Republican Debate Thoughts

So while this is far from the first debate, this is the first one I was able to watch in non highlight form, so I figured I'd give a few thoughts.

• Romney is so far ahead of these guys in "general politician skills" it's not even funny. His exchange with Newt was probably the most devastating 1 on 1 take down I've seen in a debate. Humiliated him. I know, it's Newt, and degree of difficulty and all, but man was that brutal to watch.
• Having only read about the other debates, I didn't understand how Rick Perry could have dropped 20 points in 3 weeks. Well, that mystery is solved! He makes Bush seem articulate and knowledgeable on the issues.
• I want a framed picture of the look on everyone's face when Ron Paul brought up Iran/Contra. I'd actually pay to see cameras of each person's face when Ron Paul is speaking, just to capture their facial expressions.
• Based on the Iran/Contra thing, we need to find a way to do a Republican debate where all the questions are directly related to the things that Reagan actually did, rather than the nonsense claimed about him now. We could kick it off by asking if arming Osama Bin Laden was a good idea. 
• Cain's response to criticism of his Sim City tax plan was incoherent, and mostly about fruit. Don't know if people cared or not though.
• Bachman seemed fairly subdued. Santorm's desperate attempts to talk about his hatred of gay people was hilarious. You could tell he just wanted to yell out "listen you morons, All you used to care about was gay people and abortion!!! What happened???"
• There seems to be a strong anti-romney vote, but there isn't a warm enough body to house it. It really can't be emphasized how terrible all the other cantidates are, just in their political skills alone. Obama better hope that they can coalese around someone and take down Romney, cause I'm really starting to believe if he gets the nomination Obama is toast.
• One more thing, Anderson Cooper repeating the complete BS right wing lie that only 51% of Americans pay taxes drove me insane. I know it's a Republican debate and no facts were allowed within 30 feet of the stage, but I expect better from Anderson Cooper for some reason.

Did you watch it? What did you think?

Crazy Liberals and Their Crazy Liberal Ideas

You mean austerity doesn't improve economic growth??? Krugman: (via atrios)

Right now, the two most prominent institutions calling for an end to the disastrous turn to short-run austerity are … Goldman Sachs and the International Monetary Fund.

Brad has written about the Goldman memo, which calls for a nominal GDP target — that is, a future dollar value of GDP — that would in effect both promise a significantly higher inflation rate over the medium term and require very large quantitative easing. We need to be careful about this: it’s a proposal from the excellent Jan Hatzius, not official GS policy. But still.

Meanwhile, the IMF special report for the G20 (pdf) is essentially a declaration that the focus on universal austerity was wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s a lot milder than it should be — the Fund is still, for example, endorsing the Cameron austerity plan. But it pretty much flatly says that Congress should pass the Obama jobs bill.

Atrios asks if we can start giving these "the master of the universe jobs" to people who haven't taken 2-3 years to figure this out?

Maybe?

If so, I vote for this guy.

BP Regains Bidding Rights For Gulf Drilling

Remember those guys that did such a great job drilling in the gulf last time?
Let's give em another shot!

The Obama administration has infuriated environmentalists by giving BP the green light to bid for new drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico.

The move – seen as a major step in the company's political rehabilitation as an offshore driller following the Deepwater Horizon accident – was revealed by the head of the US safety regulator after a congressional hearing in Washington.

"They don't have a deeply flawed record offshore," said Michael Bromwich, head of the newly formed Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. "The question is: 'Do you administer the administrative death penalty based on one incident?', and we have concluded that's not appropriate."

Drilling rights are sold off on a regular basis but many believed BP would be ruled out as unsuitable after the gulf well blowout that killed 11 workers and polluted the beaches of southern states. The next sale comes up in December, when more than 8m hectares (20m acres) of offshore rights will come up for grabs.

BP declined to comment, but Friends of the Earth said it was appalled. "Governments should be administering the death penalty to all deepwater drilling rather than waiting for yet more devastating incidents like the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico or in any other part of the world," argued Craig Bennett, director of policy and campaigns at the environmental group.

"It is not just BP operations that are deeply flawed," he added. "There is not a single oil company that can say with a high degree of confidence that it can drill safely and how it will clear up if something goes wrong. It is clear in the context of climate change we need to develop new clean technologies, not hunt for fossil fuels in ever more remote and hard-to-reach areas."

The "they don't have a deeply flawed record" quote is jaw dropping, but the statement from friends of the earth really hits the nail on the head. BP's non-reaction to the gulf spill was essentially the airing of a dirty secret that no one has the slightest clue what to do when something goes wrong with one of these things.

So let's obviously keep doing it, and why not let the same people who fucked it up last time go for it again?  Awesome.

Standing Up For The 1%

One of the more powerful recurring chants/signs/slogans of the Occupy Wall Street movement has been "We are the 99%".

Those on the right have responded typically: Finding a new way to do the bidding for the rich and powerful, and being completely factually wrong in the process. Alex Pareene's description is amazing:

The conservative response to the “We are the 99 percent” movement is … hilarious. (And, sure, heartbreaking.) Conservative filmmaker Mike Wilson and vacuous right-blogger Erick Erickson joined forces to start “We Are the 53%,” a blog made up of contributions from the 53 percent of Americans who pay more in federal income taxes than they receive back in deductions or credits.

The project was kicked off by Erick Erickson, who announced that he works “three jobs,” by which he means being a professional television pundit, radio pundit and Internet pundit. There is a stunning amount of cognitive dissonance, misplaced resentment and class revulsion going on, even for a conservative Web project.

The site can’t even manage to correctly represent that 53 percent, with multiple contributors very clearly belonging to the 47 percent of people who make up the supposed parasite class. There is a blog dedicated to this confused minority. The best example is obviously this dog.

Let’s get this out of the way early: Pretty much every adult American pays taxes. Workers who are too poor to pay federal income taxes still pay payroll taxes, and property taxes if they own their home. Even the unemployed pay sales taxes. The poorest Americans — people who make an average of $12,500 a year — pay, on average, 16 percent of their paltry income in taxes. That is less than every other demographic, but the point of a progressive tax system is that 16 percent of a poor person’s income is a hell of a lot more meaningful to that person than 30 percent of a millionaire’s. It’s a simple concept, and one that most Americans agree with. And that simplicity and popularity is why the conservative movement has spent 100 years attempting to muddy the debate with misinformation. (They are quite dedicated, actually, to class warfare, in that they seek to align the shrinking middle with the elites in a war against the downtrodden.)

So a good number of people who pay no federal income taxes are simply lucky enough to be impoverished. The rest are beneficiaries of tax breaks and loopholes championed most vocally by Republicans. A member of “the 1 percent” (or, more accurately, the tenth-of-1 percent) likely considers these harried taxpayers “the 53 percent of people without the sense to hire a good accountant.”

Multiple lies, wrapped up in self righteousness, blended with a healthy dose of incoherence. We are the 53% couldn't be better designed to capture the mind of the modern day conservative movement.

The 9-9-9 Plan: It's Awesome

You get to the point where you're so out of the loop over here... I finally do some interneting and all I see from everyone everywhere is 9-9-9, Hermain Cain, blah blah blah. Almost everyone seems to agree that it's a stupid plan, but what is it? No one says in the reaction pieces, which is weird because 9-9-9 seems really simple, like it should lend itself to easy explanation.

But nah, everyone is just talking about how stupid it is, so I have to go to Cain's site and figure it out for myself. I'm already kinda resentful because of that, but the first line turns me around:

"The natural state of our economy is prosperity. Freedom ensures that."

Wow, here's a guy who apparently doesn't understand anything about the economy! It's making me glad that I'm about to try and read his tax plan. By the way, 'freedom ensures that' is a great suffix to add to any random statement. Try it at home for fun.

"We can not spend our way to prosperity.
Government spending IS taxation.
Government spending is like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of the pool, pouring it in the shallow end. Then they HOPE that the water level will CHANGE."

Why do I feel like he would get into some Clintonian debate about the definition of "is" and stuff if anyone asked him questions about that? Also who actually wrote these sentences? Is Cain even less of a real contender than he seems?!

You know what, forget about the substance of his plan, if there is any. Check this out:

"The Fair Tax makes our exported goods and services the most competitively internationally than any other tax system."

What is happening in that sentence? How could someone look at that and then put it up on his website as the official description of his stupid tax plan? What is happening in America?! Then you get to his summary on the bottom:

"Ends all payroll taxes
Ends the Death Tax
Features zero tax on capital gains and repatriated profits
Lowest marginal rates on production
Allows immediate expensing of business investments
Eliminates double taxation of dividends"

Oh okay. While we're at it, why not just tax everyone in America a nickel? Also instead of a Death Tax you get a Death Credit, where poor people give rich people some money if someone in their family dies. Also instead of payroll tax we can just hire some people to scrounge around gutters and find loose change- also creating jobs for Americans! Capital gains should be completely untaxed and the number of millions of dollars you've made in this category should enable you to punch an equal number of homeless people in the face. Now things are really fair. I call it the 6-4-3-7-4-7-4-2-6-1-0 plan. Vote for Pizza Man Herman Cain.

Pro Murder/Slave Labor/Tax Cheating Bills Pass The House, Will Be Signed By Democratic President

Last night, the free trade deals that we've written about numerous times on this blog passed the house, the last meaningful place where they could have been opposed. They then go to the desk of a Democratic president, who I can only assume will sign the agreement with the blood of murdered Colombian trade unionists, because that's the level of fuck he's given about their lives in pushing these deals.

Obama released a statement about how these job killing deals will create jobs (no really, i believe you this time!) and about how exciting it is that we have enough corporate whores in both parties to make this deal bipartisan. He described the deal as a "major win for American workers, to which David Dayen brilliantly replied:

They’re not a win for Colombian trade unionists, as even the weak Action Plan which has failed to protect them from murder was kept on the side and not written into the trade pact, giving it no authority. They are mainly a win for North Korean sweatshop owners and Panamanian tax haven specialists. And, I should add that the President and his entire party just got done saying that Republicans want only to sabotage the economy, and will not let anything pass that creates jobs. Now they are applauding the passage of job-creating trade agreements. Something doesn’t fit.

It's actually pretty simple: It doesn't fit because he's lying to all of us about the impact of this deal. Does it make more sense now?

There are no mean senators making this happen, there are no government constraints forcing Obama to pass these deals. I don't know if he's passing them because it makes him look like a super awesome bipartisan leader for the election, or whether he thinks rewarding a country for legalizing the murder of unionists is the right thing to do. Or if he thinks the American worker benefits from competition with slave labor. Or if he thinks that tax cheats needed a helping hand. It honestly doesn't matter. Pushing these deals was 100% Obama's call, and it's a truly shameful moment for his presidency.

Elizabeth Warren For Senate

This parody is amazing: