Good luck with that rebranding
by David Atkins
Rep. Don Young says he “meant no disrespect” when he used the term “wetbacks.”
“My father had a ranch; we used to have 50-60 wetbacks to pick tomatoes,” Young, an Alaska Republican, told a local radio station in a story posted Thursday. “It takes two people to pick the same tomatoes now. It’s all done by machine.”
Much as Republicans may want to rebrand, this sort of thing is going to keep happening. It’s coded into Republican DNA.
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Just a couple of white jerks agitating to take the food out of people’s mouths
by digby
This is from a couple of weeks ago. Don’t say they didn’t warn us:
Fox News has been flogging the “food stamp scandal” all day long. But nobody got to the heart of it better than Larry Kudlow on CNBC today. He just couldn’t stop talking about “dependency”, which apparently translates to some people’s shocking dependency on .. food.
First this:
And then this:
It looks to me as if the right wing just can’t quit that Randroid love that dare not speak its name. (Shhhhh. Don’t say takers and makers.)
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When free speech just isn’t menacing enough
by digby
Gosh, I wonder why so many people are shying away from politics these days:
I’m fairly sure that my right to free speech is threatened when someone who disagrees with me shows up with a gun. This is just common sense. There is no reason these guys had to bring guns to the rally. They could have showed up with signs, as people have done forever. They could have shouted down the speakers, they could have engaged the protesters one on one. This is how we normally stage our political disagreements. But no, they show up at rallies with loaded guns and ostentatiously display them. There is no other reason to do it this way except that you want to intimidate those on the other side.
And it’s effective:
A member of Moms Demand Action said that she felt unsettled by their presence and said that the organizers would have to think twice before holding another event, particularly one where children could be present.
I would certainly think twice about going to an event where people are passionate about an issue on both sides but where one side was armed. (And it doesn’t matter which side I was on — stray bullets hit innocent people every single day.) This is called self-preservation. In exactly the same way that I don’t jump into a lion’s cage, I don’t go places where there are angry people with guns. Sure, it’s possible — even likely — that nothing will happen. But it’s a mistake to count on the lion to behave in a civilized way.
These gun proliferation supporters obviously know that a sign would do. But a sign doesn’t get the message across is quite the same visceral way, does it?
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The climate scientists have been proven right
by David Atkins
The climate scientists were right. They’ve always been right:
Forecasts of global temperature rises over the past 15 years have proved remarkably accurate, new analysis of scientists’ modelling of climate change shows.
The debate around the accuracy of climate modelling and forecasting has been especially intense recently, due to suggestions that forecasts have exaggerated the warming observed so far – and therefore also the level warming that can be expected in the future. But the new research casts serious doubts on these claims, and should give a boost to confidence in scientific predictions of climate change.
The paper, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature Geoscience, explores the performance of a climate forecast based on data up to 1996 by comparing it with the actual temperatures observed since. The results show that scientists accurately predicted the warming experienced in the past decade, relative to the decade to 1996, to within a few hundredths of a degree.
But as always, the people are actually right about things don’t get to make an impact on public policy.
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If the numbers don’t add up, get new numbers
by digby
This is how they achieve their long term goals — under the radar, changing the way the numbers are calculated to prove an ideological point and change our understanding of how the world works. The story says the Senate endorsed “a model called ‘dynamic scoring,’ which assumes that tax cuts will pay for at least part of their cost by generating more economic activity. The measure by Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) called on CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation to include ‘macroeconomic feedback scoring’ in all future estimates of tax legislation.”
They passed it 51-49 with the help of Mark Begich of Alaska, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and Claire McCaskill of Missouri.
It’s not the kind of message amendment you see all the time.
Senators love to use budget resolutions as fodder for amendments that can be easily turned into 30-second attack ads. So what did Republicans hope to gain by forcing a vote on dynamic scoring?
In this case, the vote appears to have been aimed at an audience inside the Beltway — and at the conservative groups that support Republicans’ biggest economic ideas, from tax cuts to health care…
But there’s a larger battle that goes beyond dynamic scoring.
Conservatives’ ideas, including revenue-generating tax cuts and a more market-oriented health care system, can only work if tax policy changes people’s behavior — and that’s just not how CBO views the world.
If the numbers don’t add up, find new numbers:
“Virtually all economists agree that tax policy affects economic growth, which in turn affects the revenue impact of tax legislation, but the Senate currently deprives itself of information on the macroeconomic revenue impact of its tax policies,” Portman told POLITICO in an email. “Requiring that CBO release dynamic scores of tax legislation for information purposes can help lawmakers better judge the possible budget impact of tax legislation.”
This doesn’t have the force of law, but I’m going to guess that the wealthy, celebrity Villagers will be all on board. They love finding out that the average Real Americans they identify with in spite of their money and celebrity will be much better off if rich people have more money. It helps quiet their cognitive dissonance a bit.
As I mentioned in my earlier post today, there is some question as to why average people now support deficit reduction when just a couple of years ago they couldn’t care less. Well, I’ve been chastised severely by Very Serious People in the past for suggesting that it might just be because our president and the Republicans have made it the centerpiece of their economic plans for the past two years. Why wouldn’t they think this? After all, “everyone” agrees that deficit reduction is the single most important economic problem we face — the only issue is whether it must be done by cutting programs alone or with a “balanced approach” of cutting programs and “asking the rich to pay a little bit more.” Virtually nobody argues that we needn’t do deficit reduction at the moment at all (besides some scruffy bloggers and Nobel Prize winning economists, that is.) Normal people who don’t pay close attention to this stuff don’t imagine that both parties are willing to screw them so if they agree on something it must be because there’s no other choice.
Anyway, here we are:
Republican Party operatives have seized on a recent survey that they believe proves the GOP has a “winning message” when it comes to cutting government spending. Their widely touted internal poll was replicated in part by a new HuffPost/YouGov survey finding that most Americans see an economic benefit from unspecified cuts in federal spending — by a 55 to 18 percent margin.
Now, they are very explicitly against cutting SS and Medicare and other vital programs. But sure, they’ve come to believe that cutting the deficit will create jobs. It would never occur to normal human being that the entire political establishment of both parties would become obsessed with a policy that didn’t create jobs when we’ve been mired in high unemployment and an economy that’s dead in the water for more than four years. It’s just beyond their imagination that our leadership could be so wrong.
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From “the wealthy are different from you and me” files: more data
by digby
I’ve written frequently about this Demos study that shows the rich are different from you and me. Here’s more evidence from yet another study this time by Professors Benjamin I. Page and Larry M. Bartels:
Our Survey of Economically Successful Americans was an attempt to begin to shed light on both the viewpoints and the political reach of the very wealthy.
While we had no way to measure directly the political influence of those surveyed, they did report themselves to be highly active politically.
Two-thirds of the respondents had contributed money (averaging $4,633) in the most recent presidential election, and fully one-fifth of them “bundled” contributions from others. About half recently initiated contact with a U.S. senator or representative, and nearly half (44%) of those contacts concerned matters of relatively narrow economic self-interest rather than broader national concerns. This kind of access to elected officials suggests an outsized influence in Washington.
On policy, it wasn’t just their ranking of budget deficits as the biggest concern that put wealthy respondents out of step with other Americans. They were also much less likely to favor raising taxes on high-income people, instead advocating that entitlement programs like Social Security and healthcare be cut to balance the budget. Large majorities of ordinary Americans oppose any substantial cuts to those programs.
While the wealthy favored more government spending on infrastructure, scientific research and aid to education, they leaned toward cutting nearly everything else. Even with education, they opposed things that most Americans favor, including spending to ensure that all children have access to good-quality public schools, expanding government programs to ensure that everyone who wants to go to college can do so, and investing more in worker retraining and education.
The wealthy opposed — while most Americans favor — instituting a system of national health insurance, raising the minimum wage to above poverty levels, increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit and providing a “decent standard of living” for the unemployed. They were also against the federal government helping with or providing jobs for those who cannot find private employment.
Unlike most Americans, wealthy respondents opposed increased regulation of large corporations and raising the “cap” that exempts income above $113,700 from the FICA payroll tax. And unlike most Americans, they oppose relying heavily on corporate taxes to raise revenue and oppose taxing the rich to redistribute wealth.
They speculate that the differences in concerns might come from the fact that the wealthy act out of self-interest or that they might know better than the rest of us plebes what constitutes the “common good.” They point out that the constant drumbeat about deficits over the past couple of years may have educated the country to understand that cutting their own throats is actually good for them.
Let’s just say I think that the first possibility is the more likely since austerity is being shown as a destructive policy everywhere it’s been tried. Well, destructive for everyone but the wealthy who seem to be making out just fine.
These two rightly refuse to come to any conclusions without more empirical study:
A larger-scale national study is needed to pin down more precisely the views of wealthy Americans about public policy. We need to understand how they formed the preferences they have, and how wealthy people from different regions, industries, and social backgrounds differ in their political views and behavior. We also need to understand more about their political clout.
Our initial results suggest the wealthy have very different ideas than other Americans on a variety of policy issues. If their influence is far greater than that of ordinary people, what does that mean for American democracy?
I am not constrained by the need for more data since I am just an average person who relies on my own two eyes and ears — and years of experience studying human nature — and I feel quite confident that the wealthy exercises tremendous clout in our political culture, that they live in a different world from the rest of us and therefore many of them have views on politics which are skewed to their self-interest and that the policies we see coming out of Washington quite obviously reflect this. I can also see that this is not democracy in any recognizable form. But that’s just me.
H/t to Dave Johnson who has much more on this here.
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QOTD: Limbaugh
by digby
At Least Half The Political Feeds On Twitter Are “Political Hacks Paid By Democrats And Their Front Groups”
Yes, that’s so true. I’m living so high on the hog from my Soros money that it’s getting hard to tweet during my massages and black truffle small plate luncheons. Only so much time during the day …
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About that rising tide
by digby
Houston, we really, really, really have a problem:
Newly released data on corporate profitability for 2012 show the continuation of historic levels of profitability despite excessive unemployment and stagnant wages for most workers. Specifically, the share of capital income (such as profits and interest, which are hereafter referred to as ‘profits’) in the corporate sector increased to 25.6 percent in 2012, the highest in any year since 1950-1951 and far higher than the 19.9 percent share prevailing over 1969-2007, the five business cycles preceding the financial crisis.
This historic share of income going to profits reflects historically high returns on investments, meaning more profit per dollar of assets. A higher profits share could result from an economy becoming more capital-intensive, where more assets are associated with each worker in the production of goods and services. However, the economy has become less capital-intensive since 2007 and is now only modestly more capital-intensive than it was over the preceding four decades. Profitability used to be lower when there was high unemployment, but in this downturn we have already seen the share of income going to profit exceed the high point reached in the last recovery or at any time in the last five recoveries. We now have an economy built to assure high corporate profitability even when it’s operating far below capacity and when most families and workers are faring poorly. This is further evidence that there is a remarkable disconnect between the fortunes of business and those best-off (high-income households) and the vast majority.
So, basically, they’re just churning profits among themselves and their shareholders and nothing is going to workers or the larger economy. I guess that’s capitalism at it’s best, but it’s getting harder and harder to make the argument that a rising tide lifts all boats. It looks a lot more like this:
It’s not for lack of trying
by David Atkins
I want to mock this, but my heart just isn’t in it do so:
WASHINGTON – President Obama is taking Senate Republicans on another date night.
Following his successful dinner earlier this month with a dozen GOP senators, during which they discussed budgets, the president has dialed up his ideological adversaries to request more of the same.
Obama phoned Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia to arrange for a second dinner, and the senator is putting together a guest list of another dozen GOP senators, none of whom attended the first one.
The save-the-date is April 10, with a location to be determined, an aide to the senator confirmed.
“The president called Sen. Isakson in the last 10 days and asked if he would like to spearhead a second dinner to build on the first dinner,” said Joan Kirchner, deputy chief of staff for the two-term Georgia Republican. “Sen. Isakson said he would be happy to do so.”
The White House confirmed that the dinner, first reported Wednesday by Politico, is on.
We could go round the merry-go-round on this one again, but what’s the point? Senate Republicans aren’t about to give ground on anything resembling a reasonable budget that actually addresses the nation’s problems instead of slashing earned benefits to appease the nonexistent Bond Lords. So the President is either hopelessly naive in attempting to woo them or is actually aligned with their anti-entitlements position. There’s plenty of evidence, highlighted on this blog time and again, that the latter is the case.
But my well of cynicism has run dry this morning, and my outrage meter is depleted. Instead of peering into the intentions of the White House and the President, let’s address the media component.
The President is doing what the Sally Quinns and Peggy Noonans of the world have been asking of him. He’s wining and dining legislators, putting on the charm offensive, hashing out policy over dinner and drinks like a good little Villager. He’s playing the game they way the vacuous Village socialites insist that it be played.
As a heathen out in the sticks of Ventura County who would sooner pour a glass of champagne over Ted Cruz’ head than drink one with him, color me unimpressed with Village rituals. There are very real differences among Americans that ought to be reflected by their representatives. Differences that arise not from petty political issues, but serious social and economic ones. If a nice dinner and a chat over drinks can “resolve” these issues among the people’s representatives, then frankly the bons vivants aren’t doing their jobs. But if that’s what the Washington establishment wants, then there it is. He’s giving it to them.
If our supposedly progressive President is going to play the entitlement cutting Village socialite, then at the very least the rest of the empty socialites should give him credit for going along with their useless charade. We should be able to at least expect that silver lining from the Village press for all the time the President is wasting with these jokers. Or worse still, for all the time the President may be spending on negotiating Social Security cuts that the Noonans and Quinns couldn’t care less about.
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You won’t believe who won the annual Robert M. Ball Award for Outstanding Achievements in Social Insurance
by digby
Jayzuz, this is just sad. Michael Hiltzik reports:
Robert M. Ball is one of the most revered figures in Social Security history, a man whose devotion to safeguarding the program from ideological attacks and political cant over six decades made him the program’s “undisputed spiritual leader.”
Alice M. Rivlin is a distinguished budget expert at the Brookings Institution whose willingness to promote “entitlement reform” (read: cut benefits) as a deficit nostrum has given her a reputation as a danger to Social Security and Medicare.
So when Rivlin was named the ninth recipient of the annual Robert M. Ball Award for Outstanding Achievements in Social Insurance this week, Social Security advocates erupted in fury.
The critics complain that Rivlin’s grasp of social insurance principles is spotty at best. They argue that her tendency to treat Social Security and Medicare as mere expenditure line items to be kneaded into place in a broader deficit policy doesn’t meet the award’s goals; it’s supposed to recognize people who have demonstrated “innovation” or “effectiveness” in furthering public understanding of the programs.
They have a point. It doesn’t help that Rivlin, 82, has affiliated herself with groups funded by hedge fund billionaire Peter G. Peterson, whose hostility to Social Security and Medicare is legendary and who isn’t above using ginned-up panic over government deficits as a weapon.
The main target of the critics’ wrath is the National Academy of Social Insurance, which bestows the award and, as it happens, was founded by Ball. The organization created the Ball award in 2004 to honor Ball on his 90th birthday. (He died in 2008.) Some NASI members are talking about resigning in protest.
Rivlin herself admits that the Chained-CPI is a benefit cut and defends it as a good idea. And that’s because, to her, deficit reduction, is the holy grail and SS has a big old pot of money they can use to do it. This is an embarrassment.
This is yet another sign that the defenders of SS are getting ready to throw in the towel. And for what? Hiltzik found this great quote from Rivlin that explains what an absurd farce it is:
Why make such changes at all, decades before it becomes clear whether they’re even fiscally necessary? Rivlin told a congressional committee this month that enactment of such a package would “demonstrate that our democracy works to solve problems before they reach crisis proportions.”
If there’s a worse rationale for making policy changes to programs that have functioned well for as long as 70 years, good luck finding it.
Pathetic.
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