their independence! And to think Jefferson didn’t even mention this in the Declaration.

What’s a fair share?

by digby

When this issue of the 47% not paying any federal income taxes (who also, apparently are the only ones voting for Barack Obama) came up in the GOP primary, Romney complained that “everyone needs to pay their fair share.” Coming from a man who refuses to tell the American people whether he’s paid his fair share is pretty rich.

Here’s a good chart that explains how this breaks down:

When reporters inquired of the campaigns what should be done about these tax expenditures (which they all agreed were a encouraging all these parasites to slack off … and vote for the Democrats so they could keep their cushy existences at the expense of everyone else) here’s how they responded:

Pressed on how they would bring more people into the tax system, none of the top three campaigns offered details. Alice Stewart, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Bachmann, said the Minnesotan “believes that the tax code is too complicated and must be reformed to be fairer and flatter.”

Campaign spokeswoman Gail Gitcho said Mr. Romney “is opposed to tax increases,” adding he would produce his economic plan in the fall.

“Governor Perry wants more people on the tax rolls not by raising taxes or expanding the tax base, but by putting people to work,” said Perry spokesman Mark Miner.

Profiles in courage, there. It would seem that the Republicans are using this purely as a divisive tactic. Even some of their own intellectuals disagree with it:

Kevin Hassett, director of economic policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said the GOP candidates were wrong to assume that working-class voters support government programs because they are free.

Poorer households pay disproportionate shares of what Mr. Hassett calls stealth taxes on gasoline, alcohol and cigarette, even lottery tickets. They may get back in Social Security and Medicare benefits more than they pay in payroll taxes, but that is cold comfort for struggling young workers trying to buy a house, he said.

Well, that’s crazy.They’re so bad, they don’t even deserve representation in the government. Especially the kids and old people. They’re just a bunch of losers who need to stop being “takers” and give something back to the “makers.” This is just as it was in the good old days. Of feudalism. They used to call it “tribute” but we can modernize it a bit and call it”paying their fair share.”

Parasites R Us

by digby

We knew that Paul Ryan believed this country was made up of “the takers vs the makers” but we hadn’t heard Mitt Romney explicitly make that case until now. David Corn has obtained the full video (pieces have been floating around on Youtube for a while) of Romney talking to a bunch of his fellow one percenters. This pretty much lays it all out:

Fielding a question from a donor about how he could triumph in November, Romney replied:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

Romney went on: “[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

You realize that he’s talking about around a hundred and fifty million people, don’t you? He’s literally saying that nearly half the country is a bunch of parasites.

This is not a slip of the tongue. As Greg Sargent explains, it’s just another iteration of his dogwhistling welfare queen campaign:

[H]is explanation veers into a truly extreme version of a theory that’s widespread on the right: Democrats are trying to encourage dependency on government for the explicit purpose of enlarging the pool of voters who can be relied upon to vote Democratic for the rest of their lives, in order to preserve the government handouts they enjoy.

In Romney’s telling, all of these 47 percent of voters are complicit in this arrangement. As a result, there is no hope of ever persuading them to take personal responsibility for their lives. He seems to be conflating the government-dependency conspiracy theory with another right wing meme — the complaint that only 47 percent of Americans pay no income taxes. Put those together and you arrive at Romney’s formulation.

In a sense, this is an extreme version of a narrative Romney has adopted on multiple fronts. He has charged that Obama is taking away hard won Medicare benefits from seniors to redistribute them to other people; he claims Obama is gutting welfare reform to send welfare checks to those who don’t work; and has even suggested Obama is doing the latter to appeal to his “base.” The attacks on Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech are of a piece with this, pushing the notion that Obama demeans your hard work and individual initiative because he thinks only government-sponsored success constitues real achievement and wants to expand government over every part of our lives, forever increasing government dependency and perpetually eroding good old fashioned self reliance.

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a presidential candidate with more contempt for the American people than Mitt Romney. It’s one thing for a candidate to attack his opponent, but to attack half the country as a bunch of losers you don’t have to care about is just unprecedented. He’s obviously as much a believer in twisted Randroid tropes as his chosen VP.

And as I’m listening to Chris Matthews and his panel go on about how Romney is a captive of his base and doesn’t really believe what he’s saying (not regarding this video specifically) I can’t help but wonder why he’d say the following in private amongst a bunch of rich donors like himself if he didn’t believe it:

Describing his family background, he quipped about his father, “Had he been born of Mexican parents, I’d have a better shot of winning this.”

Because the minorities get all the breaks in this damned country, dontcha know?

There has been a tendency to believe that Romney might really be a moderate underneath it all and that he’s just playing to the wingnuts. It sounds to me like he’s very fluent in wingnut ideology in private. So much so, that I would have to say that it’s far more likely he conned the people of Massachusetts all those years ago that that he’s conning all the wingnuts now.

And so do his rich Republican donors. Anyone who’s still waiting for the Big Money Boyz to pull the plug on these wacky weirdos on the right is going to be waiting a long time. They are the wacky weirdos on the right. And Mitt’s certainly King of the Weirdos.

Here’s one of the videos, more at the link:

The truth is not a core issue

by digby

If you want to see a perfect example of how reporters can get so lost in journalistic process that they lose sight of the truth, reality even, read this NY Times public editor column from yesterday on the “he said/she said” convention:

Readers are quick to cite examples. Several who wrote to me thought there was an element of false balance in a recent front-page article in The Times on the legal battles over allegations of voter fraud and vote suppression — hot topics that may affect the presidential race.

In his article, which led last Monday’s paper, the national reporter Ethan Bronner made every effort to provide balance. Some readers say the piece, in so doing, wrongly suggested that there was enough voter fraud to justify strict voter identification requirements — rules that some Democrats believe amount to vote suppression. Ben Somberg of the Center for Progressive Reform said The Times itself had established in multiple stories that there was little evidence of voter fraud.

“I hope it’s not The Times’s policy to move this matter back into the ‘he said she said’ realm,” he wrote.

The national editor, Sam Sifton, rejected the argument. “There’s a lot of reasonable disagreement on both sides,” he said. One side says there’s not significant voter fraud; the other side says there’s not significant voter suppression.

“It’s not our job to litigate it in the paper,” Mr. Sifton said. “We need to state what each side says.”

Mr. Bronner agreed. “Both sides have become very angry and very suspicious about the other,” he said. “The purpose of this story was to step back and look at both sides, to lay it out.” While he agreed that there was “no known evidence of in-person voter fraud,” and that could have been included in this story, “I don’t think that’s the core issue here.”

I just don’t know what to say at this point. How can you possibly believe you’ve “laid it out” if you didn’t include the most salient fact that there is no evidence of in-person voter fraud? It’s completely inexplicable unless you realize that if you say that, you are simultaneously raising the question of why the Republicans would be passing laws to prevent it. That’s when it gets dicey — the only reasonable conclusion is that these people don’t believe the evidence and are passing these laws out of some form of mass paranoia. Or they are trying to suppress the vote, the success or failure of which is nearly impossible to measure.

That’s the “core issue,” whether you’re reporting about the two sides being at odds or whether you’re trying to educate the public about the issue itself (or, hopefully, doing both …) I suppose it’s understandable that a reporter could get so mired in the weeds that he could no longer see that he was actually misleading his readers by reporting on the dispute without offering all the context and evidence that would lead the reader to understand the entirely of the issue. I guess I just assumed it would be an editors job to make sure he did. Apparently this editor didn’t think so and others obviously remain confused which I find truly depressing.

The public editor did weigh in on that in a frank and refreshing way, I thought:

It ought to go without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway: Journalists need to make every effort to get beyond the spin and help readers know what to believe, to help them make their way through complicated and contentious subjects.

The more news organizations can state established truths and stand by them, the better off the readership — and the democracy — will be.

Yes, it certainly ought to go without saying but I’m glad somebody in that job finally said it.

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Today’s right wing victimization and whining

by digby

Brought to you by Right Wing Watch:

The former Susan G. Komen for the Cure executive who orchestrated the organization’s controversial and short-lived break from Planned Parenthood earlier this year, is out with a new book claiming that the funding dispute was all Planned Parenthood’s fault. In “Planned Bullyhood,” Karen Handel claims that Planned Parenthood turned its back on a “gentlewomen’s agreement” to not discuss the fact that Komen was withdrawing $680,000 a year in grants for breast cancer screenings through the organization’s clinics and then turned on Komen in a PR blitz.

Handel, an anti-choice activist and former GOP candidate who reportedly pushed the move within Komen, resigned shortly after the news of the break caused a national firestorm.

In interviews with right-wing radio hosts Janet Mefferd and Janet Parshall last week, Handel portrays herself as the victim of bullying by the “vicious” Planned Parenthood. She tells Mefferd that Planned Parenthood launched “a mafia-style attack” and that “Komen was held hostage for a mere $680,000.” She sees a double standard in the fact that President Obama didn’t call her after she was criticized, “like he did Sandra Fluke.”

Oh, boo hoo hoo.

I love the “Komen was held hostage for a mere $680,000.” And I can’t help but wonder when the Planned Parenthood bullies called her a slut in the national media and insisted that she had so much sex she could hardly walk? I must have missed all that.

On the other hand, if fighting for funding to help women with breast cancer is what she means by bullying, then bully for them.

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Thank you, Robert Kuttner

by digby

… for this:

Two years ago, the Democrats handed the Republicans their two crown jewels — Social Security and Medicare. By targeting Medicare for budget “savings” that could be used to finance what the Republicans called Obamacare, the White House gave the GOP ammunition to contend that the Democrats were taking benefits away from seniors.

Expanding health coverage for the young and defense of Medicare for the elderly got depicted as a zero sum game. Republicans made huge gains in 2010 with seniors. Instead of the political winner it should have been, Obamacare became an epithet.

Then, in the aborted grand budget bargain of 2011, Obama was so eager to achieve a compromise on mostly Republican terms that he very nearly agreed to needless cuts in Social Security. Only Republican intransigence on any kind of tax hikes saved the president from himself — or more precisely from his deficit-hawk advisers.

Now, however, Republicans have given Social Security and Medicare back to the Democrats (where they belong.) Polls show that Medicare is no longer a winner for the Republicans, and the Democrats have embraced the term, “Obamacare” as positive label.

The reason, of course, is Paul Ryan.

That’s right. In order to run against his program they had to … run against his program. But as Kuttner says, this is not time to be complacent:

But never underestimate the Democrats’ capacity for snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory.

Lurking in the wings is the latest reincarnation of Bowles-Simpson, the bipartisan zombie that refuses to die. A “Fix the Debt” campaign,” chaired by none other than Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, has become the darling of the centrist media and of Wall Street.

The Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the National Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, several leading Democratic deficit hawks, and some 70 corporate CEOs have pledged to raise $50 to 100 million dollars in corporate money for this latest campaign, which promotes yet another a grand bargain of tax increases and cuts in Social Security and other social spending.

Bowles continues to be touted as Obama’s next Treasury Secretary when Tim Geithner finally (mercifully!) calls it a day. Other Democrats who are part of this effort are former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, who was chair of the Democratic National Committee in 2000, and former Democratic Congressman Vic Fazio, who once headed the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Rounding out this group of Democrats doing Republicans’ bidding on fiscal issues are former Georgia Senator Samm Nunn and Wall Streeter and former Obama official Steve Rattner.

Shame!

I did not watch Meet the Press this week, so I mercifully missed the Simpson-Bowles circus. I’m glad I did. I don’t need the heartburn. This alone is sickening:

Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, co-chairs of the president’s fiscal commission and widely hailed as serious thought leaders on dealing with the country’s economic problem, had strong criticisms for both men vying to be President of the United States for the next four years.

As Kuttner points out, they are hailed as “serious thought leaders” by the corporate media (and wealthy celebrity villagers who will benefit from their agenda.) The rest of us, not so much.

Everyone loves Simpson, by the way, for taking the Republicans to task for not agreeing to raise taxes. But that leaves off the other half of his critique which is against the greedy geezers who don’t want to wait until their in the grave to get Social Security and Medicare.

Once again we see the real divide: it’s between people who want to cut the hell out of vital government services in the middle of an epic economic slump and people who want to cut the hell out of vital government services in the middle of an economic slump but are willing to kick in some tip money to appease the rubes. The desires of the people — much less the needs of the economy — simply aren’t on the table.

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Jeffrey Goldberg Tries To Slither Off Topic

by tristero

This is bullshit and Goldberg knows it. The real issue is that Romney and Ryan are listening to neocons and the neocons are crazy. Goldberg’s just trying to slither away from  the subject. (Read MoDo’s column to learn who actually used that ominous word “slither” – and about a member of which ethnic group.)

If anything, Goldberg himself is being anti-Semitic by assuming that Jews as a group have anything whatsoever to do with the obnoxious and deeply disturbed worldview of the slithery neo-cons. To assume every Jew sympathizes or feels even the remotest solidarity with Jewish neocons merely because of a common ethnic/religious heritage is deeply insulting.

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Boy scout leaders and Catholic priests. Oh my.

by David Atkins

This should be shocking to absolutely no one:

Over two decades, the Boy Scouts of America failed to report hundreds of alleged child molesters to police and often hid the allegations from parents and the public – including cases in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

A Los Angeles Times review of 1,600 confidential files dating from 1970 to 1991 has found that Scouting officials frequently urged admitted offenders to quietly resign – and helped many cover their tracks.

Volunteers and employees suspected of abuse were allowed to leave citing bogus reasons such as business demands, “chronic brain dysfunction,” and duties at a Shakespeare festival.

The details are contained in the organization’s confidential “perversion files,” a blacklist of alleged molesters, that the Scouts have used internally since 1919. Scouts’ lawyers around the country have been fighting in court to keep the files from public view.

As the L.A. Times reported last month, the blacklist often didn’t work: Men expelled for alleged abuses slipped back into the program, only to be accused of molesting again. Now, a more extensive review has shown that Scouts sometimes abetted molesters by keeping allegations under wraps.

In the majority of cases, the Scouts learned of alleged abuse after it had been reported to authorities. But in more than 500 instances, the Scouts learned about it from victims, parents, staff members, or anonymous tips.

In about 400 of those cases – 80 percent – there is no record of Scouting officials’ reporting the allegations to police. In more than 100 of the cases, officials actively sought to conceal the alleged abuse or allowed the suspects to hide it, the newspaper found.

Is it any surprise that this sort of thing invariably happens in the most right-wing, homophobic organizations? It shouldn’t be.

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