Month: December 2012

Saturday afternoon fun

by digby

For your entertainment, a random Breitbart comment thread:

JTRPOP
I’m a hardcore conservative, but look what the 1st Tea Party did…Obama was reelected, and the Tea Party was vilified by the media. & Occupy was praised.

RIGHTINTEXAS
So that is a good reason to whine and roll over? We only are defeated if we quit.

PATRIOT
We have quit. Mitt won hands down & we did nothing. Whats left to do? Become a terrorest against our own country?

KOZANNE
Don’t think we haven’t been branded terrorists of a sort already? We’re damned if we do and damned if we dont, so at this point, let’s give ’em all a really, really, really good reason to lie about us some more.

I’m at the point where I don’t really give a damn about the 0bamabots anymore. They made their choice, let ’em take the consequences. Any fight left in me is for my descendants and for my fellow patriots. I’m not going off the cliff with the lemmings, dammit.

CHRIS BLAKE
Possibly. Hope not, but possibly. But explain how being a Patriot, and supporting the Constitution against foreign AND domestic enemies is being a terrorist against our own country? It is working in support of it.

AGNTORNGVCTM
Yes. Armed insurrection is a viable strategy. I’ll be there, throwing my — oh, what is it this week? — my left kidney at the White House.

John Kerry threw somebody’s military medals at the White House when he was upset and I got my medical problems from the same place those medals came from. It’s only fair.

Besides, all I can do is blog anymore. It would be a good diversion and somewhat therapeutic.

SAM TAMP
Stop voting for the republican party! We are their masters not the other way around.

RIGHTINTEXAS
We? I have not.

REDLEY62
Give to the Tea Party! They at least did something for our country in 2010 mid elections. Get rid of the RINO’s in the GOP is the work that has to be done.
Don’t give up—get mad OR get on the railroad car headed to the showers—your choice!

ELAINE
Vote and support all conservatives in 2014 and take the MAJORITY away from Harry. Do that, keep the House and BO is rendered powerless for his last two years. I will never give up!

REDLEY62
NO, YOU have quit! NOT We have quit…

LISA4USA
The TEA Party is not terrorist and this is not America any longer, ‘patriot’.
“What’s left to do?” According to you, it would be to just lie down and die…and that’s just what they want.

FRANK455444
Thats what had to be done to CREATE this nation to begin with.

DANIEL BURKE
Massive voter fraud is why Obama is occupying the oval office. If GOP refuses to fight for honest elections they are useless to us.

ACONSERVATIVEFIRST
Patriot, we have not quit. We lost an election. The Tea Party is still intact. There is much left to do i.e. indoctrination in our education, vote fraud, corrupted media, open borders, dirty politicians, repeal of 90+% of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid’s treasonous treachery to our Nation, and a few more…
We need your support, not a defeatist attitude hung around our necks. Help us. Visit your local Tea Party and get involved on some level. It’s a good thing. You’ll be glad you did.

JESSICASHERWOOD
Throw in a compliant media, and the GOP had a strawman they could use…. http://youtube.qr.net/jOyC/wat…

XANNY
The GOP can’t challenge voter fraud because of the 1981 lawsuite against the RNC case no.09-4615. limiting their ability to engage or asist in voter fraud prevention. See www.fellowshipofminds.wordpres…. Time for a new party, maybe the Gop and the Tea Party together to form a new party.

RUMORCT
We have not quit.

VAPOR MAN
Your Country has been hijacked… you are living in a Post Constitutional oligopoly that has been sold to the highest bidder. The sooner people realize this the sooner we can take the country back.

LDOMIN
Ridley62 I think we should stop blaming one another. That is what this administration want…more division amongst us. We need to stand together and fight for our country and our liberty. We have to do this or everything is lost.

GUY DUDEBRO
If you study the numbers, nobody will ever be able to overtake the Santa Claus Party. It’s time to prepare for Revolution.

In fairness, I’ve read similar threads on liberal blogs after a loss. But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it when it happens to the other side.

QOTD

by digby

Cliff Schecter:

We’re now forced to confront a band of enormously wealthy people who’ve benefitted from – or bestowed upon others – large financial bailouts and ill-considered taxcuts who like lecturing Americans living on earned benefits about “shared sacrifice”. As in, you give up a meal each day, and I’ll give up a pair of yacht shoes! Deal?

Exactly. And this is not confined to Republicans, by any means. Regular readers know that I’ve been writing about “Fix the Debt” and Ed Rendell for months. But it and he are garnering attention elsewhere these days:

In addition to his current duties as professional-liberal-even-Joe-Sixpack-can-love on MSNBC, Ballard Spahr court jester, and corporate consigliere at Greenhill & Co investment bank, Rendell is currently co-chairing the steering committee of something called The CEO Campaign to Fix the Debt—a blue-chip cabal of 130-plus plutocrats who have anted up a $43 million kitty to fund a multimedia stealth campaign/public relations offensive to convince the turkeys to vote for Thanksgiving.

Fix the Debt is pushing for radical alterations to the tax code to legalize a hundred-plus billion dollar corporate tax dodge and pass the buck onto the middle/working/underclass in the form of deep cuts to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, all the while masquerading as a selfless crusade to save the nation from going over the [cue thunder and lightning] financial cliff. Bless their blackened hearts.

One of the Fix the Debt campaign’s main proposals for deficit reduction is creating a “territorial tax system” that would enable corporations to evade taxation on offshore earnings—which amounts to a combined $418 billion from the Fix the Debt member corporations—when they bring that money home, and giving themselves a $134 billion tax break, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies titled “The CEO Campaign to ‘Fix’ the Debt: A Trojan Horse for Massive Corporate Tax Breaks.”

Just to be clear, they are talking about paying off the national debt by pocketing $134 billion in taxes annually.

Indeed. And yet somehow, we’ve been talked into believing that the wealthy will be making a serious sacrifice if some of their taxes are raised — a sacrifice equal to the sacrifice of millions of Americans who will see their already meager incomes and health security reduced.

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So liberals exist after all

by digby

It’s nice to see the progressive caucus out there playing its role in the public side of the negotiations. After all, in America if you aren’t on TV you don’t exist:

I watched the debt ceiling debacle closely and I don’t recall seeing all these guys on TV laying out the progressive position. This is good.

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Shocking: Smart talk on the “fiscal cliff” on television (Chris Hayes, of course)

by digby

This discussion of the president’s opening bid on Chris Hayes this morning is quite good:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I had never heard before that the Congressional Black Caucus was going to vote against the estate tax because of a few black millionaires. That’s a dynamic I hadn’t even considered.

There’s more here on the Village CW that “entitlements” have to be on the able:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The polling on this is fascinating. The people clearly don’t want what the CW insists “must be done” (and which rational analysis says shouldn’t be done.)  But beyond Obama’s stump speech promise to “fix the deficit with a balanced approach that asks the rich to pay a little bit more” it wasn’t a topic of discussion in the last campaign. Why?  We knew the so-called fiscal cliff was looming. I wrote about it several times a week. We tried to get candidates interested in the progressive alternatives. But aside from a few stalwarts like Bernie Sanders, nobody cared.

So, here we are. In their defense, I’m not sure the American people believe that anyone can actually do anything in government so they’re counting on all this being much ado about nothing. I am too. But unlike most people, I believe that some very powerful people in both parties would very much like to see all this Grand Bargaining get done over the next year or so. And I’m scared to death they’ll succeed.

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Fast food uprising


by digby

If you’re looking for some sharp analysis of the fast food strike in NYC last week,this clip with Sarah Jaffe on The Ed Show delivers:

I think this is very intriguing. It takes a lot of guts to walk out of a job, especially in a tough job market. And yet we’re starting to see it happen. Charts like this tell the tale:

Corporate profits hit all time high:

Corporate profits as part of GDP also hits all time high:

Corporate profits vs wages:

I think we can all see what’s wrong with this picture.

It’s happening because people intuitively get that they’re being screwed and some smart organizers are out there giving them some tools and ways of thinking about that. It’s going to be very interesting to see how this plays out.

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Faux journalism versus good journalism

by David Atkins

Nate Silver takes aim at Politico:

“Politico is … it’s like ‘Who won the day?’ kind of thing, right?” Silver responded. “They’re trying to cover it like it’s sports, but not in an intelligent way at all, right? And they want to create noise, basically, right? Their whole thing is, you have to have a lead story about some gaffe that some candidate made on the campaign trail.”

Of course, the same could be said of most of the political press.

The alternative, of course, would be to try to get at the truth. That would be journalism. Good journalism would then not only report the truth, but report it in context.

For instance, here’s what passes for faux journalism these days:
“Democrats and Republicans divided as fiscal cliff looms.”

Here’s what actual journalism would look like:
“As fiscal cliff looms, Democrats offer major spending cuts; Republicans refuse tax increases on wealthy.”

Here’s what good journalism would look like:
“Democrats plan to cut assistance to poor during massive recession as Republicans defend record low tax rates on the wealthy at time of record income income inequality, while Congress nears self-imposed arbitrary deficit deadline.”

Good luck getting them to do that, though. Good journalism is hard.

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Republicans really don’t want the kids on their lawns

Gee, I wonder why conservatives are losing the young people:

Of course, old white guys lecturing everyone about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket is nothing new. Here’s St Ronnie waxing on about the good old days (in a speech that sounds suspiciously like the scribblings of Peggy Noonan.)

I’m pretty sure I was among those unpatriotic young people he was talking about. But even at the time a whole bunch of young people were following his lead and as they grew older they turned into middle aged jerks and are now close to being senior jerks. They won’t be a majority but they’ll still be jerks (with a lot of money) and they’ll still be pains in the ass. Even Bill O’Reilly was young once.

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Getting to yes

by digby

Daniel Foster at NRO makes the case for Republicans going for the Corker Plan (which he describes as “Romney’s plan made flesh with more plausible math and greater respect for political constraints.”)

But as a starting point for negotiations, the Corker plan has a lot to recommend it. Most critically, it meets the Democrats’ sine qua non of concentrating tax hikes on wealthier taxpayers. But it does so while making the Bush tax rates a permanent feature of the tax code, instead of the ever-expiring creatures of “reconciliation” gimmickry they currently are. This simple change will avert the regularly scheduled crises we’ve enjoyed for the last four years. It will mean Democrats can’t raise taxes in the future through mere inaction. It will dramatically simplify the twisted ways we talk about taxes (you’ll spend far less time explaining to your friends the difference between “current law” and “current policy”). And if you think that perpetuating the myth that raising rates on the rich will solve our problems is more pernicious than actually raising rates on the rich, the Corker approach will deny Democrats a cheap psychological and rhetorical victory. New revenue through limiting deductions can be plausibly sold as part of broader tax-code reform, not a capitulation on the overloaded question of whether the “rich” are paying their “fair share.” In the conservative long-game, having the first conversation instead of the second matters, big time.

I’ve always thought the Republicans might someday realize that some of their long-game goals were in reach with these negotiations if they could just find a way to finesse the pesky temporary tax hike issue. Whether they will is another story. Foster conveniently lays out the reasons why they may not do it:

Now, Corker might be overselling a bit. Such are our fiscal woes that taking a four-and-a-half-trillion-dollar bite out of the debt gets us roughly a quarter of the way home. So it’d be closer to right if Corker said that anything short of starting in earnest to solve the problem would be a failure. But you might think that only massive deficit reduction will do, and that the Republicans ought to offer dead-weight resistance to any plan that doesn’t, say, balance the budget over ten years or fundamentally restructure the size and shape of the federal government. Or you might think that the Republicans should back only a Band-Aid, do just enough to avert catastrophe (again) and wait for 2013 or 2015 to take another shot under more favorable conditions. And if you think either of those things, you probably don’t think Corker’s approach is the best thing going.

I’m going to guess that the real question is whether they want to take yes for an answer now on program cuts or wait until 2013 or 2015 to take another shot. The idea that they really care about massive deficit reduction is belied by their history.

And keep in mind that this “moderate” plan pretty much decimates the safety net in exchange for some tepid tax hikes. But that’s still moderate in their eyes: if tax hikes are now the Democrats’ sine qua non I think it’s safe to say that stopping tax hikes has long been the Republican sine qua non as well. After all, there’s only one president in the last 30 years who actually balanced a budget and left a surplus and it wasn’t a Republican. (A lot of good that did for the Dems …)

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