There are two primary debates occurring tonight.
One is a debate between Glen Urquhart and Michele Rollins at the Hockessin Memorial Hall.
The other debate is between Sheriff Mike Walsh and challenger Trinidad Navarro for the Democratic nomination to New Castle County Sheriff.
Use this thread to discuss the debates if you’re listening or attending in person.
Will Bunch has posted on his blog today this killer post: Jobless America: Reagan’s Chickens Have Come Home To Roost. If there is only one thing that you read today, make this it. And be sure to read the links too. Bunch uses this post to locate the Ground Zero of the current economic meltdown with the implementation of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies — policies that firmly reset American economic policy from middle-class supports towards the wealthy and to business. Policy that — among other things — has left most Americans’ wages largely stagnant but made sure that our access to credit increased faster than our wages did. It is hard to excerpt just one piece, but this is important:
It’s important to note that while Reagan’s rhetoric and powers of persuasion are were extremely critical to launching the age of debt in America, he didn’t just talk the talk, he also walked the walk, beginning with his own misguided policies. It was under Reagan’s presidency that the United States went from a creditor nation to a debtor nation for the first time since World War I, initiating America’s massive slide into long-term dependency on China and other foreign powers to underwrite our spending spree. And of course, Tea Party activists today have amnesia over the fact that Reagan drove more debt than all the U.S. presidents who came before him. Years later, Vice President Dick Cheney said that he learned from Reagan that deficits didn’t matter. Like so much of what came out of Cheney’s lips while he was in the West Wing, that was a lie. The huge deficits wracked up by Reagan worsened the recession of 1990-91 by giving central bankers few options — it eventually took politically risky tax hikes by George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton to undo Reaganomics and trigger the strong economy of the 1990s.
And that Reagan debt paid for things that were unproductive in the long-run — a massive arms buildup that included many weapons that were outdated by the time they rolled off the assembly line, and massive tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans — as the top marginal rate for high-earners went from 70 percent to 50 percent (where it was for most of Reagan’s presidency, much higher than today) to 28 percent after the tax reform of 1986. This launched the huge spike in CEO pay; when Reagan was elected the average chief executive made 40 times what his average employee earned, but by 2000 that had risen astronomically to a multiple of 400. No wonder Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” speech from “Wall Street” is such an indelible image of the 1980s.
But earning power for middle-class Americans has barely budged since the dawn of the Reagan era. So in order to take part in the great festival of materialism that Ronald Reagan called “Americanism,” people borrowed. The 40th president tried to make that easier by deregulating the savings-and-loan industry — which proved to be a massive boondoggle that cost taxpayers $160 billion even as policy makers failed to learn the lessons of the S&L debacle. Still, people found many ways to borrow and buy, mainly on credit cards. In 1980, the typical American saved 10 percent of what he or she earned, but by 2004 that plunged to zero. Household and consumer debt went from 100 percent of the U.S. GDP in 1980 to 177 percent today. If you’ve been around for the last 25 years, you saw how this was accomplished through the chasing of bubbles, first on Wall Street and then in the housing mania of the mid-2000s. Now, with falling home prices and record foreclosures, there are no more bubbles to inflate, which is why the Reaganist chickens of our unsupported spending binge are finally coming home to roost.
And now we pay — we pay in large part with an economy that will be very slow to recover enough jobs for the Americans who want them. Not because of the BS story (that our media has lazily bought into) that businesses are uncertain of the regulatory environment — but because businesses are unsure of when we’ll start buying stuff again. Since our own economy is currently built on us getting enough credit to buy more stuff than we need, we are in for a long recovery slog, as most people are reining in their spending and trying to deleverage their own households. There is a part of this consumers economy that is unlikely to ever come back.
And we also pay with the kind of legislative paralysis that refuses to see the real depth of the price being paid by Americans for 30+ years of Reagan-era economic policy. Advocates of the status quo do that advocacy on the backs of the unemployed and under-employed, while pulling off the hat trick of riling up these same people to indulge in the worst of their nativist fears and resentments — specifically ignoring their own economic interests. But the repubs will be trotting out Reagan this campaign season (can’t use BushCo, of course) as an example of wise economic policy. Don’t believe it — Ronald Reagan is specifically responsible for how we got here and we can’t afford any more of it.
Welcome to your Monday open thread. Share what’s on your mind with the rest of us. Don’t be shy!
Once again Sarah Palin is responsible for another round of ugliness. Conservatives are still up in arms that the 1st amendment covers everyone, including people they don’t like. This weekend an anti-Park51 (Cordoba House) protest was held in NYC. One man found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, looking too foreign.
At an anti-Islam rally yesterday at Ground Zero, a person of color wearing a skull cap and wandering through the crowd was targeted with insults and nearly attacked by protesters for the offense of looking vaguely Muslim. The videographer summarized the episode this way:
A man walks through the crowd at the Ground Zero protest and is mistaken as a Muslim. The crowd turns on him and confronts him. The man in the blue hard hat calls him a coward and tries to fight him. The tall man who I think was one of the organizers tried to get between the two men. Later I caught up with the man who’s name is Kenny. He is a Union carpenter who works at Ground Zero. We discussed what a scary moment that was for him.
These are the same people who told us they were exercising their Constitutional rights by acting like asses at townhall meetings and waving guns around in crowds. I guess the 1st amendment only applies to them, huh?
Finally, a good news story for the day. Corporations can donate unlimited money to political campaigns, but should they?
Target still finds itself facing a backlash:
After weeks of public protest over its financial support of an organization that backed a GOP gubernatorial candidate opposed to gay rights, Target Corp. now faces a new form of pressure: demands from institutional shareholders that it revamp its donation process to avoid the chance of additional backfires.
…
Imprudent donations can potentially have a major negative impact on company reputations and business if they don’t carefully and fully assess a candidate’s positions,” said Tim Smith, a senior vice president at Walden Asset Management, one of three asset management firms that this week filed a resolution asking the retail giant to overhaul its campaign donation policies. He cautioned that funding ballot initiatives, as many corporations have done, “can similarly backfire.”
The three management firms sponsoring the resolution — Calvert Asset Management, Trillium Asset Management and Walden — together hold $57.5 million of Target stock. Other institutional investors, including the giant New York state pension fund and union investment managers, are considering co-signing the resolution, which calls on Target’s independent directors to review the criteria and risks in making donations to organizations active in political campaigns.
“Target should have carefully considered the implications that direct political contributions can have toward shareholder value,” said Ola Fadahunsi, spokesman for New York Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, the pension fund’s sole trustee. “It’s troubling to think that they can fund controversial candidates without properly assessing the risks and rewards involved.”
This country is divided enough without turning into “red” companies and “blue” companies
They really need to own this:
Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) on Sunday said lawmakers who have not signed onto Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to balance the budget lacked “courage” and could be targeted by the conservative tea party movement as a result.
Armey’s comments on NBC’s “Meet the Press” came just moments after Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) sidestepped a question about Ryan’s plan, which looks to balance the budget by reinventing slimmer versions of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the tax code…. […]
“All Paul Ryan is saying is let Social Security be voluntary, let Medicare be voluntary,” Armey said. “The fact that he only has 13 co-sponsors is a big reason why our folks are agitated against the Republicans as well as the Democrats — the difference between being a co-sponsor of Ryan or not is a thing called courage.”
Steve Benen pushes the message home:
To this extent, Armey raises a reasonable argument: if Paul is putting on paper what Republicans really believe, why don’t they have the courage of their convictions? Why not have the guts to endorse a budget plan that reflects their actual thinking?
Armey and Ryan think the radical roadmap should be part of the debate — and oddly enough, I couldn’t agree more. Are Republicans on board with Ryan’s roadmap or not? Is his plan a reflection of what GOP candidates would do with their majority? Shouldn’t voters have a chance to hear from Republicans about this before there’s an election?
I, too, couldn’t agree more. Every Republican needs to be asked if they support Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan – and they need to answer.
Meanwhile, in the most Republican County in California Conservatives may get the chance to live (or perish) by their principles…
Residents in Modoc County, in the remote northeastern corner of California, will soon vote on whether to tax themselves to save their local hospital.
The county has gone broke trying to keep the hospital open, and a fractious debate has erupted in this proudly conservative frontier community over the best way forward… [T]he county hospital in Alturas– even with its limited services– is a lifeline to the people who live here. The closest full-service hospitals are hours away, and the nearby medical centers over the mountains are often unreachable during winter storms.
…The hospital is not just a lifeline– it’s an economic engine, even if it is just sputtering along. Like many rural hospitals, Modoc Medical Center is the largest employer in town, and people here worry what will happen if it closes.
Wonder how long Modoc County lasts if the hospital closes. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present America’s next Ghost Town – courtesy of the GOP ideology.
Republican Ron Johnson is running for the U.S. Senate seat in Wisconsin against Russ Feingold. It’s another one of those suprisingly close races and Johnson is giving Feingold a run for his money. Johnson may not have gotten as much attention as other nutty GOP Senate candidates like Sharron Angle or Rand Paul but he certainly belongs in that group. He talked to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about how climate change is really the sun’s fault:
Johnson:
If you take a look at geologic time, we’ve had huge climate swings. We’re sitting here in Wisconsin. Had it not been for climate swings, we’d be sitting on a two or three hundred foot thick glacier. Man wasn’t around back then. So no, I absolutely do not believe that the science of man-caused climate change is proven. Not by any stretch of the imagination. I think it’s far more likely that it’s just sunspot activity, or something just in the geologic eons of time where we have changes in the climate.
The Middle Ages was an extremely warm period of time, too. It wasn’t like there were tons of cars on the road. So it always strikes me as a little absurd for anybody to think, Okay, this is the sweet spot in geologic time for climate. And it’s such a good place, that we have spent trillions of dollars, and do great harm to our economy, on a fool’s errand. I don’t think we can do anything about controling what the climate is.
I wonder if the countless scientists studying this issue ever asked themselves whether their scientific models allowed for the possibility that they were erroneously designating this moment geological time’s climate change “sweet spot.”
The sunspot argument is a popular one in the denier community. Blogger Steven Andrew shows why this argument is wrong (the blog post is about a different denier, with the same claim):
That bold statement is not only wrong, it is 100% wrong and he knows it. Below are the sunspot and solar irradiance cycles plotted on the same graph by year courtesy of NASA.
As you can see, both sunpots and solar irradiance move together and both are just barely coming out of a deep minimum. The sun has been in the coolest part of its cycle, with the least number of sunspots, for the last two or three years (2010 is not complete yet, but the events so far are yet another reason record heat on earth is so worrisome).
Oh well, there goes that talking point. Or it would go away in a sane world. Since we don’t live in a sane world where facts matter I’m sure they’ll keep repeating this talking point.
When I lived in Buffalo, Carl Paladino was I name that I saw everywhere. He’s a wealthy developer in the region. Paladino is running for the GOP nomination for the governor of New York (he’s taking on Rick Lazio in the primary) and he’s a complete nutter:
Back in April, emails from Paladino surfaced in which he forwarded bestiality videos and tons of racist jokes. He fired back, saying, in short, that he’s not racist and he doesn’t enjoy watching horses have sex with women. But whatever, the past is the past, right? Since then he’s been laying down his platform, and taking on issues the Tea Party loves to hate, like welfare. Besides reducing the state’s budget by 20 percent and cutting taxes, Paladino has a solution for people on welfare: relocate them to prison dormitories. Paladino spoke to the AP:
Instead of handing out the welfare checks, we’ll teach people how to earn their check. We’ll teach them personal hygiene … the personal things they don’t get when they come from dysfunctional homes.”
You have to teach them basic things – taking care of themselves, physical fitness. In their dysfunctional environment, they never learned these things.”
Paladino cites the positives of moving poor people into prison dorms — they have access to “basketball courts, bathroom facilities, toilet facilities.” What’s not to like about that? And Paladino has the type of street cred the average Tea Party Joe is looking for. He’s a wealthy real estate developer and is opposed to Muslims building things in America.
I’m sure he’s got even better ideas. What about debtor’s prison and indentured servitude? I don’t think those have been tried in a while.
I find this new “libertarian” Republican party a bit confusing. They still want to control uteruses and they want government intervention in where religious centers are built (if they’re the “wrong” religion). Now Paladino also wants a massive government internment of poor people because they need to play basketball and learn hygiene.
John Kowalko, the Democratic candidate in the 25th District, will announce his candidacy at 11:00 AM at the Newark Senior Center. Come on out to hear John give ’em hell.
We all know the budget problems facing our cities, counties and state governments. Still, what’s Philadelphia’s next great idea, taxing lemonade stands?
It would probably be a better revenue model than their plan to charged bloggers $300 for a business privilege license:
Between her blog and infrequent contributions to ehow.com, over the last few years she says she’s made about $50. To [Marilyn] Bess, her website is a hobby. To the city of Philadelphia, it’s a potential moneymaker, and the city wants its cut.
In May, the city sent Bess a letter demanding that she pay $300, the price of a business privilege license.
“The real kick in the pants is that I don’t even have a full-time job, so for the city to tell me to pony up $300 for a business privilege license, pay wage tax, business privilege tax, net profits tax on a handful of money is outrageous,” Bess says.
It would be one thing if Bess’ website were, well, an actual business, or if the amount of money the city wanted didn’t outpace her earnings six-fold. Sure, the city has its rules; and yes, cash-strapped cities can’t very well ignore potential sources of income. But at the same time, there must be some room for discretion and common sense.
When Bess pressed her case to officials with the city’s now-closed tax amnesty program, she says, “I was told to hire an accountant.”
She’s not alone. After dutifully reporting even the smallest profits on their tax filings this year, a number — though no one knows exactly what that number is — of Philadelphia bloggers were dispatched letters informing them that they owe $300 for a privilege license, plus taxes on any profits they made.
Even if, as with Sean Barry, that profit is $11 over two years.
So the city wants some people to pay more in taxes fees than they earn. Brilliant!
That a celebrity/gossip site, (Gawker) is mocking these idgits is nice. Nicer still would be ABC/CBS/NBC News mocking them. Baby steps.
These two posts by Tobin have a leitmotif.
This post looks at the Ting/Protack/O’Donnell primary numbers to get an idea of how many “Protack” voters O’Donnell needs to win to make it a race (assuming Mike Castle has the Jan Ting voters locked up and O’Donnell still has the most easily duped, idiot voters locked up).
Spoiler Alert: O’Donnell has no chance in hell. If Castle keeps the Ting’lers (the Ting-o-philes?, the Jan-Sports?), he can give away something like 4 out of 5 “Protack” voters and still kick her ass.
This post looks at how Mike Protack made out in his various primaries in the NCC district that he is now running for council person in. Spoiler Alert: Voters don’t like Mike Protack.
The Bottom Line: Elective politics is, in the end, a numbers game. I never cease to be astonished by the fact that O’Donnell and Protack can’t grasp that simple fact.
O’Donnell’s goon squad looks to be loading up to unleash an ethics attack on Castle.
A few weeks back, this post detailing a corrupt group of GOP legislators, began popped up to the top of “Mike Castle” google searches.
And now, we have the rough outlines of “Mike Castle is a money grubbing ethics challenged scum-bag” theme trotted out here – and picked up for a slightly large audience here.
These are the buzz words to listen for over the next couple of weeks…
“Since Castle’s election to Congress in 1992, three of Castle’s top five contributors have been from the banking industry — MBNA Corp (acquired by Bank of America in 2006), Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. And 10 of his top 20 contributors were banking firms.”
I’m sure I speak for everyone here when I say that I hope O’Donnell’s attacks are vicious and effective.
Bonini’s signs really bug the shit out of me.
The the line: “it’s YOUR money” is pure GOP dog whistle racism and this is how it works.
The whole republican system is about nursing grievances. It is about division and, ginning up outrage. It is a strategy that is inherently un-American because the whole the point of Democracy is to come together in goodwill and solve problems. Coming together to solve problems is something we’ve been able to accomplish for two-hundred years.
Blessed with abundant material wealth, we’ve elected governments to plan for the future, deliberate and collectively implement beneficial projects. On the local, state and national level, we have instituted systems which pool our money in order to invest it in schools, infra-structure, research, and all manner of civilization building projects large and small. To paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, we all chip in to have a civilized society. It is OUR money.
Republicans like Bonini are more interested in power than that are in civilization or even democracy. They have taken the cynical, divisive course of painting ALL taxes as theft. For Bonini all taxes are confiscatory. It is not OUR money. It is YOUR money, and that is where the racism comes in.
The Republican gripes and grievances theme is so baked into modern American politics that he does Bonini does not even need to make the racism explicit. The slogan “It is YOUR money” implies the grievance that all Republican politicians are playing on. It is YOUR money – don’t let THEM spend YOUR money on unworthy black and brown people. (Ronald Reagan, may you rot in hell for what you’ve wrought.)
It does not matter to Bonini that the US has the third lowest tax burden among Industrialized countries. (Only Ireland and Iceland, two countries that are now utterly insolvent, have lower personal taxes).
No, it is all about nursing racial grievances. Forget the fact that US corporate taxes are less than 1% of GDP. Bonini’s, “It’s YOUR money” BS is not about taxes. It is about race.
Is Bonini sending around pictures of the White House with watermelons growing on the South Lawn? Who knows. One thing is certain – he is not above using the GOP’s coded racism in this treasurers race.
UPDATE: For anyone who needs help contextualizing Bonini’s casual racism, I recommend reading this timely kos post:
It’s not surprising that this generation of Republicans has made a hero out of Joeseph McCarthy. They admire the way in which he cowed his enemies and the way in which he distorted the meaning of liberty. They admire him because he generated fear.
The question of “have you no sense of decency” has been answered. They do not — at least not one that rises above their hunger for power.
Hello everyone and welcome to your weekend open thread. I’m typing this up on the run because I’m busy running around today. This is the first ever blog post that I’ve written on my iTouch. No links yet, you’ll have to provide your own!