Skip to content

Month: October 2016

Deficit talk gives the Village the warm and fuzzies

Deficit talk gives the Village the warm and fuzzies

by digby



Ian Millhiser at Think Progress addresses one of the more irritating aspects of last night’s debate: what was going on with those blast-from-the-past economic questions?

Quijano did not ask either candidate about their plans to foster job growth. She did not broach the subject of trade. Or ask about home ownership. Or wages. Or job training. Or poverty.

Instead, she asked just two questions about economic policy, and she explicitly attributed both of them to the “nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.” The first asked if the two vice presidential candidates are “concerned that adding more to the debt could be disastrous for the country.” The second warned of a grim future, “when the Social Security Trust Funds run out of money.”

So who is the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget? They are probably the leading advocacy group promoting the idea that federal deficits are out of control and shrinking them should be a top priority. Their board members include both Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, co-chairs of a government commission that tried and failed to advance various proposals supported by deficit hawks in 2010. Pete Peterson, a billionaire who is probably the nation’s leading funder of anti-deficit advocacy, is also a board member.

To be sure, there are many people — especially in elite media circles — who share the Committee’s view that deficits are a pressing issue. But Quijano’s decision to focus on this to the exclusion of all other economic policy questions is odd. It is especially odd because the case for aggressive deficit reduction is weaker today than it has been in years.

In 2009, when President Obama took office, America’s deficit was 9.8 percent of our gross domestic product. Compared to historic levels, that is very high — although high deficits are normal during a recession. When the economy is weak, tax revenue declines at the very same time that more Americans are taking advantage of safety net programs. And that means more money going out of the federal treasury and less money coming in.

Seven years later, however, the deficit was only a quarter of the size it was when Obama first moved into the White House. In 2015, the deficit was only 2.5 percent of GDP. It’s now lower than it was at any point during the entirely of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

Quijano, in other words, fixated on the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s pet issue, despite the fact that our current leadership has done an extraordinary job of reducing the deficit.

I noticed on twitter that many of the Villagers were soothed by the smooth familiar cadences of Pence’s standard wingnut rhetoric on this subject. Daddy’s home we can all relax.  

They undoubtedly all yearn for the days when they could spend their days telling working and middle class Americans they have to take their medicine and sacrifice for the good of the bond-holders… er, the country.

.

Conservatives have a new dreamboat (and it isn’t Donald Trump)

The conservative movement finds their new dreamboat



by digby


From Richard Viguerie:

Is It Too Late To Replace Donald Trump With Mike Pence? 

Richard A Viguerie, CHQ Chairman | 10/5/16 

In the aftermath of last night’s vice presidential debate, I ask CHQ readers the question that was undoubtedly on the minds of all of the Republicans and conservatives who watched or listened to Mike Pence’s stellar performance: Is it too late to replace Donald Trump with Mike Pence?  

Tim Kaine talked, acted, sounded like a “I know more than you, trust me” Washington politician.  

Mike Pence laid claim to be the clear and obvious heir to Ronald Reagan with nobody in second place.  

Cancel the next two Presidential debates and rerun the Vice Presidential debate in place of the Presidential debate and the Republicans win in a walk.  

The split screen showed a rude and smirking Tim Kaine. With the sound on or off Tim Kaine was a big loser.  

Last night Mike Pence laid claim to be the leader of the conservative cause for years to come.

He sure showed up Trump didn’t he?

.

A lot of white people don’t like him either

A lot of white people don’t like him either

by digby

Harry Enten at 538 reports:

Donald Trump’s strategy in this campaign has been fairly clear from the beginning: Drive up Republican support among white voters in order to compensate for the GOP’s shrinking share among the growing nonwhite portion of the electorate. And Trump has succeeded in overperforming among a certain slice of white voters, those without a college degree. But overall, the strategy isn’t working. Trump has a smaller lead among white voters than Mitt Romney did in 2012, and Trump’s margin seems to be falling from where it was when the general election began.

Four years ago, Romney beat President Obama among white voters by 17 percentage points, according to pre-election polls. That was the largest winning margin among white voters for any losing presidential candidate since at least 1948. Of course, even if Trump did just as well as Romney did, it would help him less, given that the 2016 electorate will probably be more diverse that 2012’s. And to win — even if the electorate remained as white as it was four years ago — Trump would need a margin of 22 percentage points or more among white voters.

But Trump isn’t even doing as well as Romney. Trump is winning white voters by just 13 percentage points, according to an average of the last five live-interviewer national surveys. He doesn’t reach the magic 22 percentage point margin in a single one of these polls.

Luckily for the fate of the world there are just enough white people (mostly moderate GOP women) who haven’t completely lost their minds and will do the right thing to keep an authoritarian white nationalist from leading the most powerful country on earth. Let’s hope it’s enough.

.

Did Clinton close Trump’s loophole?

Did Clinton close Trump’s loophole?

by digby

Trump probably shouldn’t have brought this up:

At a rally Tuesday in Arizona, Donald Trump sought to blame Hillary Clinton for his own low tax bills. He asked:

“After years of failure, she complains about how I’ve used tax laws of this country to my benefit. Then I ask a simple question: Why didn’t she ever try to change those laws so I couldn’t use them?”

Well, maybe Clinton didn’t just try to change laws Trump used, but actually got them changed, when she was in the Senate in 2002.

According to a Tuesday column by Lee Sheppard in the tax industry publication Tax Notes, Trump may have benefited greatly in the 1990s from a tax loophole related to forgiven debts — a loophole that would have allowed him to deduct business losses on his personal income tax return, even if those losses were actually borne by banks that loaned Trump money and never got it back.

People often use the term “loophole” to refer to tax deductions they don’t like, but this one was a loophole in the true sense of the word: a tax break created by legislative accident.

This loophole was the subject of a 2001 Supreme Court case, Gitlitz v. Commissioner, in which the IRS argued the relevant tax law could not have possibly meant what it appeared to say, which was that business owners could in some cases deduct losses they had not actually borne.

After the IRS lost that case, the loophole was closed by the Job Creation and Worker Assistance Act of 2002, a bill that then-Sen. Hillary Clinton voted for and President George W. Bush signed. But that law only stopped taxpayers from using the loophole going forward; they were still allowed to benefit from tax losses they had booked through it in prior years, such as 1995.

Read on for more detail… 

One of Trump’s more annoying lines is this one saying Clinton didn’t solve all the world’s problems during her years in public service so she’s a failure which, considering his own massive failures, is really rich. Being an authoritarian by nature, he sees leadership as ruling by edict.  The fact that his party has spent decades trying to obstruct all progress in order to make it possible for guys like Trump to keep every last penny for themselves and their worthless heirs, isn’t really salient to him because he thinks he can “make deals” or force “respect” and always get his way.

If this speculation is true, Clinton did help pass a law designed to stop greedheads like Trump, who may have taken the largest NOL in the country in 1995, from cheating the taxpayers by taking advantage of an accidental loophole to save his dying company from extinction. It figures that would be how he did it.

.

Peter Panics

Peter Panics

by digby

From Crooks and Liars: they just can’t help revealing their male panic

So the morning after on Fox, Tucker Carlson goes on a rant against gender-neutral language. At the VP debate, Senator Tim Kaine proclaimed himself as “Hillary Clinton’s right-hand person,’ and Tucker is sure that’s proof that the Democrats want to force America to throw away all gender identities and make him assume the role of a neutered man.

Kaine doesn’t have to work hard to distinguish the Democratic ticket from the misogynist dynamic GOP duo. From the VP Debate:

KAINE: My primary role is to be Hillary Clinton’s right hand person and strong supporter as she puts together the most historic administration possible and I relish that role, I’m so proud of her.

Oh boy, that upset the mansplainers at Fox and Friends today. Why can’t he say man? Oh, perhaps because there are many women who are Clinton’s trusted assistants as well and that’s the terminology used to describe everyone?

Why is that offensive? Political correctness, sensitivity and a change from the old male-chauvinism glory days makes them feel uncomfortable and icky!

DOOCY He’s her ‘right-hand person.’ (smirks)

CARLSON: Why do men have to neuter themselves to fit with Progressive orthodoxy? I mean, Tim Kaine is a man. Why is it embarrassing to say that? He didn’t choose to be a man he was born that way. That’s the biological reality that the rest of us are busy denying But it doesn’t make it any less true.

Paranoid much Tucker? Who’s telling you to deny your own masculinity? (Nevermind.)

Tucker went on:

CARLSON: Why does he have to pretend otherwise? You wonder why men aren’t voting for Hillary? And they’re not? Maybe this is why.

Tucker agreed that he likes being a man. Then the other two couch tumors clamored in.

KILMEADE: You’re proud to be a man, Steve, right?

DOOCY: Yeah, it’s great.

Yeah, I’m sure it is.

The Reagan Pence ticket

The Reagan Pence ticket

by digby

I wrote about the debate for Salon of course:

Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate was a reminder of what this election would have been like had we been in the time when only white, male career politicians ran for president. You know, the good old days when America was great — before we decided to nominate “demographically symbolic” candidates and celebrity con artists. Surprisingly, it was fairly interesting.

I must confess that I had not been a close follower of Sen. Tim Kaine’s career. He’s a Virginia politician, so he’s always had the eye of the political press. But for some reason I’ve never taken the sort of interest in him as have others who write about politics. It’s no secret that I had hoped Clinton would take a big risk and name the lefty firebrand Elizabeth Warren as her running mate, but Kaine seems like a smart, congenial fellow and I’ve been impressed with his performance on the campaign trail. I was also pleased to see that he’s been more progressive than is generally acknowledged. My assumption going into last night’s debate was that he would be knowledgeable and competent, and pin down Pence on his running mate’s many flaws.

By contrast, I closely followed Mike Pence’s career for years and he’s got plenty of flaws of his own. Indeed, for as much as he seems like a milquetoast next to Trump, he’s just as “out there” in his own way. The fact that GOP leaders like Paul Ryan think of him as a mainstream figure says everything about how the Republican Party ended up with Donald Trump at the top of the ticket.

As a leader of the Republican Party’s religious and a congressman who was anything but camera shy, Pence was seen as a comer since he first went to Washington in 2000. He was one of those ultra-conservative politicians who came out of the right-wing talk radio world and had a fluency in conservative patois that made him very effective in the era of Fox News. His patented furrowed brow gives him a permanently pained expression that makes it seems as if he takes his hardcore far-right philosophy more in sorrow than in anger. He’s basically Ted Cruz without the intellect.

Both Kaine and Pence are pro-life Catholics, but Kaine believes in a woman’s right to choose, while Pence is so extreme that as Governor of Indiana he signed the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the country which banned abortion even in the case of severe disability and required that fetal tissue be buried or cremated. (A federal judge blocked the law from taking effect in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt.) He crusaded to shut down Planned Parenthood and succeeded in closing dozens of clinics in Indiana.

His stand on LGBT rights was so extreme that he actually went too far, which is really saying something since Indiana is one of the most conservative states in the union. It’s home to the 20th century revival of the Ku Klux Klan (which may explain his reluctance to say whether he believes former Imperial Wizard David Duke is aptly described as “deplorable.”) He’s always been extremely hostile to gay rights, going back to his first run for Congress when he advocated for “gay conversion therapy” in lieu of funding for HIV/AIDS, which he characterized as being spent by organizations that “celebrate and encourage the types of behaviors that facilitate the spreading of the HIV virus.”

More recently, he supported a bill allowing discrimination against the LGBT community on the basis of “religious liberty,” one of Pence’s personal hobby horses and the main social conservative legal strategy of the moment. Under tremendous pressure from people all over the country and his own constituents, he retreated.

From his denial of climate change to his belief in creationism, Pence is the most hard-right radical to ever appear on a national ticket. Just this week a federal court had to block his atrocious bill barring Syrian refugees from his state because his reasoning that Syrians scare him is discriminatory. If he were still in Congress, he’d be running the obstructionist Freedom Caucus with the likes of Ohio’s Jim Jordan and Iowa’s Steve King.

Mike Pence is the living embodiment of the modern conservative movement in all its glory, and last night he took the opportunity to place himself at the head of the pack for the 2020 presidential race. And he did it at the expense of the man at the top of the ticket. He might as well have been running with the ghost of Ronald Reagan for as often as he quoted him. He certainly didn’t waste any of his time quoting Donald Trump.

On the other side, Tim Kaine threw himself into the clearly uncomfortable role of attack dog for the benefit of Hillary Clinton by interrupting and bringing up Trump’s odious comments and positions over and over again particularly on the issues of Trump’s insults. And he hit him repeatedly on Vladimir Putin, Trump’s deportation plan and the missing tax returns. But for inexplicable reasons, Pence repeatedly denied that Trump had said what he clearly has said and he even denied what he himself had clearly said. Even weirder, Pence also claimed that Clinton and Kaine are running an “insult-driven campaign” which would make all but the most die-hard supporters laugh out loud.

Hillary Clinton herself may have had the best response to that during the debate:

Fact-checkers are still toiling to sort it all out. But you can’t really blame Pence. Trump is indefensible and parroting “I know you are but what am I” may be the only thing you can do in that situation.

The early reviews had Pence winning the debate on style with Kaine getting in the hits he needed to provide fodder for his own campaign over the next few days.

He was, of course, actually baiting Trump not Pence and according to the New York Times’ John Harwood, Trump was not amused that Pence advanced his own agenda and didn’t defend Trump:

And this may be the bigger problem:

Can he find the discipline to keep his ego in check over the next few days? I wouldn’t bet money on it.

He’s not going to like this:

Quote Donald Trump, insult Donald Trump by @BloggersRUs

Quote Donald Trump, insult Donald Trump
by Tom Sullivan

As the saying goes, that was 90 minutes of your life you’ll never get back. “Borderline unwatchable,” wrote Chris Cillizza of the vice presidential debate:

There was so much crosstalk and so little actual question answering that it felt like watching two kids throw mashed potatoes at one another. (Actually, watching two kids throw mashe dpotoatoes at one another would have been a heck of a lot more entertaining.)

Last night, the only time Sen. Tim Kaine and Gov. Mike Pence were not talking past each other was when they were talking over each other. The debate was remarkable mostly for how disjointed the questioning was and for Pence and Kaine interrupting each other largely unchecked by moderator Elaine Quijano. Neither the candidates nor the moderator looked good.

Except Pence came out looking better in debate than Donald Trump. He kept his cool. “Calm, smooth, and steady,” showing his chops from a stint in conservative talk radio. Pence steadily denied over and over things Donald Trump said on camera and accused Kaine of an “avalanche of insults.” Jamelle Bouie at Slate writes:

These insults? These insults were quotes. Kaine was quoting Donald Trump, telling viewers that Trump had called Mexicans “rapists and criminals” (true); that he had called women “slobs, pigs, dogs, and disgusting” (true); and that he had attacked an Indiana-born federal judge “and said he was unqualified to hear a federal lawsuit because his parents were Mexican” (also true).

Despite the obvious truth of everything on display, Pence’s response was to call these quotes—taken almost verbatim from Trump—a kind of “insult” against the Republican ticket. And so it continued for the next 90 minutes.

Yet even as Pence complained of an “insult driven” campaign from the Democrats, Trump was undermining him on Twitter:

Clinton, watching, replied:

You’d have thought Donald Trump would have relished being the center of any attention. Except whenever Pence had a chance to defend him, Pence backed away, contradicting his boss on support for Vladimir Putin, nuclear proliferation and more.

For his part, Kaine seemed wedged into a suit that didn’t fit. He had practiced his lines well, but delivered them hurriedly so as to get them out before he got cut off. His constant interruptions likely did not play well with viewers and undermined his image as genuine. Pence had him on poise, but poise in denying the truth. Kaine promoted Clinton’s record, while Pence denied Trump’s.

Nothing was resolved last night: no fatal blows landed, no polls moved. USA Today encapsulated the problem:

In a conversation about the economy, Kaine attempted to make the case that the economy has been recovering under President Obama — 15 million jobs created, Kaine said, and median income is rising. Pence’s reply was fascinating: “Senator, you can roll out the numbers and the sunny side, but I got to tell you, people in Scranton know different. People in Fort Wayne, Ind., know different. I mean, this economy is struggling.” This is the core distinction of these campaigns: the Democrats’ half-full take versus the Republicans’ half-empty view of America, distilled in a few lines of a vice presidential debate.

As unfavorable news continues to trickle out about Trump’s tax avoidance and trickle-down economic policies, it seems more likely Donald Trump is really running for the chance to empty America’s other half.

Women in authoritah

Women in authoritah

by digby

This is what my google image search for college professor returned

I hate to say it but my experience in politics in recent years has made this data very unsurprising to me:

Students tend to think their male professors are “geniuses,” while their female professors are “bossy,” a new interactive chart reveals. Using data from RateMyProfessors.com, a popular forum for griping or raving about classes, Benjamin Schmidt, a Northeastern University professor, was able to clearly map out students’ biases.

The chart breaks down reviews to sort which words are affiliated with each gender and discipline. According to The Upshot, “Men are more likely to be described as a star, knowledgeable, awesome or the best professor. Women are more likely to be described as bossy, disorganized, helpful, annoying or as playing favorites. Nice or rude are also more often used to describe women than men.”

Students are much more likely to call their male professors “geniuses.” Female professors, meanwhile, are far more likely to be called “feisty,” especially if they teach humanities classes.

The tool helps illustrate student biases that are only beginning to come to light. A December 2014 study found that students consistently rated teachers higher if they thought they were male.

Gendered language is one way those biases manifest themselves, and can do significant damage to women’s professional and personal lives. A recent analysis of performance reviews in the tech industry found that women were far more likely to receive criticism from their supervisors. The word “abrasive” was used many times to describe female employees, but never appeared in a review for any of the men.

“Abrasive” is also more likely to be used to describe a female professor on RateMyProfessor.

It goes on in that vein. I know people want to think this isn’t true but it is. And it permeates our society and has permeated this election in ways that are just plain depressing since it also exists among people of good faith.

.

The fading musical diversity of American English

The fading musical diversity of American English

by digby

I don’t know what it means,  but we might guess that it’s the difference between older and younger and people who were born and raised there vs transplants from elsewhere. And we don’t know how they defined “southern accent.” African Americans often have a distinct accent that is certainly derived from the south but which has traveled to all parts of the country with their own migration.

I have noticed that there are fewer strong regional accents generally then when I was growing up. I think it’s kind of a shame. It was nice having the diversity of all the different sounds from different parts of the ocuntry.Even within regions it used to be very different — southern accents are very diverse as are those in the midwest and northeast. More people sound the same now and it’s not nearly as musical and interesting as it used to be.

.