OLD MAN RAMBLES TOWARDS EMPTY CHAIR

DEAR GOD THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED:

Via twitter, some solid photoshopping here:

Important Updates:

JN sends me an updated version of the image:

And For meme purposes, Bagnewsnotes has a good screengrab:

The Post Truth Era Has Fully Arrived

Dave Roberts of Grist and Chris Hayes have both written about this phenomenon, but I think Paul Ryan's speech last night was a good coming out party for openly lying about easily disprovable things on a national stage. Ryan Grim:

Ryan then noted that Obama, while campaigning for president, promised that a GM plant in Wisconsin would not shut down. "That plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight," Ryan said.

Except Obama didn't promise that. And the plant closed in December 2008 -- while George W. Bush was president.

It was just one of several striking and demonstrably misleading elements of Ryan's much-anticipated acceptance speech. And it comes just days after Romney pollster Neil Newhouse warned, defending the campaign's demonstrably false ads claiming Obama removed work requirements from welfare, "We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers."

Ryan, for his part, slammed the president for not supporting a deficit commission report without mentioning that he himself had voted against it, helping to kill it.

He also made a cornerstone of his argument the claim that Obama "funneled" $716 billion out of Medicare to pay for Obamacare. But he didn't mention that his own budget plan relies on those very same savings.

Ryan also put responsibility for Standard & Poor's downgrade of U.S. government debt at Obama's doorstep. But he didn't mention that S&P itself, in explaining its downgrade, referred to the debt ceiling standoff. That process of raising the debt ceiling was only politicized in the last Congress, driven by House Republicans, led in the charge by Paul Ryan.

These things aren't that shocking anymore, but it's kind of incredible that you would say so many obviously false things in a speech this widely seen. But then again, if he won't become a joke for lying constantly about this stuff, what's the downside?

These Teacherless Teacher's Unions Will Kill Us All!

Chris Christie last night:

"They believe in teacher's unions, we believe in teachers"

Someone tell Chris Christie that teacher's unions are DEMOCRATIC ORGANIZATIONS MADE UP ENTIRELY OF TEACHERS.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!

Listen, this is MORNING JOE. Take Your Interesting Back and Forth Elsewhere!

So this isn't something I say very often... but well done Chris Matthews.



Also, in addition to being right, I absolutely loved how awkward he made the rest of the panel. Tom Brokaw and Joe Scarborough were clearly upset that a guest was actually forced to face criticism and debate on a cable news bullshitting fest at the ultimate bullshitting event of them all, a political convention! How dare he!

Train of Thought Lounge: David Bowie

We Have Reached Peak Wingnut

I don't want to get all hyperbolic here, but this might be the most unintentionally funny column ever. You can tell the was seething that most people don't share his homoerotic daddy issues filled view of Mitt Romney said "screw what the PC liberal elites say, I'm gonna tell it like it is!" And this is what followed. And it is incredible.

And because everyone who I've sent this to has asked: no, this is not satire. This is the actual COVER article for the National Review this month:

What do women want? The conventional biological wisdom is that men select mates for fertility, while women select for status — thus the commonness of younger women’s pairing with well-established older men but the rarity of the converse. The Demi Moore–Ashton Kutcher model is an exception — the only 40-year-old woman Jack Nicholson has ever seen naked is Kathy Bates in that horrific hot-tub scene. Age is cruel to women, and subordination is cruel to men. Ellen Kullman is a very pretty woman, but at 56 years of age she probably would not turn a lot of heads in a college bar, and the fact that she is the chairman and CEO of Dupont isn’t going to change that.

It’s a good thing Mitt Romney doesn’t hang out in college bars.

You want off-the-charts status? Check out the curriculum vitae of one Willard M. Romney: $200 million in the bank (and a hell of a lot more if he didn’t give so much away), apex alpha executive, CEO, chairman of the board, governor, bishop, boss of everything he’s ever touched. Son of the same, father of more. It is a curious scientific fact (explained in evolutionary biology by the Trivers-Willard hypothesis — Willard, notice) that high-status animals tend to have more male offspring than female offspring, which holds true across many species, from red deer to mink to Homo sap. The offspring of rich families are statistically biased in favor of sons — the children of the general population are 51 percent male and 49 percent female, but the children of the Forbes billionaire list are 60 percent male. Have a gander at that Romney family picture: five sons, zero daughters. Romney has 18 grandchildren, and they exceed a 2:1 ratio of grandsons to granddaughters (13:5). When they go to church at their summer-vacation home, the Romney clan makes up a third of the congregation. He is basically a tribal chieftain.

Professor Obama? Two daughters. May as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.

That's pretty good. Can it get better? (Yes it can)

From an evolutionary point of view, Mitt Romney should get 100 percent of the female vote. All of it. He should get Michelle Obama’s vote. You can insert your own Mormon polygamy joke here, but the ladies do tend to flock to successful executives and entrepreneurs. Saleh al-Rajhi, billionaire banker, left behind 61 children when he cashed out last year. We don’t do harems here, of course, but Romney is exactly the kind of guy who in another time and place would have the option of maintaining one. He’s a boss. Given that we are no longer roaming the veldt for the most part, money is a reasonable stand-in for social status. Romney’s net worth is more than that of the last eight U.S. presidents combined. He set up a trust for his grandkids and kicked in about seven times Barack Obama’s net worth, which at $11.8 million is not inconsiderable but probably less than Romney’s tax bill in a good year. If he hadn’t given away so much money to his church, charities, and grandkids, Mitt Romney would have more money than Jay-Z.

You know what this needs? More white guy talking about rap culture! What, you're saying there's an entire paragraph of that, not just a Jay Z reference? Buckle up...

Some Occupy Wall Street types, believing it to be the height of wit, have begun to spell Romney’s name “Rmoney.” But Romney can do better than that — put it in all caps: R-MONEY. Jay-Z can keep his puny little lowercase letters and the Maybach: R-MONEY doesn’t own a flashy car with rims, R-MONEY does billion-dollar deals with Keystone Automotive and Delphi. You want to make it rain? R-MONEY is going to make it storm, like biblical. Rappers boast about their fat stacks: R-MONEY’s fat stacks live in a beachfront house of their own in the Hamptons, and the bricks in that house are made from tightly bound hundred-dollar bills. You have a ton of money? R-MONEY has 200 metric tons of money if he decides to keep it in cash.

There really aren't words for that paragraph. And for the sake of highlights and time, let's ahead to the last page:

George Romney made his money by being a boss — a leader. Mitt Romney has been the same thing. When things went wrong, people put Romney in charge of them — at Bain, at the Olympics, at a hundred companies he helped turn around or restructure. Bain is a financial firm, but Romney wasn’t some Wall Street bank-monkey with a pitch book. He was the guy who fired you. He was a boss, like his dad, and like his sons probably will be. Barack Obama was never in charge of anything of any significance until the delicate geniuses who make up the electorate of this fine republic handed him the keys to the Treasury and the nuclear football because we were tired of Frenchmen sneering at us when we went on vacation. Obama made his money in part through political connections — no, I don’t think Michelle Obama was worth nearly 400 grand a year — and by authoring two celebrity memoirs, his sole innovation in life having been to write the memoir first and become a celebrity second. Can you imagine Barack Obama trying to pull off a hostile takeover without Rahm Emanuel holding his diapers up for him? Impossible.

MITT ROMNEY IS A BOSS WHOSE HUGE PENIS BIRTHED FUTURE BOSSES. Can Obama say the same? I think not. He's wearing diapers held by a fertile white man, or something.

Reassuring arch-patriarch — maybe one with enough sons and grandsons to form a pillaging band of marauders? Hillary Rodham Clinton told us that it takes a village, and Mitt Romney showed us how to populate a village with thriving offspring.

Have I written enough about Mitt Romney and his fertile dong? I haven't? Ok, here's more:

Newsweek, which as of this writing is still in business, recently ran a cover photo of Romney with the headline: “The Wimp Factor: Is He Just Too Insecure to Be President?” Look at his fat stacks. Look at that mess of sons and grandchildren. Look at a picture of Ann Romney on her wedding day and that cocky smirk on his face. What exactly has Mitt Romney got to be insecure about? That he’s not as prodigious a patriarch as Ramses II or as rich as >Lakshmi Mittal? I bet he sleeps at night and never worries about that. He has done everything right in life, and he should own it. And by own it, I mean put it on the black card and stow it in the G6 — or at least in first class, for Pete’s sake.

And that, is how he ends the article.

3000 words of pure wingnut id. We can only be thankful that the national review has fired enough of it's normal white supremacist writing stable that this made it into their publication. As their cover story.

Like a Boss

By J.N.

What do women want? The conventional biological wisdom is that men select mates for fertility, while women select for status — thus the commonness of younger women’s pairing with well-established older men but the rarity of the converse. The Demi Moore–Ashton Kutcher model is an exception — the only 40-year-old woman Jack Nicholson has ever seen naked is Kathy Bates in that horrific hot-tub scene. Age is cruel to women, and subordination is cruel to men. Ellen Kullman is a very pretty woman, but at 56 years of age she probably would not turn a lot of heads in a college bar, and the fact that she is the chairman and CEO of Dupont isn’t going to change that.

It’s a good thing Mitt Romney doesn’t hang out in college bars.

You want off-the-charts status? Check out the curriculum vitae of one Willard M. Romney: $200 million in the bank (and a hell of a lot more if he didn’t give so much away), apex alpha executive, CEO, chairman of the board, governor, bishop, boss of everything he’s ever touched. Son of the same, father of more. It is a curious scientific fact (explained in evolutionary biology by the Trivers-Willard hypothesis — Willard, notice) that high-status animals tend to have more male offspring than female offspring, which holds true across many species, from red deer to mink to Homo sap. The offspring of rich families are statistically biased in favor of sons — the children of the general population are 51 percent male and 49 percent female, but the children of the Forbes billionaire list are 60 percent male. Have a gander at that Romney family picture: five sons, zero daughters. Romney has 18 grandchildren, and they exceed a 2:1 ratio of grandsons to granddaughters (13:5). When they go to church at their summer-vacation home, the Romney clan makes up a third of the congregation. He is basically a tribal chieftain.

Professor Obama? Two daughters. May as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.

From an evolutionary point of view, Mitt Romney should get 100 percent of the female vote. All of it. He should get Michelle Obama’s vote. You can insert your own Mormon polygamy joke here, but the ladies do tend to flock to successful executives and entrepreneurs. Saleh al-Rajhi, billionaire banker, left behind 61 children when he cashed out last year. We don’t do harems here, of course, but Romney is exactly the kind of guy who in another time and place would have the option of maintaining one. He’s a boss. Given that we are no longer roaming the veldt for the most part, money is a reasonable stand-in for social status. Romney’s net worth is more than that of the last eight U.S. presidents combined. He set up a trust for his grandkids and kicked in about seven times Barack Obama’s net worth, which at $11.8 million is not inconsiderable but probably less than Romney’s tax bill in a good year. If he hadn’t given away so much money to his church, charities, and grandkids, Mitt Romney would have more money than Jay-Z.

It is time for Mitt Romney to get in touch with his inner rich guy.

Some Occupy Wall Street types, believing it to be the height of wit, have begun to spell Romney’s name “Rmoney.” But Romney can do better than that — put it in all caps: R-MONEY. Jay-Z can keep his puny little lowercase letters and the Maybach: R-MONEY doesn’t own a flashy car with rims, R-MONEY does billion-dollar deals with Keystone Automotive and Delphi. You want to make it rain? R-MONEY is going to make it storm, like biblical. RRomney is forever saying — and God bless him for this — that we shouldn’t punish success, that we shouldn’t discourage risk-taking and entrepreneurship, and that we shouldn’t resent wealth. He celebrates the successful businessman and the free market that makes such success possible. And then he goes around acting like somebody who gives a fig about the price of a gallon of gas as anything other than a statistical abstraction on some spreadsheet somewhere or a political opportunity. This isn’t just cheap campaign theater: In 2010, Romney and his wife were flying back from the Vancouver winter Olympics when a guy flipped out on the plane and took a swing at him. Romney had reminded the guy to return his seat to the full upright and locked position before take-off — that’s our Mitt, no? Romney laughed the episode off and didn’t press charges, but the real news is this: Romney was flying commercial. In fact, he was sitting in the 15th row of an Embraer ERJ-190, which on Canadian Air means he was flying coach. Economy class! No normal person flies economy class if he can afford not to — and Romney can afford his own airliner. Fly like a G6? Romney could buy his-and-hers Gulfstreams and still have more money left over than Gwyneth Paltrow and the McCains combined. And John McCain famously has more houses than he can count.

I suppose he’s practicing bourgeois virtues and whatnot, and we conservatives probably should cheer that. Hurrah. Now Romney should quit pretending that he’s an ordinary schmo with ordinary schmo problems and start living a little larger. He should not be ashamed of being loaded; instead, he should have some fun with it. He will discover something that the Obama campaign has not quite figured out yet: Americans do not hate rich people. Americans love rich people. Americans will sit on their couches and watch billionaire Donald Trump fire people on television — for fun. Nobody hates Jay Leno for owning seven Aston Martins and 17 Lamborghinis — people go to his garage’s website (of course his garage has its own website) to ogle his cars and leave appreciative remarks. (Like President Obama, Leno’s big on green cars: He’s got 39 of them, which probably negates the environmental benefit of buying a green car, but whatever.) There are lots of children of rich and powerful men who do not turn out to be 0.01 percent as successful as Mitt Romney has. Meghan McCain’s father is a rich guy and a failed presidential candidate, just like Mitt’s. Anybody think Meghan McCain’s life is going to turn out like Mitt Romney’s?

Romney should try to find out whatever the hell happened to fellow gazillionaire William Weld, last seen nodding off in the lunchroom at McDermott Will & Emery, though by no means should he let it be known that he is seeking the advice of another moderate Republican ex-governor of Massachusetts. Weld has occasionally disastrous political judgment (he endorsed Romney in the 2008 primary but endorsed Barack Obama in the general) but he carried off the rich-guy thing with real panache. When it was suggested that his aristocratic background would prevent his understanding the problems of the common man, Weld retorted that his family “arrived in 1630 with only the shirts on their back . . . and 2,000 pounds of gold.” Romney, the millionaire executive/governor/presidential-candidate son of a millionaire executive/governor/presidential candidate, would be blessed to be as comfortable in his own pampered skin as Weld was.

It isn’t just that he has money — it’s how he got the money. Sure, he grew up rich — Dad was the CEO of American Motors. (Hey, where was their bailout?) But Mitt didn’t inherit his fortune: He gave away everything his father left him, establishing a school of public management in his father’s memory. (Old-school patriarchs build monuments to their fathers.) Why would he do a thing like that? Because he didn’t need the money: “I figured we had enough of our own,” he explained. And then some. George Romney made his money by being a boss — a leader. Mitt Romney has been the same thing. When things went wrong, people put Romney in charge of them — at Bain, at the Olympics, at a hundred companies he helped turn around or restructure. Bain is a financial firm, but Romney wasn’t some Wall Street bank-monkey with a pitch book. He was the guy who fired you. He was a boss, like his dad, and like his sons probably will be. Barack Obama was never in charge of anything of any significance until the delicate geniuses who make up the electorate of this fine republic handed him the keys to the Treasury and the nuclear football because we were tired of Frenchmen sneering at us when we went on vacation. Obama made his money in part through political connections — no, I don’t think Michelle Obama was worth nearly 400 grand a year — and by authoring two celebrity memoirs, his sole innovation in life having been to write the memoir first and become a celebrity second. Can you imagine Barack Obama trying to pull off a hostile takeover without Rahm Emanuel holding his diapers up for him? Impossible.

Elections are not about public policy. They aren’t even about the economy. Elections are tribal, and tribes are — Occupy types, cover your delicate ears — ruthlessly hierarchical. Somebody has to be the top dog. As much as we’d all like to forget Al Gore ever existed, it’s worth keeping in mind that ridiculous episode in which Naomi Wolf tried to teach him to be more of an overdog. Slate, after poking fun at her advising him to wear more earth-toned suits, reported it thus:

 Wolf’s non-sartorial advice to Gore — and to President Clinton before him, as an unpaid adviser — is even stranger. She coached each to emphasize his manly strengths, relying on hoary, tired gender stereotypes. She reportedly told Gore that he is the “beta male” who must fight Clinton’s “alpha male” for dominance. And as an adviser to the Clinton White House, she informed the president that the nation was searching for a “good-father role model” to “build a house” for the country. “I will not let anyone or anything touch the bedrock,” Wolf wrote in one memo for him. “I will DEFEND/PROTECT the foundation.” This came only three years after the publication of her book Fire with Fire, in which she savaged Republican spin doctors for positioning George Bush as “the reassuring arch-patriarch.”

Reassuring arch-patriarch — maybe one with enough sons and grandsons to form a pillaging band of marauders? Hillary Rodham Clinton told us that it takes a village, and Mitt Romney showed us how to populate a village with thriving offspring. Newsweek, which as of this writing is still in business, recently ran a cover photo of Romney with the headline: “The Wimp Factor: Is He Just Too Insecure to Be President?” Look at his fat stacks. Look at that mess of sons and grandchildren. Look at a picture of Ann Romney on her wedding day and that cocky smirk on his face. What exactly has Mitt Romney got to be insecure about? That he’s not as prodigious a patriarch as Ramses II or as rich as >Lakshmi Mittal? I bet he sleeps at night and never worries about that. He has done everything right in life, and he should own it. And by own it, I mean put it on the black card and stow it in the G6 — or at least in first class, for Pete’s sake.

"Health of The Mother"

I forgot about this gem from 2008: (Via Jessica Valenti)

Obama's Transformation

Really great Op ed from awesome writer Ta-Nehesi Coates. Read it.

During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama earned the G.O.P.’s mockery. Now he has earned their fear. It is an ambiguous feat, accomplished by going to the dark side, by walking the G.O.P.’s talk, by becoming the man Dick Cheney fashioned himself to be.

Accidentally Revealing Your Real Views

I could be wrong, but how is this very different (in practice, not in words) to the normal GOP position on rape/abortion/women:

Rep. Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri who is running against Sen. Claire McCaskill, justified his opposition to abortion rights even in case of rape with a claim that victims of “legitimate rape” have unnamed biological defenses that prevent pregnancy.

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview postedSunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
Akin said that even in the worst-case scenario — when the supposed natural protections against unwanted pregnancy fail — abortion should still not be a legal option for the rape victim.

“Let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work, or something,” Akin said. “I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.”

I mean, I get that this is not what you usually hear people say, but in the end result of GOP policy towards abortion, what is the difference? The Family Research Council and like minded groups have already stated their support for Akin, and understandably so.

Also if you're considering donating to his opponent, don't, or at least not yet. This jackass is probably going to resign on his own terms, and Claire McCaskill is one of the worst douche caucus offenders, and has taken a lead in attempting to cut medicare. She'll probably win based on this debacle, but she doesn't deserve your money or active support in any way.

Meanwhile, in Afganistan

While no one is paying attention, and the issue isn't within 2000 feet of the presidential campaign:

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Another Afghan policeman turned his weapon on American allies on Friday in the country's west, killing two U.S. service members in the latest of a disturbing string of attacks by Afghan security forces on the international troops training them.

The killing — which local police said was by an Afghan recruited just five days earlier to a village defense force — is the sixth similar incident in two weeks.

...

Attacks by Afghan allies on international troops have escalated this year, killing at least 36 foreign troops and raising questions about the strategy to train national police and soldiers to take over security and fight the Taliban after most foreign troops leave by the end of 2014.

Biden to the Rescue on Social Security?

Paul Ryan's nomination has done some good already:

Vice President Joe Biden told cafe patrons in Virginia on Tuesday that he could "guarantee" he and President Obama would allow no changes to Social Security.

As a debate over reforming entitlements -- particularly Medicare -- takes center stage in the 2012 presidential campaign, Biden seemed to promise not to allow changes to the program.

"Hey, by the way, let's talk about Social Security," Biden said after a diner at The Coffee Break Cafe in Stuart, VA expressed his relief that the Obama campaign wasn't talking about changing the popular entitlement program.

"Number one, I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security," Biden said, per a pool report. "I flat guarantee you."
The pool report noted that most of the patrons at the cafe toward whom Biden was directing his remarks were over the age of 60.

This is huge to have Biden on the record with this, because of Obama's repeated flirting with changing the way social security is calculated to a way that would be a benefit cut for many people. And while I stand by my earlier talk that policy statements during the campaign don't matter, having definitive statements like this that you can throw back in someone's face later are the main reason campaigns are useful. It doesn't mean it won't happen, but these words will at least make it a bit harder for them.

Please, everyone ask Biden more questions! Maybe about the war in Afghanistan!

That's a Clown Question, Bro

As readers of this blog know, I've had a strong dislike for Hillary Clinton that goes back way before the primary with Obama. Gotta give credit where credit is due here, this is just awesome:

Interviewer: Okay. Which designers do you prefer?

Hillary Clinton: What designers of clothes?

Interviewer: Yes.

Hillary Clinton: Would you ever ask a man that question?

Interviewer: Probably not. Probably not.

Well done.

Paul Ryan Helped Kill the Grand Bargain

Damn, and all this time I had been giving Eric Cantor sole credit for killing the grand bargain: (thanks to Dan for sending this my way)

Mr. Ryan’s enormous influence was apparent last summer when Representative Eric Cantor, the second most powerful House Republican, told Mr. Obama during negotiations over an attempted bipartisan “grand bargain” that Mr. Ryan disliked its policy and was concerned that a deal would pave the way for Mr. Obama’s easy re-election, according to a Democrat and a Republican who were briefed on the conversation.

Well done Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor. You had a Democratic president offering benefit cuts to the bedrocks of our social safety net, and you turned it down. I support your reelection if you can pull this off in the lame duck session.

Kidding. Sort of.

Paul Ryan!

A few thoughts:

• I had always thought Romney's best chance of winning was by not getting to specific of what he wants to do and make this election a referendum on how shitty the economy is. By picking Ryan his campaign obviously disagrees, because this ties him to an extremely unpopular set of policy plans.
• I said a bit of this on twitter, but there are two ways this can go as far as a debate over social security/Medicare goes:
• 1) This forces Obama to be a much stronger defender of Medicare and Social Security, which could complicate his willingness to cut them as part of a "grand bargain" (or it might not matter at all what he says during the campaign, I've argued here that very little of what is said matters)
• 2) The other side of this (as my dad also pointed out to me) is that this could easily turn into a contest of who is more serious about cutting medicare between Ryan and Obama. This isn't designed to appeal to anyone outside of hack DC journalists, and it seems so stupid it couldn't possibly happen... but keep in mind a chief Obama adviser spoke about how signing a deal with benefit cuts to medicare and social security would be a net positive and only hurt him with "the left", and this is the administration that spent time "courting" David Brooks, so anything is possible.
• I understand that Romney wanted to nail down his base, but keep in mind that people in the Democratic party who study focus groups and message stuff for a living have been attempting to tie Romney to Ryan's budget looooooooong before now. Being the mastermind behind a plan to kill medicare is as Norm McDonald would say "box office poison".
• To give you an idea about how strongly people react to the idea of Medicare cuts, many "tea party" candidates in 2010 won their elections on the dishonest idea that Obama cut Medicare in his health care bill (he did but those were cuts on the provider side, not benefit cuts, an important difference).
• Around the country, house and senate candidates in both parties have been either running against Ryan's budget, or simply running away from their vote for it. This shit is toxic. People like Medicare, and don't want it turned into a voucher system. I'm sure Romney/Ryan have a plan to deal with that, and I'll be interested to see what it is.

Anyhow, I think that's all I have for the moment, what are your thoughts?

Sign Mitt Romney is Running a Terrible Campaign

The fact that you probably haven't seen this graph: (via business insider)

Happy Friday

Via Edsbs's twitter a few weeks back.

thetrainofthought.COM Has Returned!

You can update your bookmarks, although by tomorrow the blogspot address and www.thetrainofthough.org should be auto forwarding to this address.

Exciting times.

Obama Upset That People Don't Give Him Enough Credit For Ok-ing Social Security/Medicare Cuts

For anyone who has ignored the evidence and still believes that Obama wouldn't cut social security or Medicare, this is from the man himself:

The news media have played a crucial role in Mr. Obama’s career, helping to make him a national star not long after he had been an anonymous state legislator. As president, however, he has come to believe the news media have had a role in frustrating his ambitions to change the terms of the country’s political discussion. He particularly believes that Democrats do not receive enough credit for their willingness to accept cuts in Medicare and Social Security, while Republicans oppose almost any tax increase to reduce the deficit.

So there you have it. There is so much more to say about the fact that he wants credit for being willing to do something horrible, but I don't have the energy. You know what is going to be terrible? The lame duck session. Get ready now, it's going to be a fight.

Texas Executes Mentally Retarded Man

This has not been a good week for the "what the fuck is wrong with our country" files...

HUNTSVILLE, Texas — A Texas man convicted of killing a police informant two decades ago was executed Tuesday evening after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected arguments that he was too mentally impaired to qualify for the death penalty.
Marvin Wilson, 54, was pronounced dead at 6:27 p.m., 14 minutes after his lethal injection began at the state prison in Huntsville. Wilson's attorneys had argued that he should have been ineligible for capital punishment because of his low IQ.

SERIOUSLY THANK GOD WE HAVE SO MANY GUNS IN THIS COUNTRY

These days I don't even know what to say about the American national gun fetish. That something so self-evidently self-destructive is not only defended, but upheld as a pillar of our country... Like Tom Tomorrow said after some past massacre, the debate has been mostly settled, and the other side won- and now this is the price that we all have to pay.

Housing Help is Not On The Way

One of the last hopes of a large scale project that would improve people's lives and the economy without the help of congress was using Freddie and Fannie to perform principle reductions on people's mortgages.

That hope died last week when the Director of FHFA, Ed DeMarco, announced his refusal to do so. David Dayen:

The important part is actually what Dylan Matthews notes in passing AFTER this, that Levitin said “replacing him means Obama can’t blame DeMarco for the state of the housing sector.” This is quite right, and you can see it something I tweeted yesterday. James Lockhart left FHFA, making Ed DeMarco acting director, in August of 2009, three years ago. In the total time he has been acting director, there has been a Presidential nominee for the position for roughly two months. The Administration didn’t get around to nominating Joseph Smith – the banking commissioner of North Carolina and currently the enforcement monitor for the foreclosure fraud settlement – until November 2010, during the lame duck session. Smith was denied an up or down vote in the lame duck and he withdrew his name from consideration in January 2011. And that’s been it. There has never been a replacement nominee for FHFA Director since.

The President and the Treasury Department claim that principal reduction and refinancing are priorities (now, after three years of doing nothing toward that purpose; the HAMP principal reduction program did nothing until the incentives got tweaked this year). They claim that they strongly object to DeMarco’s position. They have rallied a large section of the housing advocacy community around to focusing attention on DeMarco, a virtual unknown just a few months ago. DeMarco, in fact, is very useful to the Administration right now. He’s an excellent foil, a means to distract attention away from the terrible housing policies of the past few years. Suddenly it’s Ed DeMarco’s fault that housing hasn’t improved. It’s Ed DeMarco’s fault that you can buy a house for the price of a Lexus in 10 cities in America. DeMarco as cartoon villain puts the guys who have been running housing policy for the last three-plus years in the white hats.

That’s been sold brilliantly, and a recess appointment would mean that Obama would have to take ownership of the policy. There’s a chance that could actually fail. And so, for three years, there’s been a named nominee for two months. This is working out nicely for the Administration.

This is not to say that DeMarco is somehow right. I think Jared Bernstein’s analysis of DeMarco’s flawed analysis is spot-on. And DeMarco re-imagining himself as the executor of all taxpayer funds – by rejecting the cost savings for principal reduction by saying it just moves money from Treasury to the GSEs, as if he has any say over how tax dollars are spent at Treasury – is a breach of jurisdiction and simply a dodge to force an ideological rejection of principal reduction. Will DeMarco stop facilitating home purchases in the suburbs because suburban sprawl forces more hydrocarbon use, leading to increased taxpayer dollars for the Defense Department to secure oil supplies? The whole thing is ridiculous.

But DeMarco knows he won’t be fired. He’s become the symbol in the story, and the Administration is much more interested in symbolism when it comes to housing.

And now, Bailout author Neil Barofsky, someone who actually worked through this whole process with the Treasury department, has also given his take:

Last week the acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Ed DeMarco, made a familiar argument. He announced that he would not approve the Obama administration’s request that struggling borrowers whose mortgages are backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac receive debt relief through principal reductions subsidized by the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). DeMarco’s refusal was based on his concern that granting such relief would encourage other borrowers to “strategically default” by not making payments on their loan to take advantage of the promise of a reduction in their debt. This is a version of the moral hazard argument we heard about so often in the early days of the financial crisis. Secretary Geithner, in response, argued in a public letter that notwithstanding such concerns, and for the greater good of the overall economy, such relief should be granted whenever it would result in a better economic outcome than foreclosure.

This is not the first time this debate is happening – but last time around, Geithner was the one arguing DeMarco’s points. Although one can argue whether principal reductions are the right way to address the ongoing housing slump – I have championed principal reductions for years but acknowledge that there are passionate arguments on both sides of the issue – no one should be fooled that the administration’s entreaties to DeMarco are anything but political posturing. As I recount in my recently released book, Bailout, during my time as the special inspector general in charge of oversight of the TARP bailouts, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, using the same justifications now offered by DeMarco, consistently blocked efforts to use TARP funds already designated for homeowner relief through a principal reduction program that could have a meaningful impact on the overall economy.

For example, in 2009, $50 billion in TARP funds had been committed to help homeowners through the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), a program that the president announced was intended to help up to 4 million struggling families stay in their homes through sustainable mortgage modifications. Hundreds of billions more were still available and could have been used by the White House and the Treasury Department to help support a massive reduction in mortgage debt. But Geithner avoided this path to a housing recovery, explaining that he believed it would be “dramatically more expensive for the American taxpayer, harder to justify, [and] create much greater risk of unfairness.” Treasury amplified that argument in 2010, after it reluctantly instituted a weak principal reduction program in response to overwhelming congressional pressure. That program incongruously left it to the largely bank-owned mortgage servicers (and to Fannie and Freddie) to determine if such relief would be implemented. In response to our criticism that the conflicts of interest baked into the program would render it ineffective unless principal reduction was made mandatory (when in the best interests of the holder of the loan), Treasury reinforced Geithner’s early statements, refusing to do so primarily because of fears of a lurking danger: the ”moral hazard of strategic default.” The message was clear: No way, no how would Treasury require principal reduction, even when Treasury’s analysis indicated it would be in the best interest of the owner, investor or guarantor of the mortgage.

Indeed, at every critical juncture at which Treasury could have unilaterally implemented meaningful principal reduction, the same argument now presented by DeMarco was hauled out as an excuse for inaction.

I want to believe the best intentions of the administration, and if they've had a real change of heart over the importance of principled reductions, but it really would fly in the face of everything we've seen on housing policy in the Obama Administration.

The fact that every left leaning advocacy group simultaneously sent me some campaign action against Ed DeMarco is what sent my bullshit detectors into high gear. Focusing on DeMarco does nothing other than divert our attention from the people who have presided over our abysmal housing policy the past three years.   Wish it was something else, but that's really the only way I can see it at this point.

Tweet of the Day

Guns don't kill people. White supremacists with guns who live in a country with no gun control kill people.
— Zack (@CanadaZack) August 6, 2012

Fire Tim Geithner

Atrios points me to the fact that it's been two years since this atrocity. How on earth does he still have a job?

Harry Reid Is Trolling Mitt Romney Because He Can

I've been trying to waste less of our time posting about stupid horse race campaign stuff, just cause I really don't think it's that important, but this was too good to pass up.

Harry Reid is is fucking with Mitt Romney in such a funny way that it's worth admiring what a complete asshole he's being. So Romney won't release his tax returns and has withheld pressure to do so up till now, including when there were plenty of people calling for him to do so during the GOP primary. Exactly why he made the calculation that it's better to not release them is somewhat of a mystery (unless they state that he's killed a man, I'm not sure how much worse that is than the perception that he's hiding something).

Anyhow, Harry Reid has started openly trolling Romney, and just start speculating out loud about stuff he might have heard that could only be disproved by Romney releasing his taxes:

In a wide-ranging interview with The Huffington Post from his office on Capitol Hill, Reid saved some of his toughest words for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Romney couldn't make it through a Senate confirmation process as a mere Cabinet nominee, the majority leader insisted, owing to the opaqueness of his personal finances.

"His poor father must be so embarrassed about his son," Reid said, in reference to George Romney's standard-setting decision to turn over 12 years of tax returns when he ran for president in the late 1960s.

Saying he had "no problem with somebody being really, really wealthy," Reid sat up in his chair a bit before stirring the pot further. A month or so ago, he said, a person who had invested with Bain Capital called his office.

"Harry, he didn't pay any taxes for 10 years," Reid recounted the person as saying.

"He didn't pay taxes for 10 years! Now, do I know that that's true? Well, I'm not certain," said Reid. "But obviously he can't release those tax returns. How would it look?

"You guys have said his wealth is $250 million," Reid went on. "Not a chance in the world. It's a lot more than that. I mean, you do pretty well if you don't pay taxes for 10 years when you're making millions and millions of dollars."

It's pretty hilarious, because as long as Romney refuses to release his returns, Reid (or anyone, actually) can basically say whatever BS they want, because outside of releasing his tax returns, there is no way to disprove it. Also, any time an accusation like "maybe he didn't pay taxes for 10 years" is out there, you've kind of already lost the debate, no matter how it turns out.

"I want to be the savior"

Love this quote from John Wall. He's going to have a big year, mark it down:

“You wanna do it all,” Wall told Dime. “You wanna be an All-Star. You wanna be one of the top five best point guards. You wanna make the playoffs, and get this city back to where they know they can be. When you have the playoffs, I heard how crazy it could be when everybody is wearing all white. That’s what I want to get to. I want to be the savior.”

Tweet of the Day

Indeed:

Seriously, I want to vote for the version of Obama that exists in fevered right-wing imaginations. How do we do that?
— Ned Resnikoff (@resnikoff) August 1, 2012

We could really do a lot worse than a socialist on domestic policy and a Kenyan anti-colonialist on foreign policy...