Tag Archives: Republican Bamboozlement

Summer Of Spittle II Coming?

Huffington Post reports that Paul Ryan’s angry town hall is starting to look like a trend. Here’s just one example from their report:

Rep. Robert Dold, (R-Ill.):

Fresh off voting for the so-called Paul Ryan budget plan on Friday, newly-elected Congressman Robert Dold returned to Buffalo Grove Saturday where constituents questioned him about several elements of the Republican budget.

[…]

But Dold couldn’t even get to the end of the presentation before audience members began peppering him with questions about the Ryan budget, named after House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin. It began with audience members telling Dold they don’t believe chopping 10 percentage points off the highest corporate tax rate will create jobs. A handful of people in the audience identified themselves as business owners and accountants who said their effective corporate income tax rate is already lower than the lowest rates proposed in the Ryan plan. They pointed to companies such as GE that pay almost no taxes despite billions in profits as evidence.

[…]

Some in the audience then told Dold they don’t like the idea in the Ryan budget plan of Medicare becoming a voucher program that makes senior citizens buy private health insurance about 10 years from now. Audience members said buying private insurance is a shell game where no one really knows what costs a company will cover or to what degree.

I think we will be hearing quite a bit about this over the summer. Stay tuned!

Wednesday Morning Fun: CRI

I have been thinking that CRI, which stands for “Caesar Rodney Institute” is probably secretly an acronym for something else.  Let’s come up with other things that CRI might REALLY mean.  I’ll start:

  • Charlies Risky Investment
  • Caustic Republican Idioms
  • Complete Republican Idiocy

There are so many ways to go.  Let’s see if we can find a good one to use when we refer to them in the future.

The Very Serious Paul Ryan Budget

Yesterday press favorite Paul Ryan revealed his plan to reduce the deficit by cutting taxes for the rich and ending Medicare and Medicaid. The plan is to turn Medicaid into a block grant for states (because states are just itching to get out from the federal burden of actually insuring people) and to turn Medicaid into vouchers for people under 55. Of course this will totally work because even though people over 55 love their Medicare and anticipate getting it, people who are 54 are completely indifferent. Jonathan Bernstein offers a warning to reporters – check the numbers:

Indeed, looking through Paul Ryan’s budget document (which has a lot more rhetoric than it has hard numbers), I see at least two obvious causes for skepticism. The first is that Ryan is counting on considerable budget savings — $1.4 trillion over the decade — by repealing the Affordable Care Act. Of course, the CBO has said that ACA will be a net budget winner over the next decade, and a major winner after that. Is Ryan using honest CBO numbers, but just juggling the presentation? Or is he simply ignoring neutral evaluations of the effects of health care reform? Ryan couldn’t explain the numbers during his press conference today.

The second clue is that Ryan refers (on page 59 of the proposal) to “dynamic” scoring of taxes. This, of course, is the same supply-side nonsense that Republicans have been peddling since 1981. It’s easy to show major deficit reductions if you slash taxes but pretend that it will yield revenue increases, but in reality, of course, it increases the deficit.

Tim Fernholz, meanwhile, points out another flaw: It’s one thing to set up budget targets or “caps” for the future, but quite another to actually hit them. It’s fair to credit Ryan and the Republicans with supporting real cuts even if they are talking about specific measures that have no chance of winning the support of the Democratic Senate and President Obama. But it’s a lot harder to know what to make of budget caps unaccompanied by specific program cuts.

The Economist points out that Ryan’s budget uses some really strange assumptions from the Heritage Foundation (the same people who said Bush’s budget would give a surplus):

PAUL RYAN has officially revealed the House Republicans’ budget proposal, and we will have a detailed analysis of it up in short order. Reactions to the plan will vary (sharply, it’s safe to say). But whatever your take on the policy proposals, it’s worth approaching the rosy claims made on its behalf with extreme caution. Claims like:

A study just released by the Heritage Center for Data Analysis projects that The Path to Prosperity will help create nearly one million new private-sector jobs next year, bring the unemployment rate down to 4% by 2015, and result in 2.5 million additional private-sector jobs in the last year of the decade. It spurs economic growth, with $1.5 trillion in additional real GDP over the decade. According to Heritage’s analysis, it would result in $1.1 trillion in higher wages and an average of $1,000 in additional family income each year.

That sounds unbelievably good, and for good reason—the figures in the Heritage analysis are simply outlandish. According to the study cited above, Mr Ryan’s plan will bring the unemployment rate down to 6.4% next year, 4.0% in 2015, and 2.8% in 2021. When the Obama administration projected a 5.9% unemployment rate in 2015 falling to 5.3% by the end of the decade, the Congressional Budget Office chided it for excessive optimism. The Federal Reserve has been indicating that the long-run unemployment rate in America is likely to be between 5.0% and 6.0%, and their estimate has risen over the past year. During the heady economic days of the late 1990s, the unemployment rate never got down to 4%. CORRECTION: Actually, the unemployment rate did dip just below 4% in 2000. I don’t think anyone considers this a sustainable level of unemployment, however, and indeed, the first time the rate dipped below 4% the Fed responded with a 50 basis-point increase in the federal funds rate.

2.8% unemployment! Hey, that’s the Republicans jobs plan. Step 1 – end Medicare, Step 2 ????, Step 3 JOBS!

Just a few minutes of combing through the numbers finds a lot of strange things. Ezra Klein finds that Ryan assumes that repeal of the Affordable Care Act will save $1.4T, rather than cost $200B estimated by the CBO. Ryan’s budget actually cuts taxes, so it won’t decrease the deficit until the magival Medicare cuts go into effect. Krugman points out the obvious – the Medicare cuts will not stick, it will only create a lot political uncertainty:

If the Medicare Advantage precedent holds, what will happen in 2022 or a bit later is that Congress will react to the fury of younger seniors — who see that those born just a few years earlier have vastly better benefits than they do — by increasing the vouchers. And the end result, in that case, would be that the Ryan plan substantially increases Medicare costs; remember that the payment increases that were part of the 2003 Medicare bill, introduced to rescue failing Medicare Advantage programs, have resulted in large overpayments, adding hundreds of billions to the program’s costs.

Alternatively, if the benefit cuts stick, you’ll have a lot of furious people realizing that they are paying high taxes to support lavish medical care for older Baby Boomers, while being themselves condemned to pleading with insurance companies to provide coverage in return for an inadequate voucher. Plus, private insurance companies, making lots of money off the voucher business, will cast their eyes on those potential profit centers, aka seniors, still getting government insurance. So traditional Medicare will be in the firing line — and all those assurances about how nobody currently over 55 will be hurt will turn out to be empty.

I wonder why we don’t have the Tea Party screaming ZOMG SOCIALISM! about Ryan’s voucher plan. After all, he’s providing vouchers to buy private insurance (just like the Affordable Care Act!), except a crappy version that doesn’t increase with health care cost increases.

Lying Is OK If You Believe It

Media Matters had a big scoop yesterday. They obtained an audio tape of Fox News’s managing editor admitting to a crowd that he lied to Fox viewers about Barack Obama.

Speaking in 2009 onboard a pricey Mediterranean cruise sponsored by a right-wing college, Fox Washington managing editor Bill Sammon described his attempts the previous year to link Obama to “socialism” as “mischievous speculation.” Sammon, who is also a Fox News vice president, acknowledged that “privately” he had believed that the socialism allegation was “rather far-fetched.”

“Last year, candidate Barack Obama stood on a sidewalk in Toledo, Ohio, and first let it slip to Joe the Plumber that he wanted to quote, ‘spread the wealth around,’ ” said Sammon. “At that time, I have to admit, that I went on TV on Fox News and publicly engaged in what I guess was some rather mischievous speculation about whether Barack Obama really advocated socialism, a premise that privately I found rather far-fetched.”

Media Matters had previously published several memos from Sammon instructing Fox News to use Republican talking points. However, Fox News has still insisted that its news coverage was straight news coverage. In fact I saw Fox News’s Bret Baier defend Fox on Jon Stewart’s show just last week. Sammon defended himself in a rather unusual manner.

Howard Kurtz contacted Sammon for comment, and here’s how Sammon defended himself:

In an interview, Sammon says his reference to “mischevious speculation” was “my probably inartful way of saying, ‘Can you believe how far this thing has come?’” The socialism question indeed “struck me as a far-fetched idea” in 2008. “I considered it kind of a remarkable notion that we would even be having the conversation.”

He doesn’t regret repeatedly raising it on the air because, Sammon says, “it was a main point of discussion on all the channels, in all the media” — and by 2009 he was “astonished by how the needle had moved.”

That’s pretty remarkable. Sammon is conceding that the idea did indeed strike him as far fetched in 2008, even though he and his network aggressively promoted it day in and day out throughout the campaign. And he’s defending this by pointing out that the idea ended up gaining traction, as if this somehow justifies the original act of dishonesty!

Now, Sammon is also claiming here that Obama’s behavior in office ultimately persuaded him that the original diagnosis of Obama as a socialist turned out to be correct after all. That in itself, of course, is also a ridiculous falsehood. But that aside, the bottom line here is that he doesn’t regret having spread an idea he personally found far-fetched, because so doing helped ensure that the far-fetched idea ultimately gained widespread acceptance. That’s a peculiar attitude for a “news” executive, isn’t it?

NPR covered this story yesterday. Sammon defended himself by saying that subsequent events – the bank bailout and the auto bailout – meant that he was actually right. Of course he didn’t call them bailouts, he called it a government takeover of the banks and the auto industry. He should know, since he’s a member of the media, that those two programs were initiated by George W. Bush. Will we see speculation on whether Bush is a socialist?

Repeal The Job-Killing Speaker Of The House

In a press conference Tuesday Speaker of the House John Boehner was asked about jobs:

“Do you have any sort of estimate on how many jobs will be lost through this?” Pacifica Radio’s Leigh Ann Caldwell inquired at a news conference just before the House began its debate on the cuts.

Boehner stood firm in his polished tassel loafers. “Since President Obama has taken office the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs, and if some of those jobs are lost in this, so be it,” he said.

So be it. Boehner’s got his priorities. He wants to undo the last Congress (really has there ever been a more clownish and juvenile Congress?) plus there’s women to punish. Jobs just need to take a back seat.

Dana Milbank does a follow-up, just how many job losses are we talking about anyway?

Well, Mr. Speaker, I do. I checked with budget expert Scott Lilly of the Center for American Progress, and, using the usual multipliers, he calculated that the cuts – a net of $59 billion in the last half of fiscal 2011 – would lead to the loss of 650,000 government jobs, and the indirect loss of 325,000 more jobs as fewer government workers travel and buy things. That’s nearly 1 million jobs – possibly enough to tip the economy back into recession.

I really miss Nancy Pelosi as Speaker.

How the World Sees Us

…at least via our right wingnut crazies.

This hit my mailbox ALOT over the past few days, and I cringed every time I saw it: Middle East unrest according to Glenn Beck and friends. The Guardian rounds up a the crazy, the stupid and the dangerous of the Wingnut-o-Sphere, and you should go over there to see it all. They’ve got audio and video clips as well as transcripts that they react to, this one on Glenn Beck’s (who thinks that Tunisia is our “Archduke Ferdinand moment”)new theory of the apocalypse:

To cut to the chase, a new caliphate will emerge in the Middle East and push further east until China, as Beck puts it, says “Knock it off guys” and takes over India, reaching some way into Pakistan. The caliphate will then push north, which is when it will absorb the UK:

What happens to the overwhelming radical population of the UK, of radical Islamicists. What happens? Do they just sit around on their hands or do they see an opportunity? When you take the Marxists and you combine them with the radical in Islam the whole world begins to implode

So there you have it, an “Archduke Ferdinand moment” which will split Europe, the Middle East and Asia into Chinese and radical Islamic zones. In the full Beck, he also introduces Bill Ayers (who Sarah Palin had in mind when she accused Barack Obama of “palling around with terrorists”), Hizbullah and Code Pink, a feminist antiwar group. But that’s enough for now.

Fox Noise seems to want to blame the ACA for the Egyptian uprising; Michael Savage repeats his bullshit about Obama being a part of radical Islam; Frank Gaffney claiming that the Muslim Brotherhood is already in the US government; and, of course, the chief idiot himself, Bill O’Reilly getting his OG conspiracies on by reaching back and dusting off the Domino Theory. Most appalling is this one, with a fake JFK voice calling for the impeachment of Obama:

It is appalling enough that these fools are making ALOT of money fearmongering and lying to their audiences without having the rest of the world judging us on the sheer prevalence of this kind of bullshit on our airwaves. The ironic thing is, that one of the persistent themes of these fraudsters is that somehow the world is losing respect for the US. If that it true, then these guys will need to answer for some of it.

Paying China First

In a nutshell, that seems to be forming up as the GOP plan to avoid defaulting on the US debt if there is no agreement on the debt ceiling. From TPM:

“I intend to introduce legislation that would require the Treasury to make interest payments on our debt its first priority in the event that the debt ceiling is not raised,” Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) wrote in a Friday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

If passed, Toomey’s plan would require the government to cut large checks to foreign countries, and major financial institutions, before paying off its obligations to Social Security beneficiaries and other citizens owed money by the Treasury — that is, if the U.S. hits its debt ceiling.

Toomey’s legislation is SB 163.

It boggles the mind, doesn’t it? On all kinds of levels — because not only does the so-called Party of Business not quite get the full range of US obligations, but they are perfectly willing to prioritize protecting the principal and interest obligations of foreign governments over their obligations to, military payrolls or Social Security recipients. And there is a House version too. And as the Treasury officials point out, not defaulting on the Chinese doesn’t mean you haven’t defaulted:

“[T]his idea is unworkable,” said Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin in a statement. “It would not actually prevent default, since it would seek to protect only principal and interest payments, and not other legal obligations of the U.S., from non-payment. Adopting a policy that payments to investors should take precedence over other U.S. legal obligations would merely be default by another name, since the world would recognize it as a failure by the U.S. to stand behind its commitments.”

But what a ham-fisted way to try to send a signal to investors that *they’ll* be fine — it is only (as usual) the American people (and American contractors) who they plan to screw over by not addressing the debt limit.

Welcome to the era of Keystone Cops government, folks.

ps. — I read about this on a number of blogs today, even though these bills were filed last week. Interesting that this hasn’t hit the traditional media yet — this is a Really Big Deal (which makes the GOP look really stupid), so am interested to watch how long it takes for the media to catch this bit of foolishness.

Dispatch From The GOP Braintrust

When you read the next quote, please keep in mind that Michele Bachmann is thinking about running for president.

Speaking at an Iowans For Tax Relief event, Bachmann (R-MN) also noted how slavery was a “scourge” on American history, but added that “we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.”

“And,” she continued, “I think it is high time that we recognize the contribution of our forbearers who worked tirelessly — men like John Quincy Adams, who would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country.”

John Quincy Adams was a zombie! He was a zombie because he cared so much about ending slavery. He should thought of that whole Civil War thing much earlier. Oh well, it’s not like people think the founding fathers were perfect or something.

Watching the CRI Working Hard for Their Climate Change Denier Merit Badge

Required, apparently, for full participation in the Wingularity.

Again, via Tommywonk, we learn that CRI (and their Director of Center for Energy Competitiveness, David T. Stephenson) have been posting up their promised *discussions* of the so-called flawed foundations of Delaware’s Energy policy. There are three new missives today: Delaware Energy Policy Assumptions Are Misleading; Global Warming Debate, A Tale of Two Theories and Global Warming Debate Basics, How Good Is the Temperature Record.

Veterans (and veteran watchers ) of the global warming debate* immediately recognize what is going on here. None of this is original work, of course, but another regurgitation of the petrochemical industry’s manufactured talking points and pre-rehearsed obsfuscations. There is nothing here that is an argument among genuine climate scientists — this is all ginned up by folks on the payroll of the firms who have financial interests in making sure that the real scientific conversations are completely politicized. Because they think that was win in a political argument since there is no science to back up their claims.

Anyway, I’ll be spending more time with this later on, but what struck me when I read these was that the CRI is apparently just going to regurgitate some subset of the already discredited arguments.

We should create CRI Climate Change Denier Bingo cards with this list and play bingo as we watch what arguments they trot out. Anyone want to take a go at this? I’ll provide prizes for those who play if we can get the cards….

(*which isn’t really a debate, because science just isn’t done like this, but we can’t convince our media of that)

It’s Hard Work Being Scalia

It takes a lot of work to wilfully misinterpret the 14th Amendment but Antonin Scalia is up for the job. Not only does Scalia redefine the word “citizens” to mean men only but he also just skips over the true legislative history of the amendment.

A legitimate professional historian writes:

It’s not even clear Scalia has the legislative history of the 14th Amendment right. Rep. Benjamin Butler was present at the creation, and he believed the 14th Am. had the potential to guarantee equal protection for female citizens. Same with Chief Justice Salmon Chase, who affirmed a woman’s equal right to practice law in his 1873 dissent in Bradwell v. Illinois. Chase was not only closer than his fellow justices to the men who wrote the Amendment, he was much more deeply involved in the debates of the Reconstruction period.

I’d go stronger. Scalia is clearly mistaken about the legislative history. He said “Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that.” Clearly at least some people thought that.

I guess Scalia’s founding fathers ouija board is broken.

If We Had A Real Think Tank In Delaware…

…they’d be working overtime to make sure that this comes to fruition:

Company president Peter Mandelstam (of NRG Bluewater) says the goal is to bring the supply chain along with the windfarm, not merely to import foreign-made components.

What that means (for those more accustomed to reading the CRI silliness) is that there are people out there trying to make sure that not only does Bluewater Wind get built here, but that it brings with it manufacturing of turbines and other components to supply other windpower projects. These are likely to be truly well-paying manufacturing jobs — with benefits and everything — manufacturing very high value goods. The Markell Administration has had what looks to me as a real full court press on this.

Capturing this manufacturing right at the ground floor means that we’ll have years of good employment opportunities for some Delawareans. We won’t be getting anywhere near this kind of long-term benefit from any of the dirty energy that the CRI is trying to fight for. And manufacturing is something of the Holy Grail in current American economic policy. We need to better oriented to selling stuff to other people and you can’t do that unless you make stuff to buy.

Then again, the CRI doesn’t give a damn about Delaware getting a serious foothold in this new business. They only care about ensuring their full employment by making sure their fossil fuel funders get their money’s worth.

In Which We Find the CRI Beginning their Astroturf Campaign In Favor of Dirty Energy

First place to go to get up to speed on this is Tommywonk’s place, where he notes that they are retreating to that tried and true tactic of basically just making shit up.

But in addition to the point that Tommy makes — that they are making wild claims without showing how they get there — you can see that the grind starts in the very first paragraph:

  1. Why just focus on rates charged to industry? Residential rates are higher and residents don’t get a chance for any of the commercial discounts.
  2. Industries unlikely to locate here? Tell that to Fisker and the folks re-firing up the old Valero plant.
  3. And where did they get that figure of industries being charged 50% more than the national average? Recent EIA data shows that Delaware’s electricity rates to industry is 38% higher than average and a bit cheaper than our regional counterparts.

Since CRI is relatively new, it has been in interesting to watch them try to establish themselves. They’ve gotten some funding from and are networked with the State Policy Network, which is funded by folks with petrochemical interests (among others). They are trying to be the local Heritage Foundation, without getting much traction for their assigned movement conservative policy ideas. I hope that part of the reason for this has to do with the fact that much of what they are cranking out doesn’t have much basis in reality. Like this crazyness here. (They do better at working specifically Delaware issues, but caveat emptor still applies.)

Energy policy is vitally important to Delaware in ways that the funders of the CRI are probably threatened by. We produce no fossil fuels (this is a good thing) and wind energy will reduce our reliance on fossil fuel and nuclear fuel electricity. And the U of D is ground zero of some very exciting work on alternative energy development AND delivery. These are real long-term assets for this state, with great promise for us to be at the forefront of the alternative energy business. What we can’t afford is spending time re-debating what we already know — moving forward to capture what we can of this business is the job now.

We’ll see what the rest of this series has in store. Maybe the work will be more lucid than this. I’m not holding my breath though.

More GOP Hypocrisy on Earmarks!

Surprise, surprise, surprise!

The Atlantic Wire has been rounding up the hypocrisy over the past week as it seems clear that maybe the teajadis find something useful about being able to funnel money back to their Districts, after all. These articles round up some of the reporting or blogging being done showing that these guys can’t even manage to live up to the easy stuff — like No Earmarks:

Liberals: $1 Billion Earmark Request Reveals Tea Party ‘Hypocrisy’

They Were ‘For Earmarks Before They Were Against Them’ quips Time writer Alex Altman who proceeds to note an apparently contradictory action by Tea Party caucus leader Michele Bachman: “This is one more example of how rhetoric about the importance of fiscal austerity often doesn’t align with reality. This week Bachmann has denounced Congress’ $1.2 billion settlement with black farmers as ‘scamming the federal taxpayers.’ As the Minneapolis Star-Tribune points out, her family farm has received more than $250,000 in federal farm subsidies over the past decade.”

Republicans Backpedal on Earmarks–They’re Useful After All

You gotta love this strategy — just redefine what an Earmark is:

Let’s Just Redefine ‘Earmark’ Politico also quotes Phil Roe, a Republican representative from Tennessee, who says that there are earmarks and then there are earmarks. “It’s like what beauty is … Everyone knows what a bridge to nowhere is, or an airport that lands no airplanes, or a statue to you –everyone knows that’s bad. It’s easy to say what an earmark isn’t, rather than what an earmark is.”

A description of the slime:

It’s rank hypocrisy, really. First, Republicans try to claim their fiscal conservative bona fides with a purely symbolic and utterly pointless ban on earmarking. Then, after it passes, they turn around and redefine what an ‘earmark’ is so that they can continue funneling money to their districts. It stands as proof not only of their own phoniness, but also of the fact that ‘earmarking’ is part and parcel of a large government that spends a lot of money. No matter how you try to ban it, legislators will always find a way to get money and government to their district and their supporters.

Read both of them. And once again you’ll see these same hypocrites wringing their hands on how to get re-elected if they aren’t delivering goodies. Which is not much of a good signal for their program-cutting cojones, either. They’ll just work at cutting the legs out from under the people who can least afford it and transferring more tax money into the pockets of those that bought them.