Tag Archives: Republican Bamboozlement

Are Republicans Purposely Sabotaging The U.S.?

Republicans pulled a nifty trick in November. Despite the fact that it was Republican policies that broke the economy and Republicans have opposed every effort to fix the economy, Republicans benefited in the election because Democrats are the majority party and got the blame for the bad economy. Republicans seem to have gone collectively crazy – calling Obama both a fascist and a communist and saying that he’s the most left-wing president EVER!!!!! Pundits are starting to ask the question – do Republicans care if the country fails as long as it hurts Obama?

On Monday, Matt Yglesias chimed in, suggesting that the White House needed to be prepared for “deliberate economic sabotage” from Republicans. On Friday, after taking note of recent Republican attacks on the Fed’s quantitative easing program, Paul Krugman agreed:

The core reason for the attack on the Fed is self-interest, pure and simple. China and Germany want America to stay uncompetitive; Republicans want the economy to stay weak as long as there’s a Democrat in the White House.

Steve Benen collected these quotes today and added his concurrence: “We’re talking about a major political party,” he said, “possibly undermining the strength of the country — on purpose, in public, without apology or shame — for no other reason than to give themselves a campaign advantage in 2012.”

Strong statements! But here’s what’s really remarkable: virtually no one in any position of authority has picked up on this since Collender first suggested it. On the Republican side, practically everyone from the party leaders on down is thoroughly convinced that Barack Obama is one or more of: a socialist, an appeaser, a Chicago thug, a racist, a would-be killer of grandmas, and a president who wants to undermine everything that makes America great because he’s ashamed of his country. This is just standard rhetoric from Fox News pundits, radio show hosts, rank-and-file members of Congress, and party poobahs. It’s hardly even noteworthy anymore.

Just look at the new START treaty. Despite the fact that Reagan signed the first START treaty and previous treaties have been approved easily. Despite being begged by the military and former Republican leaders, approval of the treaty is uncertain at best.

Last week I Matt Yglesias called our system a “reverse parliamentary democracy” because we are run by the minority and not the majority. Mitch McConnell has admitted that his top priority is not the economy or jobs, it’s denying President Obama a second term. Republicans have benefitted by not getting much of the blame for the poor economy. Now that they control one branch of Congress, this should change.

The Hypocrisy, It Burns

The hypocrisy is strong in this one:

Republican Andy Harris, an anesthesiologist who defeated freshman Democrat Frank Kratovil on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, reacted incredulously when informed that federal law mandated that his government-subsidized health care policy would take effect on Feb. 1 – 28 days after his Jan. 3rd swearing-in.

“He stood up and asked the two ladies who were answering questions why it had to take so long, what he would do without 28 days of health care,” said a congressional staffer who saw the exchange. The benefits session, held behind closed doors, drew about 250 freshman members, staffers and family members to the Capitol Visitors Center auditorium late Monday morning,”.

“Harris then asked if he could purchase insurance from the government to cover the gap,” added the aide, who was struck by the similarity to Harris’s request and the public option he denounced as a gateway to socialized medicine.

Oh the horror of going uninsured! Of course he won’t be uninsured, he can purchase insurance from his former employer to cover the gap under the COBRA law. Does Harris even realize that there a millions of Americans who can’t afford insurance and millions that have been determined to be uninsurable until the ACA was passed? I think the Marylanders that elected Dr. Harris are going to be disappointed with a Representative that doesn’t understand what real people experience. But, it’s OK, he’s a Republican, so he can give you a long list of things he’s scared of.

My favorite part is his explanation:

Nix said Harris, who is the father of five, wasn’t being hypocritical – he was just pointing out the inefficiency of government-run health care.

He was just pointing out the inefficiency of not having healthcare on DAY 1. Kinda like normal people, some who never get any healthcare.

In Which We Find the CRI Making Stuff Up Again To Try To Scare People

Seriously — they are actually PAYING money for their bullshit. And the new bullshit is today’s amateurish hand-wringing about Delaware’s debt situation and how apparently this is supposed to be a sword of Damocles for state Democrats by the CRI’s resident economist. An economist who apparently aspires to be the local version of the Laffer curve guy.

It is hard to know where to start, but let’s start with the obvious. There is not one single claim here that has been sourced to anything you can trace or check. Not a single number cited or claim made gets a reference to where you may be able to find that statistic in its original context. (There’s nothing with better references on their website, either) As most of the readers of this blog already know — this is a typical wingnut tactic. Just throw numbers and claims out there and try to make them the CW. It isn’t too hard to do — especially since any media outlet who may be inclined to explore this further will do so from the frame of this article (when will this bring down Democrats) vs whether this data is as dire as it is made out to be and what would that mean to the rest of us. Horserace vs information you can really use. If you pay attention to the local media, listen for this. If you hear them having on about Delaware’s debt being a problem for Democrats, you will have seen first hand how wingnuts get their media frames into circulation.

But let’s look at this:

First, Delaware residents are not paying the real bill for the runaway state and local government spending that has occurred over the past decade. Delaware exports 44 percent of its state and local tax burden, ranking fifth among all the states in being able to successfully shift the state and local tax burden out of state.

This isn’t even especially deft — scare people about not paying the bills for government, then tell them that the state does a pretty damn fine job of getting non-residents to pay alot of money into the system. *boggle* I have no idea where he got the ranking from, but I’m guessing that the tax shift data came from here.

Or how about this:

In addition, the state of Delaware has held taxes down by running up debt. Over the last decade, Delaware has gone from the middle of the pack on debt per capita to the fifth-highest among all states. State debt has doubled over the past seven years.

Did you catch the trick here? Comparison of a decade of debt-per-capita data to *seven years* of state debt increases. Bullshit and no references to where this data comes from again. Not to mention this glosses over what may have happened to state bonding activity over the years of the recession. There are states who reached their legal limits, some states pulled back significantly on bond activity for awhile, and part of ARRA is a subsidized Build America Bond that states can issue (and Delaware did). Plus (and I’m not completely certain of this), Delaware seems pretty disciplined about using bond revenues for capital expenditures (or in refinancing capital) rather than operational ones.

Or this:

Not to mention the fact that local property taxes are kept low because public education is funded primarily at the state level. Delaware has the third-lowest property taxes as a percentage of median home value among all the states.

So it is a *problem* that local property taxes are kept low? Or maybe he meant to say that the property taxes are artificially low, since there may not have been a reassessment in living memory. (Hyperbole) But also think about the housing bubble bust that we continue to feel the effects of and you have to wonder how much of a reassement could we have managed that wouldn’t have damaged governments more than they already were.

But, wait, there’s more!

Counter to that, the voter participation rate for government employees is typically high. AFSCME and the teachers union have been very involved in this election cycle in Delaware.

The voter participation rate for the teabaggers was very high this year too. As were the likely Chamber of Commerce types (add your repub-leaning group here). So the fact that people who belong to a union are exercising their franchise is supposed to be scary while belligerent teabaggers and their funders are not is meant to be scary to the folks who still think that ACORN stole elections.

He goes on to predict that taxes will go up because some of the tax advantages will dry up and because the stimulus goes away. He is right that the stimulus goes away and some of the advantages may dry up — but certainly not all of them — but it also means that there are likely some opportunities here too. Stapleford wants you to know that the Dodd-Frank banking regulation will also mean decreased revenues for Delaware, without ever citing *how* that might happen. Just the standard issue wingnut talk radio declaration that it will happen. What Stapleford does NOT do, however, is predict that the prices of everything will increase some and nor does he point to the magic talisman that will protect the State from having to pay any of those increased costs. Especially health care costs.

And while he is waiting for the tax burden to increase here, he certainly does not recommend any additional exercises the state can do to reduce costs even further. If someone was listening to me, I would spend more time taking a look at the work the state does that ought to be done by counties or municipalities — or in the places where that work overlaps. I mean, why does DelDOT have to do (or fund) so much of the snow plowing on non-DelDOT maintained roads? School systems do collect some portion of property taxes — telling them that the state contribution to budgets is holding at 2008 levels and they have to get the rest otherwise seems reasonable to me. There are local governments thinking about downsizing — how about helping them get there?

Which isn’t to say that this year’s budget isn’t another minefield, because it is. And Democrats should be On Notice here to navigate this minefield carefully. This is the year to make the tough decisions, because we all know all bets are off in 2012.

But of course, Stapleford’s piece isn’t about policy or even providing voters with any data that you can use to make decisions about your government. It is about trying to set up a Dems In Trouble storyline in the media, while pretending that none of these problems would even be in existence in the repubs were in control of state government. Nobody here will fall this this bullshit, but be on the lookout for the usual media suspects who *will*.

ps. I’m sure I spent way more time on this post — just looking for data! — than Stapleford did writing his BS. I, however, just gave up part of my Sunday afternoon for this with no possibility of participation in the Wingnut Welfare League. Amazing how much money conservatives have thrown out there to make sure that people are well and thoroughly lied to.

Yet Another Republican Talking Point Proved False

We’ve been hearing for a while about how Arizona is now a hellhole because of all the illegal immigrants. Arizona politicians want to “build the danged fence” to keep all these lawless immigrants out. Little do they know that Republican policies already keep immigrants out.

A deep recession and tougher border enforcement have led to a sharp decline in the number of immigrants entering the United States illegally in the past five years, contributing to the first significant reversal in the growth of their numbers in two decades, according to a new report by the Pew Hispanic Center.

The number of illegal immigrants entering the United States plunged by almost two-thirds between 2005 and 2009, a dramatic shift after years of growth in the population, according to the report.

In the first half of the decade, an average of 850,000 people a year entered the United States without authorization, according to the report, released Wednesday. As the economy plunged into recession between 2007 and 2009, that number fell to 300,000.

The drop has contributed to an 8 percent decrease in the estimated number of illegal immigrants living in the United States, from a peak of 12 million in 2007 to 11.1 million in 2009, the report said.

So despite what the Republicans are saying crime has decreased in Arizona over the last decade and illegal immigration has decreased dramatically. The Obama administration has also enforced immigration law more than the Bush administration did, deporting 3x as many illegal immigrants as Bush.

However, being proved false won’t keep the GOP from repeating the zombie lies. They need a scapegoat to point away from their own bad ideas.

Must Read of the Day: Reagan’s Chickens Have Come Home To Roost

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.

Born-Again Deficit Hawks

Matt Yglesias tries to make a point, but it will be lost on most of the media. Republicans do not care about the deficit.

It’s genuinely hard for me to know what would persuade people that I’m correct about this, but to recap the key points:

1) There have been two presidents who were members of the modern conservative movement, Ronald Reagan and George W Bush, and they both presided over massive increases in both present and projected deficits.

2) The major deficit reduction packages of the modern era, in 1990 and 1993, were both uniformly opposed by the conservative movement.

3) When the deficit was temporarily eliminated in the late-1990s, the mainstream conservative view was that this showed that the deficit was too low and needed to be increased via large tax cuts.

4) Senator Mitch McConnell says it’s a uniform view in his caucus that tax cuts needn’t be offset by other changes in spending.

5) The deficit reduction commission is having trouble because they think conservative politicians won’t vote for any form of tax increase.

…

But the key element of conservative fiscal policy is that tax revenue as a percent of GDP should be made as low as possible. This isn’t a goal they pursue that stands in some kind of balance with concern about the deficit, it’s the only goal they pursue.

Republicans don’t care about jobs either. They only care about tax cuts for the rich. That’s it. That’s their entire economic policy. Their “budget measures” are ridiculous – cutting out earmarks? That’s <1% of the total budget.

There’s always a disconnect between what politicians say they believe and what they actually do but this is just transparent, naked lying to the American people. With a big assist by the media. What is the point of the media if they can’t point out the difference between what politicians say and what politicians do? If they’re just going to post Republican talking points why are they needed at all?

I Call Shenanigans

Balloon Juice posted about an essay in American Thinker supposedly written by an 11-year-old boy. In the essay he details the horrible discrimination that he’s faced as a conservative kid in school.

My name is Sam Besserman, I’m eleven years old, I live in Beverly Hills, California, and ever since I can remember I have been subjected to political bias in school. The first time I noticed the bias was actually in preschool where the teacher was reading a book about the importance of mothers and the inferiority of fathers. I tried to tell the teacher that dads might be just as important. The teacher responded in a sing-song, “No, listen to me, I’m the teacher.” Of course, the girls loved the book and most of the boys hated it, except for a few who liked it and also wanted to become mothers some day. I was three years old and royally pissed off.

I had to listen to such feminist ideas every day and, at times, I actually bought into them. Months later, I still didn’t know whether mothers were really more important than fathers. Once I even felt like going into the bathroom and trying to pull off my penis. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a woman, I had just lost my enthusiasm for my embattled gender.

Let’s stop right here for a second. This kid wants us to believe that he remembers being indoctrinated into feminism at the age of 4? And that it made him so emasculated that he had to check his genitals?

The only male teacher I had might as well have been castrated. His voice was soft, his gestures were feminine, he didn’t know how to run a class and he had to rely on female assistant teachers to control the children. And, of course, the female teachers treated the girls ten times better than the boys and constantly reminded us of our alleged inferiority. One of the assistant teachers even put down our rhyme, “Boys go to college to get more knowledge, girls go to Jupiter to get more stupider,” by reminding us that more girls than boys go to college because girls are smarter. And this only encouraged the girls to hijack our rhyme and switch the sexes around.

The nerve of that teacher telling boys that girls are just as smart, if not smarter than boys. Obviously this teacher is part of the liberal/feminist/communist plot to teach the truth to children. School should be all about teaching girls their proper place in the world and making sure that Sam Besserman’s beliefs never get challenged.

Let’s review. This 11-year-old, Sam Besserman wrote the following sentence: The only male teacher I had might as well have been castrated. All I can say is that the boy has obviously had excellent teachers to be able to write so well.

What purpose does this essay serve other than to convince other conservatives that they are the victims and therefore are entitled to act like assholes? Perhaps the editors of American Thinker published a clever parody to show how many adult conservatives act like children with a grievance. What think you?

Colin Bonini Still Thinks Governing is a Stunt

So here we have another episode of the Delaware Republican party — the Supposed to Be Governing Division — putting out news and PR bait in form of silly bills rather than actually working at the State’s problems. In other words, its reruns from these people again.

This time, we have the pathetic spectacle of Senator Bonini trying to introduce SB 288 (it is not on the website as of this writing) and Bonini’s claim that the Democratic majority would not let him talk. Notwithstanding the fact that the Senate cuts off debate and discussion as it sees fit, it looks like he circumvented the usual procedures to get this bill to the floor. But SB 288 is basically SS1 to SB 147, an effort that provides an incentive (in the form of an additional 2 years of service added to those who would retire before June 30) AND would implement a a new — less generous — tier of pension benefits for new hires. SS1 to SB 147 does have a Fiscal Note too, which I’m trying to get.

We can start with the new tier of pension benefits — this is already something that is proposed in the Governor Markell’s latest budget. So Stunt 1 is Bonini trying to take credit for work that is already underway (for better or worse).

But the early retirement scheme reminds us that not only is Colin Bonini as fully innumerate as the members of his party apparently take a test to ensure, but that Bonini is spectacularly unconcerned about the real business of governing. And once again, Bonini is only interested in a headline for his talking points but not in doing any real work to help save the state money. This counts as Stunt 2.

So let’s look at the bad math:

Bonini was on Jensen’s show recently claiming that the savings would be $75K for each job lost to this early retirement. That number does not include the upfront costs for the pension plus payouts. Except that 500 or so retirements from last year (and not replaced) saved the state $13M, for a savings of $26K each.

But remember that the key to this boondoggle (if you aren’t still trying to figure out how Bonini got those numbers exactly) is that these jobs are not replaced. Which is fine, except these jobs will include the police, correctional officers, DNREC enforcement officers, toll takers, nurses, librarians, tax auditors and others that provide some real value to the State. And you’ll notice that Bonini won’t tell you this. He will get his victim on and he’ll studiously mess up the numbers because he is in campaign mode here — not governing mode. He is spending the last days of the session trying to get some crusader cred here, not in working at buttoning down the budget and other state business so that the state can, you know, Work.

So as an example — police departments are notoriously top heavy with people who are retirement-eligible. What happens of 30, 40, 50% of State Police leadership decide to retire now? These are not jobs that will be replaced (because you won’t get your savings otherwise) and yet all of his PR complaining that Democrats won’t let him talk never mentions that he is asking you to endorse reductions in strength for the State Police. The same would be true for corrections officers or probation/parole officers or the people who take your tolls. Imagine traveling around this state if there were actually fewer toll takers.

Beyond the made up numbers (a horrifying habit for a man who is running for Treasurer), the effort to hide the real impacts to services is despicable. It is one thing to tell people that smaller government = fewer police, but he won’t be honest with you about that. He is just going to waste the time of the Senate to bring up stunt bills so he can fire off his prepared press releases on them. I mean really — how to you bring up a major financial bill 2, 3 weeks before the session ends? The JFC is essentially done its work so that the session can wind down with its budget. There is no time for any of the actuarial work that has to be done. And this bill would ask people to make their retirement decisions on or before June 30, 2010! Bonini already knows that there is no way the JFC or the GA could get this done now. But he isn’t interested in passing a bill — he is interested in a campaign prop. Count this as Stunt 3.

So if you see Bonini around the campaign trail, make sure to ask him for the backup on his cost savings here. Sensible backup won’t exist — but he will run around hyping his fake numbers (and how this individual gets away with such spectacular idiocy with numbers is beyond me). But a man willing to tell you fake numbers about early retirement will be delighted to live with fake numbers in the Treasurer’s office.

The Right on the Verge of Another Defeat in the Culture War

NYT columnist Charles Blow points us to an eye-popping new survey by the Gallup organization, a survey that shows new and convincing majorities of Americans who no longer hold moral objections to gay and lesbian people. This is what a specific piece of bigotry losing its power looks like:

No wonder they are fighting so hard and making up lots of scary stuff along the way to try to sway the public to hold fast to those bigotries. From the article:

1. For the first time, the percentage of Americans who perceive “gay and lesbian relations” as morally acceptable has crossed the 50 percent mark. (You have to love the fact that they still use the word “relations.” So quaint.)

2. Also for the first time, the percentage of men who hold that view is greater than the percentage of women who do.

3. This new alignment is being led by a dramatic change in attitudes among younger men, but older men’s perceptions also have eclipsed older women’s. While women’s views have stayed about the same over the past four years, the percentage of men ages 18 to 49 who perceived these “relations” as morally acceptable rose by 48 percent, and among men over 50, it rose by 26 percent.

Blow’s article goes on to speculate on why this change is happening, but it is just important to mark that it is. So when you see the GOP double down on anti-gay and lesbian rhetoric this election season (hidden behind opposition to the repeal of DADT), you will know why. They are losing one more group of people to demonize — which is ground zero of their perpetual campaign of resentments. And that is something to be applauded.

ps. Anybody know of any good Culture War images? Could find one to tag this post with….

Another Wingnut Conspiracy Smackdown

The usual repub blog suspects picked and ran with an item from The American Spectator which purported to have a bit of “news” about the HHS having information (in the form of a report from the Office of the Actuary for Medicare) in advance of the ACA bill vote that would indicate that medical costs would rise. The usual right-wing purveyors of wrong went to town with this, of course. (John Cole at Balloon Juice has the screenshot of Google showing how focused the spread of this kind of stuff is among the usual GOP suspects.)

And Guess What?

They were all wrong. Politico and NBC actually did some real reporting for a change and just called the Office of the Actuary to see what was going on. This is the deal:

1. The Office of the Actuary didn’t receive the language of the reconciliation bill until March 18 (when the legislation was posted), so the Spectator’s assertion that HHS had a copy of the Actuary’s score a week before congressional passage — on March 22 — doesn’t make sense.

2. Past scores from the Office of the Actuary came out AFTER passage of the legislation. For the House bill that passed on Nov. 7, 2009, the Actuary’s score came out on Nov. 13. And for the Senate bill that passed on Dec. 24, 2009, the Actuary’s score came out on Jan. 8, 2010. This most recent Actuary report is dated April 22.

3. Given points #1 and #2, it’s hard to see how the Actuary’s score was available before the CBO’s, which came out on March 18.

And the Actuary himself states pretty uncategorically that the American Spectator’s reporting was quite wrong. Steve Benen provides quick evidence that legislators did have this data and were debating it before the vote.

The American Spectator did come back and double down on their story — basically saying that their unnamed sources refused to change their story. But here is the thing — again. For all of the BS about getting beyond the talking points and the bromides and putting a more serious face back onto conservatism, you see right here their Achilles heel. An unbelievable reliance on news sources that are absolutely in the business of pushing the spin, the misinformation and the lies to be able to whip up the manufactured outrage. The reality based community exists and dealing with that, rather than the manufactured outrage fodder is going to be the first step in getting the serious face back. Because as long as even those with ambitions to not be part of the crazy keep pushing the clearly wrong, then they are still inmates in the asylum.