DOWNLOADS: (384)

PLAYS: (1018)

Embed

In the wake of Rick Santorum's recent three-peat, he's drawing more scrutiny, and the results are predictably awesome.

Check out this completely ahistorical take on the French Revolution.

SANTORUM: They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is the government that gives you right, what’s left are no unalienable rights, what’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a long way from that, but if we do and follow the path of President Obama and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road.

If a junior high student had written this gibberish in an essay on the French Revolution, he'd deserve an F.

Santorum has this exactly backwards, of course. It was under the French absolute monarchy and the Ancien Régime that one had no "unalienable rights" and had a government that could tell you "what you'll do and when you'll do it."

And the Revolutionaries, inspired by Enlightenment figures like Rousseau and the American Revolution, wrote and signed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which

...defines a single set of individual and collective rights for all men. Influenced by the doctrine of natural rights, these rights are held to be universal and valid in all times and places.

The first of these include:

1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.
2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.
3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.
4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.

Obviously, none of these rights existed under King Louis, and unfortunately for Santorum, the Catholic Church stood in direct opposition to the French Revolution and in support of the Ancien Régime.

Of course, this is all an aside to the fact that the notion President Robespierre Obama is about to unleash a Reign of Terror and start beheading clergy is well beyond insane.

State: Minnesota

Type of election: Caucus

How it works: Caucus begins at 7 p.m. It is non-binding and the delegates selected tonight will advance to district or county conventions, which in turn elect state delegates, which then choose national delegates. To participate "attendees must be eligible to vote in the next general election, live in the precinct, and be in general agreement with the principles of the political party." In the end, 40 delegates will be chosen.

Official election results: Minnesota Secretary of State

Republican candidates: Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum (all others have dropped out or are polling at less than 1 percent)

Democratic candidates: Barack Obama

Previous performance: In 2008, Romney won the caucus with 41 percent of the vote. Paul finished fourth with 16 percent. Obama won the Democratic caucus with 66 percent of the vote.

Newspapers: Duluth News-Tribune, Minn Post, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Star Tribune, full list

Television stations: Full list

Progressive blogs: Bluestem Prairie, Minnesota Independent, Minnesota Progressive Project, MNPublius, Truth Surfer

Latest polling: Polling for today's contests has been sparse:

DOWNLOADS: (78)

PLAYS: (715)

Embed

Somehow, that bumbling socialist usurper in the White House who has constantly apologized for America -- has the approval of half of the country.

Obama’s overall approval rating stands at 50 percent, the highest in a Post-ABC News poll since a brief run above 50 percent immediately after Osama bin Laden was killed in early May.

But what about all those Real Americans in Real America?

Overall, 55 percent of those who are closely following the campaign say they disapprove of what the GOP candidates have been saying.

But surely, a man who made his $250M outsourcing creating jobs will mop the floor with the Kenyan Marxist, right?

In a general-election test, Obama leads Romney 52 to 43 percent among all Americans; more narrowly, 51 to 45 percent, among registered voters. Among all adults, it’s Obama’s first time topping 50 percent in a head-to-head matchup with Romney since July; it’s his first time ever above that point among registered voters.

For those keeping score at home, the Black Jimmy Carter is currently outperforming the Great Leader who was supposed to usher in a permanent Republican majority. Yes, we've got a long way to go on unemployment -- but as the ad says, "pessimism never created a job."

How's that taste, GOP?

After four new murders of labor leaders in Columbia in January, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka called on U.S. President Barack Obama to delay the implementation of the Colombia Free Trade Agreement indefinitely. The agreement, which was passed last year, was delayed for years because of violence against labor leaders. More than 2900 Colombians involved in the labor movement have been killed in the last 25 years. Colombia is the deadliest country for union members in the world. Killings have continued unabated in 2012:

The letter states that through January, one union member was killed by Colombian troops, a second was shot to death along with his wife, a third worker was “brutally murdered” and a fourth union member employed by the National Industry of Sodas (Coca-Cola) was “murdered by gunfire.”

When the bill passed, it included a Labor Action Plan designed to deal with the violence, but Colombian labor leaders say that has failed:

We applaud the creation of the April 7, 2011, U.S.-Colombia Labor Action Plan that intends to take important steps in addressing endemic labor issues in Colombia. However, the Plan continues to face serious challenges in its implementation. Union leaders and labor activists continue to be assassinated, threatened, and intimidated, and the perpetrators enjoy almost complete impunity.

The reaction to January's jobs report shows how tragically our expectations have fallen, especially among some Democrats and their supporters. Their cheerleading isn't just bad policy or bad politics, although it is both of those things. It's also callous and insensitive to the misery of millions.

It's important to keep explaining what needs to be done to end that misery. To do otherwise is to serve, however unintentionally, an insidious agenda from the right that would lower our expectations until these tragic levels of unemployment are seen as the "new normal."

An increase in jobs is a good thing, of course, even if it's far from what's needed. Here's something else that was good about the report: Conservatives keep telling us that manufacturing jobs have moved offshore permanently, but 50,000 of them were created last month. Now we can put that argument to bed and can get to work creating more of them.

The Good, the Bad, and the Urgent

But millions of Americans - including minorities and the young - have already endured years of catastrophe, with years more to come if nothing is done. Why won't more people express support for their plight and explain what needs to be done to help them?

Here's the real story: Government intervention has created millions of jobs. But those interventions were too small, so we're still years away from fixing the problem. To claim anything else is to reinforce the delusions that created the problem in the first place.

If the president and his supporters make that case clearly and forcefully, the country will be able to choose between competing visions in November. It's more likely to choose an end to its misery. The pitch is pretty simple, really: The medicine's working, but let's not stop before the patient gets well. And despite this month's report, the patient is still very, very sick.

Help is needed urgently.

Continue reading »

enlarge

Credit: Jared Bernstein

Behind almost all of the disturbing issues raised by Mitt Romney's jaw-dropping tax returns stands one largely unchallenged conservative article of faith. Much lower tax rates for capital gains than income earned through labor, conservatives claim, spur investment, catalyze economic growth and fuel job creation. But if that Republican theology isn't true, then the United States has for decades done nothing more than deliver a massive windfall to the wealthiest Americans needing it least. Unfortunately, that's precisely what the data show. As it turns out, lower capital gains taxes increase income inequality - and not investment - in America.

As Paul Krugman recounted two weeks ago, the historically low capital gains rate enjoyed by Mitt Romney hasn't always been 15 percent. In the not-too-distant past, it reached 39.9 percent and with the Reagan tax reform of 1986 was briefly the same as the top tax rate on income. But successive presidents of both parties lowered the capital gains rate on investment income because they believed, the Washington Post explained, "it spurs more investment in the U.S. economy, benefiting all Americans."

But as Jared Bernstein demonstrated with the chart above, there's no evidence to support that claim. Bernstein found that the business cycle, not acts of Congress, drive investment in the U.S.

Hard to see anything in the picture supporting the view that either the level or changes in cap gains taxes play a determinant role in investment decisions.

Remember, the ostensible reason for the favoritism in tax treatment here is to incentivize more investment and faster productivity growth. But that's not in the data and the reason it's not in the data is because investors aren't nearly as elastic to cap gains rates as their lobbyists say they are (more precisely, they'll carefully time their realizations to maximize their gains around rate changes, but that's not real economic activity-that's tax planning).

Reviewing other analyses, Brad Plummer of the Washington Post concurred with that assessment that low capital gains taxes don't necessarily jump-start investment in the economy:

The top tax rate on investment income has bounced up and down over the past 80 years—from as high as 39.9 percent in 1977 to just 15 percent today—yet investment just appears to grow with the cycle, seemingly unaffected...

Meanwhile, Troy Kravitz and Len Burman of the Urban Institute have shown that, over the past 50 years, there's no correlation between the top capital gains tax rate and U.S. economic growth—even if you allow for a lag of up to five years.

Billionaire Warren Buffett, the inspiration for the "Buffett Rule" advocated by President Obama and his Democratic allies, couldn't agree more. As he told The New York Times last year:

"I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone -- not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77—shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off."

But if lower capital gains tax rates have had little impact on investment, they have had an outsized impact on income inequality in the United States.

Continue reading »

Last week, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus compared President Obama to the Italian cruise ship captain who is being held on possible manslaughter charges for the death of 17 people. Priebus then doubled down on his comparison on Faux News.

And Tuesday on Morning Joe, Jack Kingston (W-GA) lamely claimed that Priebus was an "independent contractor" -- and defended his remarks.

BRZEZINSKI: That was disgusting. I'm sorry -- take it back. You all screwed up in a big way. You sat in a room and said, "Oh, this would be so cool to say. Ha, ha, ha." You slapped your knees and then you went out on the air and you spit that you, you vomited that out, and you made a fool of yourself. Does anyone want to add anything?

KINGSTON: I don't know that you can say that was anything but an independent contractor using his own words and his own writing.

Just how exactly is the Chairman of the RNC an "independent contractor"?

Then Kingston defended Priebus.

KINGSTON: There is name-calling there, and I don't appreciate the name-calling anymore than you do. However, there is also a point under it. The president does, in the State of the Union address, kind of revert back to kind of a lot of small ball items and isn't really handling the big issues of the day. Right now on the payroll tax cut, which isn't a huge deal, seems to be his biggest focus...

So, because the GOP didn't like Obama's State of the Union address, he's just like an incompetent, cowardly Italian cruise ship captain who is being held on possible charges for manslaughter? That has to be the lamest defense of a character assassination I've ever seen.

But that's Republicans for you. They don't back down, and they don't apologize -- and the media lets them get away with it. It's difficult to imagine the non-stop wingnut ragegasm that would've erupted if Howard Dean had said something like this about George W. Bush in 2004.

Do you remember the book by Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People? Neither does Rep. Allen West.

West called out not just President Obama, but Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and fellow Floridian Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

“Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, and take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America.”

He pledged that he will do everything in his power to stop President Obama from “destroy[ing]” the country.

I've got nothing to say to this hyperbolic absurdity except to note that it is only those least-versed in American history who can make such un-American statements. That he feels comfortable saying such things without fear of the House leadership condemning him (can you imagine the outrage if some Democrat said that about George W. Bush during his term? Quelle horreur!) shows how far down the dialogue has degenerated in the Republican Party. Nonetheless, West is becoming such an embarrassment to the Republican establishment that they are taking pains to redistrict West out of existence.

The teahadists eat that sort of thing up with a spoon, naturally. But the Florida GOP, which has a supermajority in the state legislature and is headed up by GOP Governor Rick “Voldemort” Scott, has undertaken a project to redraw the state’s districts—after being compelled to do so by votes on a ballot initiative in 2010. And it looks like Mr. West might be headed south.

Who would rob the nation of such a fiery demagogue? Wingnuts can’t pin this one on the Dems, who are pretty much powerless in Florida. But Colonel Mustard has a clue:

One of the rising stars of the Tea Party is about to be sacrificed by the Republican establishment in Florida, led by someone spinning for Mitt Romney.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

It was Will Weatherford in the Conservatory with a wrench! Well, the truth is, West was in some trouble with voters anyway. I don’t live in his district, but from what I understand, voting in a certified loon like West was something of an aberration for that area, and it’s possible they find West’s constant grandstanding a bit embarrassing.

DOWNLOADS: (126)

PLAYS: (946)

Embed

Is it unreasonable to expect the press, especially respected members of the press like CBS News' Bob Schieffer, to hold guests to account when they make ridiculous, incendiary, defamatory statements about the President of the United States? Evidently it's only unreasonable when Democrats do it about Republicans, but it seems to be perfectly all right for RNC Chair Reince Priebus to liken the President to the captain of the cruise ship that sank in Italy last week. Here's what he said:

SCHIEFFER: But Donald Trump -- he's, kind of, worried about it. You heard what he just said. He said, you know, he thinks they're cannibalizing each other. Do you think that's going to all come out OK?

PRIEBUS: Now, the history shows, Bob, that -- that tough primaries and a little bit of drama are a good thing for the challenging party. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- you know, they killed each other through June, and guess what? He won pretty easily. I think the evidence is there.

I think it's good for America. And in the end, in a few months, this is all going to be ancient history and we're going to talk about our own little Captain Schettino, which is President Obama, who is abandoning the ship here in the United States and is more interested in campaigning than doing his job as president.

SCHIEFFER: What -- what did you just say? What did you call President Obama?

PRIEBUS: I called him Captain Schettino, you know, the captain that fled the ship in Italy. That's our own president, who is fleeing the American people and not doing his job and running around the country and campaigning.

(LAUGHTER)

You made me think of it with all the ships behind you, Bob.

Really? See, if I were to consider a metaphor like captains of ships and the like, I'd think of Captain Chesley Sullenberger (Sully), who managed to save the crew and passengers of his plane by landing it in the Hudson River, saving all 155 people aboard the aircraft, instead of a cavalier, careless idiot like Captain Schettino, who had no business steering a ship so close to shallow water, failed to turn it in time, ran it into a rock and then leapt off the ship while passengers died in their life vests waiting to be evacuated.

Think about those metaphors. Who steered too close to the shore? George W. Bush and his merry band of regulators who sat around watching porn instead of paying attention to banks. Who failed to turn soon enough? Congress, perhaps, where Republicans routinely block each and every initiative to rescue this country from financial ruin? Who jumped into the life boats, leaving others to clean up and try and rescue as many as they could?

And yet, Bob Scheiffer's answer to Priebus?

SCHIEFFER: I -- I see what you're saying.

This is why we can't have nice things.

DOWNLOADS: (385)

PLAYS: (8239)

Embed

Martin Bashir may be the most underrated show host on cable television. His show is consistently smart, loaded with facts and good discussion without the incessant screaming and fireworks of other cable news shows. His interview of Rep. Joe Walsh was masterful and yet, polite. Which is why when Bashir closes his Thursday show with a three-minute comment where he's clearly a bit angry, it gets my attention.

Mr. Bashir is frustrated with the constant drumbeat from Republicans about President Obama allegedly turning the US government into a "European-style government" and so he delivers an excellent argument for why they are wrong, and why the ones who are trying to point the United States in the direction of European-style governance are...Republicans.

Bashir targets the Republican fetish for austerity and spending cuts as evidence that they, not Democrats, are trying to transform the United States. At the end, he offers the results of Republican-style austerity measures in Europe, and what they haven't accomplished.

Well done, Mr. Bashir.

Transcript below the fold.

Continue reading »