Who’s watching the watchers?
by digby
Chris Hayes on the real scandal of the Petraeus affair:
I wish I thought that using this technology to take down a mythic military icon and CIA chief would be startling enough to engender a reevaluation but I don’t. I’ve come to realize that authoritarian states can be made incrementally without people even knowing that it’s happening. Watch the whole show here if you are interested in this topic. It’s very informative.
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Time to bring back the quitter
by digby
I’ve got a suggestion for cutting short the GOP angst: Sarah Palin for president in 2016.
You think I’m joking? Think again.
In 2008, Palin, running as my party’s vice presidential candidate, was widely supposed to have cost John McCain the election. But that wasn’t so. A national exit poll conducted by CNN asked voters whether Palin was a factor in their voting. Of those who said yes, 56% voted for McCain versus 43% for Barack Obama.
And Romney? Well,the problem was that he just couldn’t appeal to the average Palin voter:
Gabriel Malor, writing for the New York Daily News’ blog, pinpointed another reason: By focusing his campaign mostly on serious economic and political issues such as the national debt and tax incentives, Romney failed to take into account the fact that large segments of the electorate neither know nor care much about serious economic and political issues. What they — a group sometimes euphemistically called “uninformed voters” — do know and care about are the tugs on their emotions, fears, revulsions and heart strings provided by hours and hours of uninterrupted television watching.
No really, that’s the argument:
Palin can more than keep up with the Democrats in appealing to voters’ emotions. Hardly anyone could be more blue collar than Palin, out on the fishing boat with her hunky blue-collar husband, Todd. Palin is “View”-ready, she’s “Ellen”-ready, she’s Kelly-and-Michael-ready.
A Palin “war against women”? Hah! Not only is she a woman, she’s got a single-mom daughter, Bristol, to help with the swelling single-mom demographic. On social issues, Palin, unlike Romney, has been absolutely consistent. And let’s remember that most Americans, whatever their view of choice, disapprove of most abortions.
Gay marriage? Palin opposes it. But she is also a strong advocate of states’ rights, and I’m betting she’d be fine with letting states and their voters grapple with the issue on their own. Remember that all of America didn’t swing toward approval of gay marriage on Nov. 6. Three reliably blue states and their voters did. If she were smart, Palin would recruit a member of her impressive gay fanboy base — yes, she has one — to help run her campaign. I nominate Kevin DuJan of the widely read gay conservative blog HillBuzz, a Palin stalwart since 2008.
And then, of course, there’s the feminist vote:
Furthermore, looks count in politics, and Palin at age 48, has it all over her possible competition, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, who will be 69 by election day 2016 and who let someone talk her into adopting the flowing blond locks of a college student, making her look like Brunnhilde in a small-town Wagner production. Men love Sarah Palin, and she loves men.
Well, maybe not. But there is her vast political success post-2008:
She’s tough as nails too. After Election 2008, she was supposed to have been through. This year eight of the 14 GOP candidates Palin endorsed for Congress won election or reelection, including tea party favorite Ted Cruz for a Senate seat in Texas.
And anyway, she’s God in drag:
Ever since the 1990s, Republicans have been looking for the next Ronald Reagan. Reagan is now revered in bipartisan circles, but during his presidency he was, like Palin, ridiculed by liberals. They cited “Bedtime for Bonzo” and sneered at his no-name college degree.
Sarah Palin is the new Ronald Reagan: charming and affable and unwilling to back down if she’s right. I can’t see what’s wrong with that.
Yes, I think it’s a great idea too. Let’s spend the next few years following her around and hanging on her every word like we did last time. It did the country a world of good.
And I have a sneaking suspicion Palin will be all for it. Surely, there’s money to be made.
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I want cooks and waiters to have health care. Seriously.
by digby
Here’s a handy list, courtesy of Wonkette, of the restaurants you need to avoid if you want to avoid having your food handled by sick people:
Papa John’s Pizza
John Schnatter, founder of Papa John’s pizza, is LIVID and he is NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE. You want his employees to have health care coverage? Well FINE, he’ll GIVE them health care coverage but it will cost you do-gooder liberals ten cents more per pizza, does that make you HAPPY? Actually, it might make you happy. We at Wonkette have concluded that we will pay ten cents more per pizza if it will ensure that the person making it is able to see a doctor when he gets sick. And we wonder why this didn’t happen sooner, if all it took was ten cents more per pizza to get employee health care coverage. Is that really all it costs? Ten cents per pizza? If so, then maybe the CEO of Papa John’s should have done this a long time ago. But again, this attitude is why we are not the CEO of a multi-billion dollar pizza company.
Olive Garden / Red Lobster
The CEO of this company is a real ball buster, and he is NOT going to make YOU pay ten cents more for a plate of noodles, no way Jose. That is a solution for pussies. This CEO is just going to cut back on employees’ hours so that they work 29 hours per week instead of 30, exempting them from health care coverage mandate. So the next time you go to Olive Garden or the Red Lobster, rest assured that your server is not going to have health care coverage. There, does that make you feel better?
Hurricane Grill and Wings, and also some Denny’s and Dairy Queen Franchises
John Metz is nobody’s fool, so John Metz, CEO and owner of Hurricane Grill and Wings as well as some Denny’s and Dairy Queen franchises, is going to pass the cost of Obamacare onto the employees AND the customer. “If I leave the prices the same, but, say on the menu that there is a five-percent surcharge for Obamacare, customers have two choices. They can either pay it, and tip 15 or 20 percent, or if they really feel so inclined, they can reduce the amount of tip they give to the server, who is the primary beneficiary of Obamacare,” Metz told The Huffington Post. Metz is a WINNER, you guys, and WINNERS do not pay for the health care coverage costs of others. They make you, the customer pay for it (SUCKER) and if you don’t want to, then YOU get to be a winner and make the waitress pay for it.
Applebee’s
Obamacare is going to cost Applebee’s “some millions of dollars” according to CEO Zane Tankel. Will these “some millions of dollars” be an increase in costs per year? Per month? Per restaurant? We don’t know, and it’s not important. What IS important is that Applebee’s will not be able to build more restaurants, or create more low-wage go-nowhere jobs, THANKS OBAMA. The solution to these costs is for the CEO to take a hit on his $9.6 million dollar per year salary or lay off employees.
There are a lot of chain restaurants in this country. If I’m going to eat in one I’d like for the employees to have access to health care. I’d prefer not to have germ-laden, typhoid Mary’s handling my food, thank you very much. And it is common sense to ask, if they are cutting corners on this, what other health regulations are they skirting? I think I’ll be eating elsewhere.
Oh, and as for Hostess? If you really will be jonesing for a twinkie when they go out of business, might I recommend a recipe made with something other than chemicals? No, they aren’t what you’d call healthy but at least they’re made from actual food.
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March of Folly: Grand Bargain style
by digby
This article at New Economic Perspectives is an enlightening and entertaining discussion of the “Grand Bargain”, in the form of a letter to the president. I’ll just excerpt this one passage (emphasis mine):
The Grand Bargain that you seek serves the interests of only a few special interests, the financial services industry, by enlarging the “market” for less stable and more speculative private-sourced retirement and health insurance products, sold now and in the future by Wall Street. Both political parties, including yourself, have being acting largely in the interests of Wall Street and not of Main Street, despite your calling Wall Street bigwigs at one point “fat cats”. A little extra taxation is not going to hurt the wealthy very much but cuts in social spending and overall cuts in government expenditure (as well as the lapse of the payroll tax cut) is going to hurt ordinary Americans a great deal as well as represent a significant drag on the overall economy (explained below). Again, the extra taxation on the wealthy is a distraction and a triviality compared to your apparent commitment to cutting Social Security and Medicare, a huge boon to the financial services industry and no one else.
Without an ennobling and constructive set of tasks and a reality-based discourse, the political goal of bipartisanship in Washington is not “grand” at all. A critical problem with the reflexive impulse to bipartisanship is that the two political parties currently are better representatives of two or more segments of economically-privileged opinion rather than of the American people as a whole. It is true that people pull the lever, for the most part, for one or the other major party but real, effective choice is very limited in a “first past the post” electoral system. And, you know as well as anyone, that once you and other lawmakers reach office, the relative power of the voter diminishes even further and the power of wealthy special interests increases exponentially. The current Democratic and Republican Parties are able to compete with each other for attention and “stir up enough dust” to temporarily distract many voters from the essential distance between the concerns of official Washington and Main Street. The mainstream media outlets have been collaborating in creating the appearance of differences between the two Parties but as you have admitted on more than one occasion you share a lot of common positions with your now vanquished opponent, Mitt Romney.
Also, apparently, you are very much attracted to the notion of sacrifice and “shared sacrifice” which also might be meaningfully linked to the notion of national grandeur and greatness: one sacrifices for others to make the nation, the group or the team greater and better. You know, you are probably right that in some areas more public-spiritedness and sacrifice of individual wants and needs may be desirable. Yet you have chosen to praise and seek to impose sacrifice on others in an area where, for ordinary people, for the most part, sacrifice is gratuitous and damaging.
You and your advisors are diverting people’s natural impulses to help other people to a false and actually a counter-productive goal, reducing the budget deficit. It would be far better that Americans would, for instance, sacrifice trips in fuel inefficient vehicles, until such time that they have workable low- and zero-emissions options, than to pay more income taxes to reduce a budget deficit. Or that some Americans choose careers that are not the most remunerative but serve public needs, like teaching school, social work and sustainable agriculture, and yet can get adequately rewarded for their work. These are real individual and group sacrifices for the good of the country not phantom sacrifices for a false ideal.
The notion that it is awe-inspiring or grand to unite the two major political parties around the narrow interests of Wall Street is to make a mockery of the idea of a grand sweep or arc of American history. Or to invoke individual sacrifice and people’s desire to help to address the phantom issue of the public debt is, as you will see below, an outrageous misappropriation of people’s desire to help others. It’s a travesty of grandeur and of greatness, the grandeur and greatness you aspire to as President.
Please read on for an excellent take on why the entire discussion is a relic of the days of the gold standard and why the idea of budget deficits in this context is simply … wrong.
America going broke is literally impossible. The risk of inflation and the wrath of the invisible bond vigilantes in the future is possible … but nowhere is it even hinted at in current reality and this obsession with slashing spending is likely to do here what it has done in Europe — that is, slow this weak economy down. And I’m afraid that at this point you have to assume this is what these people want to do. After all, they have the example of the UK where they raised taxes and cut spending and have gotten themselves right back into a recession.
It appears to me that the overarching political goal of the Democratic Party here, aside from delivering for their benefactors, is to break Grover Norquist’s hold on the Republican Party. This is a worthy goal, but the price for doing that, especially right now, is going to be very steep. Too steep. Average Americans will be “sacrificing” for decades to get it done. Meanwhile, there’s always another Grover out there and Republicans will always cut taxes the first chance they get. It’s definitional. Making it possible to raise taxes in order to fix an illusory problem is an unworthy goal at a time like this. With an economy this weak, their first obligation is to do no harm. And making the American people suffer for the Democrats’ failure to properly counter GOP propaganda is cowardly.
The obsession with “raising revenue” which is all they are talking about on the Sunday Morning shows, is folly. If it succeeds, history will judge it harshly. Possibly even “Neville Chamberlain” harshly.
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Yes, money does distort policy
by David Atkins
Much has been made of the failure of Crossroads and other conservative Super PACs to achieve significant results in the 2012. This, we are supposed to be believe, proves that big spending in elections doesn’t matter and that our democracy isn’t actually the barely veiled legalized bribery our lying eyes tell us it is.
Well, stories like this don’t do much to dispel the notion:
Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist raised a lot of eyebrows on Monday when he told National Journal that a carbon tax might be on the table if it were swapped with a cut to the income tax.
“It’s possible you could structure something that wasn’t an increase and didn’t violate the pledge,” he reportedly said.
As president of Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist has convinced hundreds of members of Congress to sign a pledge that they will never raise taxes. While his influence appears to be waning in Washington, Norquist’s tax pledge is still considered gospel for many Republicans. That’s why his willingness to consider a tax on global warming pollution is a big deal in political circles.
But one day later, after being criticized by the American Energy Alliance, the advocacy arm of a Koch-supported energy think tank devoted to promoting fossil fuel development, Norquist has completely reversed his statement, saying there virtually “no conceivable way” he could support a tax on carbon.
Koch money talks, and it talks big.
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Saturday Night at the Movies
The voluptuous horror of Mother Earth
By Dennis Hartley
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| We’re down in the Poles: Chasing Ice |
This is not a putdown: Jeff Orlowski’s new documentary Chasing Ice is glacially paced. Because you see, “glacial pacing” ain’t what it used to be. These days, glaciers are moving along (”retreating”, technically) at a pretty good clip. Unfortunately, this phenomenon does not portend well for the planet; as this ancient ice continues to dissipate at an alarmingly accelerating rate, leaving naught but barren rock in its wake, it is a red flag alert much akin to Mother Earth experiencing a health-threatening hardening of the arteries. To put it in a less flowery way…we’re fucked. After all, according to renowned nature photographer (and film subject) James Balog, “The story…is in the ice.”
Of course, there are those who continue to dismiss the concept of man-made global warming, despite such tangible evidentiary manifestations (not to mention the nearly unanimous scientific consensus), and Orlowski opens his film with a montage of the usual braying deniers (Hannity, Beck, & co.) including one that surprised me (Weather Channel creator John Coleman…really?) interspersed with news footage of some of the freakishly intense and catastrophic weather events that have become an all too frequent occurrence in recent years (gosh, it almost seems like last week…I seem to recall a “Hurricane Sandy” making a bit of a splash). Luckily, their appearances are brief, because the meat of the story centers on Balog’s eye-opening Extreme Ice Survey project.
The photographer’s fascinating journey began in 2005, while he was on an assignment for National Geographic to document the effect of climate change on the Arctic. Up until that fateful trip, Balog had counted himself amongst the skeptics; he candidly admits on camera that he “…didn’t think humans were capable” of affecting the Earth’s weather patterns in such a profound manner. His epiphany gave birth to a multi-year project that he pursued with a missionary fervor. His goal was to utilize specially modified time-lapse cameras to capture irrefutable proof that affective global warming had transcended mere academic speculation. After strategically placing the cameras (quite a challenge in and of itself) next to sizable glaciers like Solheim in Iceland, Store in Greenland and several more in Alaska and Montana, Balrog and his team began their painstaking waiting game.
The resulting images are quite beautiful and mesmerizing, yet simultaneously troubling. Orlowski’s film itself mirrors the dichotomy, being in equal parts cautionary eco-doc and art installation. Balog’s stills and time-lapsed sequences are fantastical ice-wrought dioramas that look like they could have been imagined by Roger Dean and rendered by Dale Chihuly. Finding these diamonds in the rough of pending ecological disaster reminded me of Jennifer Baichwal’s 2007 documentary about photojournalist Edward Burtynsky, Manufactured Landscapes (which I reviewed here). The film also offers a glimpse into the real blood, sweat and tears that goes into professional photography (particularly in some hair-raising moments where Balog and a member of his team make a risky foray into a seemingly bottomless ice crevasse, just to grab a couple of pictures).
While Balog makes a number of impassioned statements about the urgent need to get everyone on the same page regarding this issue, Orlowski stops just shy of giving his film a strident polemical stance. This is wise, because he doesn’t need to hit us over the head to make his point about global warming’s profound effects. This is best illustrated in the film’s money shot, where one of Balog’s video teams captures the largest “calving” event ever so documented. The jaw-dropping sequence, depicting an ice peninsula equivalent in size to lower Manhattan (and twice the height of its tallest skyscrapers) sluicing off of Greenland’s massive Hulissat Glacier, handily trumps any amount of of squawking that emits from the likes of the bloviating gasbag deniers featured in the opening montage, and proves that that old adage will forever ring true: a picture is worth a thousand words.
Saturday Night at the Movies review archives
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I can no longer sit back and allow the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids
by digby
No really, this happened:
On October 11, at a closed-door meeting of the Republican caucus convened by the body’s majority leader, Chip Rogers, a tea party activist told Republican lawmakers that Obama was mounting this most diabolical conspiracy. The event—captured on tape by a member of the Athens-based watchdog Better Georgia (who was removed from the room after 52 minutes)—had been billed as an information session on Agenda 21, a nonbinding UN agreement that commits member nations to promote sustainable development. In the eyes of conservative activists, Agenda 21 is a nefarious plot that includes forcibly relocating non-urban-dwellers and prescribing mandatory contraception as a means of curbing population growth. The invitation to the Georgia state Senate event noted the presentation would explain: “How pleasant sounding names are fostering a Socialist plan to change the way we live, eat, learn, and communicate to ‘save the earth.'”
Here’s an illustration from the presentation:
About 23 minutes into the briefing, Searcy explained how President Obama, aided by liberal organizations like the Center for American Progress and business groups like local chambers of commerce, are secretly using mind-control techniques to push their plan for forcible relocation on the gullible public:
They do that by a process known as the Delphi technique. The Delphi technique was developed by the Rand Corporation during the Cold War as a mind-control technique. It’s also known as “consensive process.” But basically the goal of the Delphi technique is to lead a targeted group of people to a pre-determined outcome while keeping the illusion of being open to public input.
Yes, elected GOP officials convened this lunatic meeting. And have previously acted upon this “threat”:
Rogers, the Georgia Senate majority leader, introduced legislation in January that would have blocked the nonbinding UN resolution from being applied to his state. Among other things, the resolution noted that, “according to the United Nations Agenda 21 policy, social justice is described as the right and opportunity of all people to benefit equally from the resources afforded by society and the environment which would be accomplished by socialists and communist redistribution of wealth.”
In case you were wondering that bill was drafted by the John Birch society. Details at the Mother Jones link.
I’m guessing that “moderating” the Republican Party is going to be easier said than done.
Update: Yep
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“Horribly unreasonable” lefties protest human sacrifice
by digby
The AP finally notices that liberals aren’t very happy with the Villager agenda of using the sick and the elderly as human sacrifices:
That new inflation index, known as chained Consumer Price Index, is a magic elixir for budget writers. But it’s anathema to many liberals, who say that moving to the new cost-of-living measure could cut average retiree benefits by about $600 a year a decade after taking effect and mean a cut of about $1,000 a year after 20 years.
“Think about it this way. You’re standing on the deck of a boat and you’re in very deep water and they want you to swim, but they’re going to put a log chain around your ankle,” Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, told a group of liberal activists assembled for a rally Thursday in a Senate hearing room. “That’s chained CPI.”
Sixteen months ago, Obama’s White House took a different view during talks with House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, on a possible budget deal. A White House draft offer by top Obama aide Rob Nabors, made public by Washington Post author Bob Woodward, proposed several controversial changes to benefit programs, including the lower inflation adjustment, raising the eligibility age for Medicare and higher Medicare premiums.
Those negotiations, however, were conducted on a playing field that favored Republicans. It was less than a year after Obama’s self-described “shellacking” in the 2010 elections and the president was desperate to win an increase in the government’s borrowing cap and avoid a government default on its debt that should shatter financial markets. Also, Obama still faced re-election in 2012.
[…]
“The price for that kind of thing has gone up,” said a senior House Democrat who required anonymity to speak frankly on party strategy. “Negotiations depend on the situation. No one should expect to get the same kind of deal.”Republicans have gotten the message, but insist that higher tax revenues be paired with cuts to rapidly growing programs such as Medicare and the Medicaid health care program for the poor and disabled. These programs are called “entitlements” because eligibility is based on meeting criteria such as age or income.
“Washington’s problem isn’t that it taxes too little, but that it spends too much,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. “But in a good-faith effort to make progress on boosting the economy and government’s long-term solvency, Republicans like me have said for more than a year now that we’re open to new revenue in exchange for meaningful reforms to the entitlement programs that are the primary drivers of our debt.”
New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte said in the GOP’s weekly radio address Saturday that “any effort to address our fiscal crisis without including entitlement reform can’t be taken seriously.”
No way, say many liberals.
“We’re going to send a loud message to the leadership in the House, in the Senate, and President Obama: ‘Do not cut Social Security, do not cut Medicare, do not cut Medicaid,’” said Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-declared socialist who aligns with Democrats. “Every now and then elections have consequences. We won.”
Republicans and even some Obama allies worry that liberal demands will make it harder for the president to seal a bargain with the GOP.
Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill., said Obama has the same problem with his party’s liberal base that Boehner has with some conservative Republicans. “Boehner has a disproportionate group of his folks skewing things too far out and the president has equally the same sort of problems with people who are horribly unreasonable,” Quigley said.
Right it’s just as “horribly unreasonable” to protest cutting the subsistence benefits of 90 year old ladies as it is to protest taxing multi-millionaires in amounts that equate to tip money. If only the grow-ups could be left alone to do what needs to be done.
But be that as it may, I think this is shaping up well. I don’t care if the Villagers think the Democrats are being unreasonable for refusing to make average Americans “sacrifice” for no other reason than to appease fantasy confident fairies and invisible bond vigilantes. Have at it. We’ll join with the looney right to prevent the “sensible centrists” from racing the Europeans for the austerity crown. At this point, I think that may be the best we can hope for, unfortunately. (Jobs aren’t even on the agenda…)
Austerity is a game for the rich to play amongst themselves. If they want to pretend that it’s a big sacrifice for them to pay a small piece of their ever growing pile of money to support the government, that’s their privilege. But thee’s no reason for progressives much less average poor, working and middle class Americans to shed any tears over it and offer up their own meager security in an act of nonsensical “fairness.” Leave the rest of us out of it.
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Creating jobs for dead people
by digby
I love art and I think it’s important. But this is obscene — and it shows just how ridiculous it is to characterize rich people as “job creators.”
Two sales, two record nights: what a week! Both Sotheby’s and Christie’s recorded “highest ever” sales for contemporary art this week, with Sotheby’s pulling in over $375 million on Tuesday only to be topped by Christie’s, which hammered down a total of $412.2 million the following night. Artists from Jeff Koons (at $33.6 million for his “Tulips,” a brilliantly-colored stainless steel sculpture) to Jean Michel Basquiat (at $25.6 million) broke new records, even as a painting by Gerhard Richter, the world’s top selling living artist (“Prag,” belonging to collector Steve Cohen), failed to sell at all.
Granted, the auctioneer was surely paid as were a few other people at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. But I think we can dispense with the idea that this was a big economic stimulator. This is about rich people paying each other vast sums of money without the rubes getting in the middle of the transaction.
And they have so much money they cheer when the prices go higher:
But what is also notable is a change in the way these prices are now received by the public. I recall a time when auction house audiences applauded a good deal: the painting that should have gone for more but which, for some reason or another, did not find many bidders and so one buyer got lucky. “Well done,” others would say, and pat him on the back. Meantime, by contrast, the buyers who went way beyond the estimates received stares, as lookers-on shook their heads in skeptical disbelief.
That , obviously, isn’t the case anymore. Now the higher the number, the louder the cheers. What a thrill! What a conquest! It’s like winning the Oscar, like reaching the World Series. Who cares if it’s a smart buy, as long as it’s a big one?
Just don’t suggest they should “pay a little bit more in taxes,” though. That’s heresy. We must put old ladies on cheaper cat food because America is “going broke.” And the public needs to learn a little something about fiscal responsibility.
h/t to TW
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Political gifts
by digby
EVAN SMITH: So Governor Romney said yesterday now somewhat famously, that “the reason that the president won is because he gave gifts to minorities in the form of healthcare or to young people in the form of preferable college loan…”
NEWT GINGRICH: I am very disappointed…
EVAN SMITH: With Governor Romney saying that?
NEWT GINGRICH: With Governor Romney’s analysis, which I believe is insulting and profoundly wrong.
EVAN SMITH: Can you talk about that? Why is that?
NEWT GINGRICH: Well first of all, we didn’t lose Asian-Americans, because they got any gifts. He did worse with Asian-Americans than he did with Latinos.
EVAN SMITH: Right, seventy-three percent of Asian-Americans, seventy-one percent of Latinos.
NEWT GINGRICH: This is the hardest working and most successful ethnic group in America, okay. They ain’t into gifts. Second, it’s an insult to all Americans. It reduces us to economic entities who have no passion, no idealism, no dreams, no philosophy, and if it had been that simple, my question would have been “Why didn’t you out bid him?”
EVAN SMITH: Right, “You had the money…” you could be in the gift giving business if you had elected to be.
NEWT GINGRICH: He had enough billionaire supporters that if buying the electorate was the key, he could have got all of his super PAC friends together and said, “Don’t buy ads, give gifts.” It’d be like the northwest Indians who have gift giving ceremonies. He could have gone town by town and said, “Come here and let me give you gifts. Here are Republican gifts.” They could have an elephant coming in with gifts on it.
One cannot help but laugh at the man who dubbed Obama “the food stamp president” getting on his high horse on this subject. Recall:
“Remember, this is the best food stamp president in history. So more Americans today get food stamps than before. And we now give it away as cash — you don’t get food stamps. You get a credit card, and the credit card can be used for anything. We have people who take their food stamp money and use it to go to Hawaii. They give food stamps now to millionaires because, after all, don’t you want to be compassionate? You know, the Obama model: isn’t there somebody you’d like to give money to this week. That’s why we’re now going to help bailout Italy because we haven’t bailed out enough people this week, the president thought let’s write another check. After all, we have so much extra money.”
And anyway he’s behind the curve. Mitt’s pals were all over this:
The Koch-backed activist group Americans for Prosperity is buying and pumping gas for drivers pulling up to stations today in Nevada, Iowa, and Michigan. The group (which has spent $31 million on anti-Obama smear ads since April) is spending $4,000 at every station to provide 100-150 drivers gas for the low price $1.84 per gallon. That dollar amount per gallon, according to AFP, reflects the price of gas during Bush’s administration, before Obama “doubled it” in 2009 when he took office.
(Of course, AFP is totally wrong. Gas prices were at their highest ($4+ gallon) May – August 2008, during Bush’s final year as President. In the head of the recession, that price ($4) proved to be unsustainable, and in keeping with the global demand for oil, it was temporarily and drastically lowered to $1.71 in December. Six days before Obama was inaugurated, the price had increased by about $0.20, before settling at $1.84. After that gas prices continued to climb, not because of Obama’s policy but because Bush’s reduced price was only a temporary and artificial adjustment.)
And as with their other electoral gambits, they got taken to the cleaners. People gladly took the “gift.” And then voted for Obama.
*Remember, these billionaires are supposedly the smartest, savviest people on the planet.
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