Leadership you can believe in

Newt Gingrich - Man Of Many Wives from Horatio Sanz

"And, going by history, she'll probably get some disease anyway." Well, remember that Newt Gingrich is a historian, after all.

Obama Girl with the dragon tattoo

Not as sexy as her usual videos, but pretty darn funny, don't you think?

How Rick Santorum ripped off American veterans

From Mother Jones:

Like any good presidential candidate, Rick Santorum heaps praise on America's soldiers and veterans. He's pledged to "make veterans a high priority" if elected president, adding, "This is not a Republican issue, this is not a Democratic issue, it is an American issue." But as a US senator, Santorum engineered a controversial land deal that robbed the military's top veterans' home of tens of millions of dollars and worsened the deteriorating conditions at the facility. ...

Under one scenario, by leasing the parcel of land and letting it be developed, the Home could pocket $105 million in income over 35 years for its trust fund, David Lacy, then-chairman of the Home's board of directors, told Congress in 1999. Lacy stressed that the Home wanted to keep the property, and not offload it to a buyer. "Once land is sold," he said, "it is lost forever as an asset."

Enter Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.). At the behest of the Roman Catholic Church, and unbeknownst to the Home, Santorum slipped an amendment into the 1999 National Defense Authorization Act handcuffing how the home could cash in on those 49 acres. The amendment forced the Home to sell—and not lease—the land to its next-door neighbor, the Catholic University of America. Ultimately, the Catholic Church bought 46 acres of the tract for $22 million. The Home lost the land for good, and by its own estimates, pocketed $27 million less than the land's value and $83 million less than what it could've made under the lease plan.

Of course, Santorum is a Catholic himself. In fact, he wants to write Catholic dogma into U.S. law. Taking land from U.S. veterans and giving it to the Catholic church is what God would want him to do, right? So why would a little thing like the U.S. Constitution stop him?

And  how is this retirement home doing now?

Financial records, court documents, and government reports from the 2000s show how the Home cut back on the services it provided veterans as it grappled with funding problems. The slashing of services got so bad that in 2003 veterans living at the Home filed a class-action suit against the Home and its director, Timothy Cox, alleging shoddy health care and less access to that care. As a result of cutbacks and declining quality in care, the suit claimed, the suicide rate at the Home spiked from 59 in 2000 to 131 in 2003.

In 2007, an investigation by the Government Accountability Office came to similarly troubling conclusions. The watchdog's head, David Walker, reported that one Home resident had been admitted to the hospital with maggots in a wound. Other vets were admitted with bad pressure sores, suggesting they'd been left unattended for dangerously long stretches of time by the Home's health care employees. ...

Yet today, despite some improvement in the Home's financial health, its campus is pocked with boarded-up, decrepit buildings. All but one of the Home's gatehouses is shuttered, as are some of the Home's more elegant buildings, including the historic Grant building (named after the Civil War general) and the red-brick hospital that now sits empty, bearing a sign warning off trespassers.

Welcome to Rick Santorum's America. This is how the whole country will end up, if he and the other Republicans get their way.

Rick Perry's 15 minutes of fame

(John Darkow)

Well, Rick Perry finally saw the writing on the wall and dropped out of the Republican presidential campaign. It took him awhile, didn't it?

The rest of us saw it very clearly weeks ago, but apparently the writing needed to be very large, and using very simple words, before Perry could understand it, himself. Maybe the fact that he was polling third in Texas finally got through to him?

At any rate, I thought this three-cartoon retrospective captured his would-be presidential career pretty well. The cartoon at the top was from when Perry was considering entering the race. What could go wrong? Indeed...

(Jeff Danziger)

Funny, but I was expecting Michele Bachmann to be the comic relief in the GOP primary. But as it turned out, they all were. But none more than Rick Perry. (OK, OK, maybe Donald Trump. But Trump is a professional clown.) In fact, Bachmann struggled to get noticed at all.

I guess crazy doesn't stand out when you're in a room full of crazy people. Well, Perry's immigration stance wasn't so crazy (and he took heat for that from the Republican base). His problem was more that he seemed like Bush's dumber brother.

(Clay  Bennett)

And so Perry is carried from the ring, mangled and bleeding. But at least it's just figuratively. Unlike Bush, Perry never got to be president, so we didn't get mangled and bleeding bodies literally - our young men and women sent to war for no reason.

We won't have Rick Perry to kick around anymore, and that's a shame. But Rick Perry will never become president, and that's very, very good.

What could go wrong? In the last decade, we've seen what could go wrong - and what could still go wrong if one of Perry's Republican competitors actually becomes president.

Our Bain Capital problem

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This is the first part of Jon Stewart's extended interview with Joe Nocera, business columnist at the New York Times (here are part 2 and part 3).

I don't usually post these. Normally, I don't even watch them. But I thought this was interesting, and I just had to blog about it. Believe it or not, that ungodly long post I wrote earlier today was merely an introduction to this one. (I promise that this post won't be quite so long.)

That was about Bain Capital as a political problem for Mitt Romney. This is about why we should all have problems with Bain Capital, at least to some extent. Note that I'm not an expert in private equity investments, far from it. And I don't want to pretend otherwise. So please keep that in mind.

According to Wikipedia, Bain Capital is an asset management and financial services company which specializes in private equity and venture capital deals, as well as other investments. Romney has taken criticism primarily from Bain Capital's leveraged buyouts, I think (and also because he's a very wealthy man who apparently pays little in taxes and wants to cut taxes even further for rich people like himself).

Leveraged buyouts occur when wealthy investors acquire control of a company by borrowing most of the purchase price, generally using the assets of the company they're acquiring as collateral for the loan. Usually it's a troubled company, because they're cheap. But the buyers end up with a troubled company and an enormous debt.

You might well wonder how that would pay. Typically, the new owners don't plan to run the company, or not for long. They'll try to get the company back on its feet, and that usually involves slashing costs - laying off workers and closing factories - as well as selling off parts of the company (or sometimes buying other companies to merge with it). Then they'll try to sell the company and start over again somewhere else.

Meanwhile, they generally suck all the money they can out of the company. They pay themselves lavish management fees, while loading up the company with debt. If they're unsuccessful, the company will go bankrupt, and they'll lose their ownership stake. But they'll keep their multimillion dollar fees.

And they probably won't have much of an ownership stake by then, anyway, since they'll have loaded the company with so much debt. It's like owning a house with an enormous mortgage. If you walk away from that, the bank will likely lose more than you will, since you won't have much cash in it.

If they're successful, they'll sell the company to someone else. And it might survive and even thrive. But it will have to make interest payments on that debt. That's an extra cost, of course, which probably didn't go to investing in the company itself, but only to enrich the leveraged buyout people.

I want to acknowledge, right from the start, that there are good things about this kind of economic activity. It's tough when people lose their jobs. It's tough when businesses fail. But, overall, it's a very good thing that business can fail.

American business has been strong because it continually reinvents itself. Some businesses thrive, others go bankrupt. Some businesses are purchased, others purchase them. Businesses merge or sell off pieces of themselves. Creative destruction is a very good thing, in general.

And yes, it's a good thing that people can be laid off or fired. It's hard on them, of course. No one wants to lose  his job, and it can be positively disastrous for some people. But what does that mean?

It doesn't mean that we should guarantee lifetime employment, because the cure would end up worse than the disease. Instead, it's just a very good reason to have a strong social safety net. And it's probably a good reason to have adult education and training programs, too.

Maintaining a dynamic business environment, keeping that creative destruction, is a good thing, despite the very real costs to very real human beings. But that's where things start to get a little weird, at least when it comes to right-wing thinking.

The same people who shrug off the firing of thousands of workers typically don't want to spend a nickel on a social safety net which would help them get back on their feet. At the same time, wealthy executives make sure that their own contracts includes a "golden parachute," so they won't suffer even if they're fired for poor performance.

And when it comes to leveraged buyouts, it's almost a win/win. Even companies that went bankrupt still produced a huge profit for Bain Capital, because they weren't the ones left holding the bag. Here's an example:

According to this information from the Boston Globe, Bain Capital used only $5 million of its own money to buy Ampad (American Pad & Paper). Seven years later, the company went bankrupt. Ampad's workers lost their jobs, and Ampad's stockholders ended up with nothing.

But Bain Capital made more than $100 million on the whole thing. Not a bad return on a $5 million investment, huh? A 2,000 percent return in just seven years? True, the story of this apparently cost Romney a U.S. Senate seat. But other than that, they made out like bandits. And this was one of their failed investments! And yeah, it's all legal, too.

In fact, it's not just legal, we actively encourage it by giving these wealthy investors a huge break on their taxes. For one thing (I mean, in addition to myriad deductions and loopholes), we let these people pay the long-term capital gains rate on their fees, and that reaches a maximum of 15 percent (a minimum of zero).

On the other hand, if you work for a living, you pay income tax rates of 10% to 35%, plus another 7.65% (currently, Obama's temporary payroll tax reduction has dropped that to 5.65%) on payroll taxes on your first $106,800. (Yes, if you're a high-earner, you actually pay a lower effective payroll tax rate than those who make less than that, but that's a subject for another post.)

It's not that all of these people do nothing of value. Good management is valuable. And taking a troubled company and making it profitable is a good thing. But they call these people corporate raiders for a reason. This isn't about good management, certainly not for the long haul. This is about raking off all the cash you can, and then escaping with the loot before the consequences hit home.

Even so, I'm not saying that it should be illegal (not with appropriate safeguards, at least), but why should they pay a lower tax rate than you do? Is this so valuable to our country that we actually need to give them tax breaks?

Jon Stewart and Joe Nocera mention some of these things in that extended interview. As Stewart says, we value capital over labor. We give investors, who tend to be the wealthiest people of our land, a huge tax break from what they'd pay if they worked for a living.

Is that justified? Maybe it is, but why? Why isn't work valued? Why should we deliberately favor the wealthy? (Not just the wealthy, of course, but overwhelmingly so.) Capital gains rates are at record lows these days.

Here's the Center for American Progress:

The benefits of preferential rates for capital gains are enjoyed by the wealthiest Americans because they’re the ones who tend to receive this type of income. More than 70 percent of the benefit goes to taxpayers with annual income of more than $1 million, a group that comprises only about 0.3 percent of all taxpayers.

Our income tax system is designed to be “progressive.” That is, we generally agree that people with higher incomes should pay a greater percentage of their income in federal income taxes, because they can afford to pay more. But because capital gains are concentrated at the highest levels of income and taxed at favorable rates, many of the most affluent taxpayers pay a lower effective tax rate than those beneath them on the income scale.

The low rates on capital gains (and dividends) are the reason why billionaire investor Warren Buffett reportedly pays the lowest-overall tax rate of all the people who work in his office, including his receptionist.

Tax data show that Buffett’s informal office poll is, in fact, representative of average tax burdens. The richest 400 U.S. taxpayers in 2007 paid an effective tax rate of just 16.6 percent. That’s largely because more than two-thirds of this group’s income—which averaged [my emphasis] $345 million—was in the form of capital gains and dividends, while most Americans are paid in salaries and wages.

This select group probably includes some managers of hedge funds and private equity funds, who enjoy another special loophole allowing them to treat most of their investment-management compensation as capital gain instead of ordinary income—vastly lowering their taxes.

As Stewart says, you're called a "socialist" these days for even wondering out loud about these things. In this age of vastly increasing income and wealth disparity, at a time when the 400 richest Americans own more of America than the bottom 50% of us, when the poor are getting poorer and the middle class are struggling, yet the rich are making out like bandits, why can't we even question this?

(TPM - click chart to embiggen)

We can't have a social safety net, because that will make the poor lazy. Yet we should eliminate estate taxes entirely, so that wealthy heirs never have to work for living? Somehow, we're not so concerned about their moral fiber, are we?

And we're right to worry about moral hazard. But why don't we ever worry about moral hazard when it comes to the wealthy? Well, the people who run our country tend to be wealthy. Their friends are wealthy, their business associates are wealthy, and they're quick to recognize the problems of the wealthy.

Now, Democrats at least try to think about the middle class. They may not be very good at it, but at least they usually try. Republicans tend to be nothing but class warriors. They care only for the wealthy.

Creative destruction is a good thing. That's one of real strengths of America's economy. But the pain of it falls entirely on the workers. Meanwhile, we taxpayers actually subsidize these leveraged buyout investors who tend to win even when everyone else loses. Should we be giving those Bain Capital people such huge tax breaks? Is what they do really that valuable to our nation as a whole?

Don't you think they'd be able to make money - maybe not quite so much money - if they had to pay normal tax rates? And is what they do so much more valuable to America than what you do that we have to give them preferential treatment? I just don't see it, myself.

And make no mistake, if they're paying less, you're paying more. If someone else gets a tax break, you help pay for that.

And when it comes to Mitt Romney,... well, anyone who keeps his money in the Cayman Islands, to avoid paying taxes in America, should be disqualified from becoming President of the United States, don't you think? Taxes support our country. Even if you value nothing but the military, you should recognize that it's taxes that pay for it.

Mitt Romney's Bain Capital problem

(Jim Morin)

This is basically the introduction to my next post. You probably know all this, since it's certainly been in the news lately. But please bear with me, because I do plan to go somewhere with it. eventually.

Mitt Romney is a very rich man. He was born rich, and he made even more money at Bain Capital. How rich is he? Well, he's apparently rich enough to think that $370,000 a year is "not very much":

Mitt Romney revealed for the first time today that his effective tax rate is “closer to 15 percent,” suggesting that he pays less in taxes than many middle income Americans despite being worth an estimated $250 million.

“What’s the effective rate I’ve been paying? It’s probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything,” Romney said during a press conference after an early morning rally. “Because my last 10 years, I’ve…my income comes overwhelmingly from some investments made in the past, whether ordinary income or earned annually. I got a little bit of income from my book, but I gave that all away. And then I get speakers fees from time to time, but not very much.”

According to his personal financial disclosure report released in August, Romney was paid more than $370,000 for speaking appearances in the 2011-2011[February, 2010 to February, 2011, I think] filing period.

It's comments like this which make Mitt Romney seem out of touch. Well, the rich aren't like you or me. Romney claims to be "unemployed," when he's actually independently wealthy, living off passive investments. He thinks nothing of making a $10,000 bet on the spur of the moment. And he doesn't imagine that "firing people" - or getting fired - could be traumatic at all.

Well, he's never in his life had to worry about losing a job, because he's always been wealthy. Ordinary middle class worries are foreign to him. He's an anthropologist - a rather clueless anthropologist - studying a primitive culture. Despite his studies, he has a hard time taking our concerns seriously.

And as a wealthy man, of course he's taken advantage of all the tax breaks, the loopholes, and the myriad other advantages wealthy investors get. Why wouldn't he? But now that he's running for office, he's realizing that - oops! - maybe ordinary middle class voters might not be too happy to see that he's been making out like a bandit.

(Steve Benson)

Sure, all rich people do this. But Warren Buffett, for example, speaks out about how wrong this is, that he shouldn't be paying a lower tax rate than his secretary. Romney, on the other hand, proposes a tax plan which will further slash taxes on the wealthy, while raising taxes on the less affluent (and causing a massive increase in our budget deficit, too).

From Greg Sargent:

The revelation that Mitt Romney pays a tax rate of around 15 percent opens the door to another question: How much would his own taxes fall under the tax plan he would pass if elected president?

Here’s the answer, according to a new analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice that was provided to me this morning. Under his plan, Romney in 2013 would see his taxes cut by nearly half of what they would be if you use current law as a baseline. ...

“This doesn't even include Romney’s proposal to cut corporate taxes from 35 percent to 25 percent, which would primarily benefit wealthy shareholders like himself,” Robert McIntyre, the director of Citizens for Tax Justice, tells me.

Going back to that ABC News article:

What Romney admitted is exactly what billionaire Warren Buffet has railed against – the fact that many multi-millionaires actually pay far less in taxes than the people who work for them.

In addition to hinting at his tax rate, Romney suggested that if he does release his returns, he will only release those from 2011 and not those from years prior.

Romney admitted that his tax rate is "probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything." That gives him a bit of wiggle room. And after constant pressure to release his tax returns, he's reluctantly planning to release his 2011 return this spring, when his accountants finish preparing it.

What do you want to bet that they'll be desperately looking for ways to increase Romney's taxes? If he's not going to be releasing his prior returns, you have to wonder just how low a rate he's been paying. Maybe 15 percent actually looks good, compared to the truth.

Jamison Foser, in fact, wonders if Romney has been paying anything at all. Some millionaires don't.

Incidentally, Romney has been misleading about that "tradition" of presidential candidates releasing their tax returns. From a different post at ABC News:

By the way, President Obama released his tax returns in March 2008, well before he clinched the Democratic nomination. And George W. Bush, as governor of Texas, released his returns before he was even a candidate.

And from Steve Benen:

Barack Obama released nearly a decade’s worth of tax returns in 2008. When George Romney ran for president, he released 12 years of returns. Disclosure for one year won’t exactly meet any fair standard for transparency.

Clearly, this worries Mitt Romney. Should it?

But tax experts tell ABC News there are other reasons Romney may not want the public viewing his returns. As one of the wealthiest candidates to run for president in recent times, Romney has used a variety of techniques to help minimize the taxes on his estimated $250 million fortune. In addition to paying the lower tax rate on his investment income, Romney has as much as $8 million invested in at least 12 funds listed on a Cayman Islands registry. Another investment, which Romney reports as being worth between $5 million and $25 million, shows up on securities records as having been domiciled in the Caymans.

Official documents reviewed by ABC News show that Bain Capital, the private equity partnership Romney once ran, has set up some 138 secretive offshore funds in the Caymans.

Romney campaign officials and those at Bain Capital tell ABC News that the purpose of setting up those accounts in the Cayman Islands is to help attract money from foreign investors, and that the accounts provide no tax advantage to American investors like Romney. Romney, the campaign said, has paid all U.S. taxes on income derived from those investments. ...

Tax experts agree that Romney remains subject to American taxes. But they say the offshore accounts have provided him -- and Bain -- with other potential financial benefits, such as higher management fees and greater foreign interest, all at the expense of the U.S. Treasury. Rebecca J. Wilkins, a tax policy expert with Citizens for Tax Justice, said the federal government loses an estimated $100 billion a year because of tax havens.

[Jack] Blum, the D.C. tax lawyer, said working through an offshore investment vehicle allows the investor to "avoid a whole series of small traps in the tax code that ordinary people would face if they paid tax on an onshore basis."

Wilkins agreed, saying the "primary advantage to setting those funds up in an offshore jurisdiction like the Cayman Islands or Bermuda is it helps the investors avoid tax."

"It helps U.S. investors avoid U.S. tax," said Wilkins, "it helps foreign investors avoid taxes in their home country, so it's not illegal or improper to set those funds up in a foreign jurisdiction, but it makes it more attractive to investors because it helps them avoid paying taxes on that income."

Sure, many - probably most - wealthy Americans use such techniques. But as Blum said, "His personal finances are a poster child of what's wrong with the American tax system."

Furthermore, this tax system has been heavily promoted by the Republican Party, and by Romney himself. Remember how the rich are supposed to be the "job creators"? Remember the promise of an economic boom if we just slashed taxes on the wealthy? Well, the Bush administration did just that. How do you like the results?

(Chris Britt)

Romney's remark about liking to fire people was taken out of context, but there are real reasons, valid reasons, why Mitt Romney has a Bain Capital problem.

The so-called "carried interest" rule has been the source of extensive debate in Washington, with opponents criticizing the allowance to tax those earnings at 15 percent a glaring loophole that benefits only the wealthiest Americans. Under the carried interest rule, income that is determined to be capital gains – like the profit reaped by hedge fund managers -- is subject to the lower 15 percent rate.

Wilkins said Romney's arrangements reminded her of the now famous remarks by billionaire financier Warren Buffet, who revealed in 2007 that he was paying taxes at a lower rate than his receptionist.

"Well, I think it's the issue that is sort of on the front page every day, when we look at the Occupy Wall Street movement and that people are really losing patience with the idea that a lot of multinational corporations have and a lot of wealthy people have that while they benefit from everything this country has to offer … they don't seem to be willing to pay their fair share," she said.

Romney's campaign objected to that ABC News article, but since we haven't seen his past tax returns, even the Wall Street Journal is wondering:

But the campaign’s assertions may be wrong or misleading. Tax experts said some of the offshore holdings are likely intended to help Mr. Romney avoid paying an obscure but hefty tax of as much as 35% on some of those investments, held in a tax-deferred retirement account.

As The Wall Street Journal reported in Thursday’s paper, many of Mr. Romney’s offshore investments are held through his individual retirement account, which has grown to between $20.7 million and $101.6 million. IRAs are tax-deferred accounts, in which earnings accrue tax-free until the money is withdrawn during retirement. ...

However, tax experts said that had Mr. Romney’s IRA invested in Bain funds in the U.S., he would likely have been forced to pay an obscure levy called the “unrelated business income tax,” also known as UBIT.

This tax, assessed for individuals at a maximum 35% rate, is meant to discourage tax-exempt entities such as an IRA or college endowment fund from unfairly competing with for-profit, taxpaying entities by operating a business without paying taxes on it. Investing in a partnership such as a Bain Capital fund that uses debt to buy companies would trigger the tax, experts said.

For this reason, the experts said, it is very common for private-equity funds such as Bain to set up vehicles in offshore locales such as the Cayman Islands. Such a structure allows American tax-exempt entities, including IRAs, to avoid paying UBIT.

Hmm,... I'm kind of wondering how you'd get as much as $100 million in an IRA when the maximum annual contribution limit is only $5,000 (OK, $6,000 if you're over 50). That's some return, don't you think!

But that's the point. I'm sure there are loopholes. The rich aren't like you or me. And for decades, our tax code has been increasingly focused on benefiting the rich. Yet today's Republicans think that we haven't gone far enough at benefiting the wealthiest of the wealthy, and they've convinced a lot of our most gullible citizens that we really need to help the "job creators."

Well, all of this stuff normally stays under the radar. Your tax returns are private. Yet there's a tradition that presidential candidates show they have nothing to hide by releasing past tax returns. And now Mitt Romney is probably wishing he'd done things differently. (But maybe not. He did save a hell of a lot of money by not having to pay taxes like those of us in the middle class.)

Again, from Steve Benen:

It’s hard to say with confidence exactly what Romney’s up to with these investments since he won’t release his returns and as the AP added, “Neither Romney nor his campaign are providing details, including how much he has invested there, or why, or if any of his money is invested elsewhere outside the United States.”

But the story itself has the potential to do some real damage to Romney. Even if we assume the typical voter doesn’t know or care about the nuances of offshore banking strategies, I suspect when the American mainstream hears “guy who keeps money in the Caymans,” questions about trust necessarily follow.

It’s also part of a larger picture. Again, the Republican frontrunner amassed a vast fortune after laying off thousands of American workers, he now pays a lower tax rate than most of the middle class, he wants to give himself another tax cut, he owns multiple luxury homes, and stashes cash in the Caymans — all while pursuing an agenda that would make things tougher on American’s working class.

And the same guy wants to keep the details from the public and refuses to release his tax returns.

This is Mitt Romney's Bain Capital problem. In my next post, I'll talk about why the rest of us might have a problem with Bain Capital.

The Tax Cut Fallacy

Hmm,... check out this post by my brother, Gregg, on why the "tax cut cheerleaders" are wrong. He's a smart guy with a great turn of phrase.

For example:

Now, don't get the idea that I think the country would be better off if everyone spent their whole paycheck every week - far from it!  We're talking about the best way to heat up a sluggish economy here, and the best way to do that is to pump up demand and create jobs.  Swimming lessons are important if you want to keep your kids safe from drowning, but if they fall in the lake, throw them a life preserver!  Long-term investment is important, not only to the financial health of the individual, but also to the economic security of the country as a whole, but nobody can worry about their retirement income if they can't afford to put bread on the table today.

The whole thing is well worth reading.

You knew this was going to happen

(the Onion)

Well, it's finally happened, just what we should have been expecting. From the Onion:

Striking down the judicial precedent that established the legal supremacy of right over wrong more than two centuries ago, the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned Right v. Wrong.

The landmark reversal—a bitterly contested 5-4 decision that has been widely praised by murderers, rapists, bigots, usurers, and pro-wrong advocates nationwide—nullifies all previously lawful forms of right and makes it very difficult for Americans to make ethical decisions or be generally decent human beings without facing criminal charges.

"It is the opinion of this court that the Constitution was crafted in such a manner as to uphold and encourage practices that are not right and, ideally, are very wrong," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority, which also in­cluded Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, and John Roberts. "Despite the compelling case for goodness, truth, and justice made by our predecessors in the case of Right v. Wrong, we firmly believe that malice, dishonesty, and injustice were the framers' original intent." ...

The ruling in Right v. Wrong was handed down in 1790 by the Supreme Court's six original members, all of whom sided with the plaintiff, prompting Chief Justice John Jay to write, "It is the emphatic province and duty of this highest judicial tribunal to rule in favor of Right, as the argument in support of Right is the right one, and the argument in support of Wrong is the wrong one."

Since that time, the verdict has been cited in most legal rulings at the state and federal level, and has been upheld by the Supreme Court numerous times, most notably in a 1974 opinion overturning a Six Circuit Court of Appeals decision that would have re-segregated the nation's schools, abolished the minimum wage, legalized evil, and allowed law enforcement officials to conduct searches and seizures without a warrant. ...

Justice Stephen Breyer chose to read his dissenting opinion aloud before the court, a rare gesture apparently aimed at expressing the full measure of his disgust with the verdict.

"The court needs to overturn this ruling immediately because, simply put, it's the right thing to do," said the associate justice, who, along with his colleagues joining him in the minority, was then arrested by Capitol Police, placed into custody, and is currently awaiting trial.

I can't say this surprises me. Every since that 2010 Citizens United decision, where Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Kennedy, and Roberts decided, also against precedent, that corporations were people, I've been expecting something like this.

I mean, it's been clear that the Republican majority on the court has been headed in this direction for some time. Heck, what do you call that 5 to 4 decision which gave us President George W. Bush in 2000 but a strong step towards wrong and against right? Citizens United just confirmed it.

This decision, too, could be overturned someday, but it puts wrong in a strong position going forward. And considering the huge advantage that Citizens United has also given to wrong, as we've clearly seen in the two years since that decision, it's likely that right will have a tough time making a comeback.

Of course, we can't give up. Never say that. But Republicans have indeed given a huge boost to wrong and a severe setback to right. So it's going to be an uphill fight going forward.

Cartoon or Fox News? You decide.

My brother just sent me this, so that's my excuse for posting a video clip that's almost five years old. :)

Actually, it's just too good to miss. And the message is still timely. In fact, I think it's amazing how much today's Republican campaign commercials look like that ad for Crusty the Clown. Couldn't you just picture Rick Perry there?

So maybe Fox News was right to worry? OK, for the record, the right-wing clowns running for office for real usually don't wear clown makeup. And Fox doesn't normally admit that it's "the voice for evil." The real Fox News probably just assumes that's obvious. Those are the two main differences.

Oh, and after you watch that clip once, go through it a second time, so you can concentrate on the news crawl at the bottom of the screen. My favorite is "Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple."

Southern discomfort

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South Carolina Republicans cheer the idea of war against America's federal government, but boo the Golden Rule. That tells us all we really need to know about the Republican base, don't you think?

Abraham Lincoln must be turning over in his grave. But, of course, these people are the old-time Dixiecrats, white southern bigots who abandoned the Democratic Party when it stood up for civil rights in the 1960s.

The Republican "Southern strategy" to deliberately woo white racists gave them the South, which used to be solidly Democratic and is now solidly Republican. But you reap what you sow. Politically, the Southern strategy was wildly successful. But now, the crazies are the Republican base.

[Please keep in mind that, just because Ron Paul is right about his Golden Rule comment, that doesn't mean he's not completely crazy himself. I've blogged about that before (here, here, and here). If that still hasn't convinced you, here's Mother Jones on why crackpots don't make good messengers.]

Anyway, at the end of this clip, Newt Gingrich doesn't understand why his comments were insulting, especially, but not exclusively (I was certainly offended by them), to African Americans. And surprise, surprise, that overwhelmingly-white Southern audience didn't understand it, either.

But note that a few people even in that audience did appear to understand it (before they were drowned out by the roar of applause at Gingrich's reply). That's progress, I guess.

Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich is going to teach black people how to get a job - cleaning toilets, no doubt. Oh, no, Gingrich wants to teach black children how to clean toilets. He actually wants to fire the adults who've managed to get that job. (Do I really have to tell you how stupid that is?)

Signs I'm blogging too much

(Alex Gregory)

#1 sign that I'm blogging too much? I didn't post anything yesterday, so my brother called this morning to see if I was still alive.  :)

Don't worry, I'm still alive and I'll get back to pointless, incessant barking right away.

I remember

I still remember exactly where I was when I heard that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot and killed. I still remember that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

And although I heard the news on the radio, not the TV, I still feel it when I watch this clip. Even today, I get that same sinking feeling.

That horrible feeling was only compounded when Bobby Kennedy was shot, just a few weeks later, while celebrating his victory in the Democratic primary in California. (And I remembered my shock at hearing of President Kennedy's assassination less than five years previously.)

For awhile, in 1968, it seemed like the lunatic right-wing was targeting those progressives who could actually lead our country forward. And when Richard Nixon was elected in November, it felt like all hope had disappeared in America.

In a way, it's funny, because Nixon would be far too liberal for the GOP these days. But that just shows what a horrible turn to the right America has taken in recent decades.

It was, in fact, the Republicans' "Southern strategy" of deliberately appealing to white racists, wildly successful in a political sense, which gave the party national dominance - despite a momentary interruption after the scandal-plagued Nixon administration - and caused this lurch to the extreme right, too.

What would America be like today if these progressive leaders had survived? Well, it's impossible to say, isn't it? But I still get that same sinking feeling in my stomach when I think about those events.

But although we've gone in a completely wrong direction economically, we've progressed quite far culturally. The fact that we've got a black man in the White House - however hysterical Republicans get about it - is proof of that. And think of how far we've progressed when it comes to gay rights!

The hysteria in the right-wing over these "culture war" issues shows that they know they're losing. And in the long run, they may lose on the help-the-rich, kick-the-poor, corporations-are-people front, too. But they'll do a lot of damage to America in the meantime. Heck, they've already done a lot of damage!

So, sure, it's easy to get depressed these days. But I remember 1968.

A new start in Minecraft

(click to embiggen)

Note: I enjoyed my moss-draped clifftop home (here and here), but I wanted to try something different, and I couldn't find the terrain I wanted in that Minecraft world. I'm sure the perfect spot was there somewhere, but I couldn't seem to find it. So I decided to create a new world, and after a couple of tries, I found one that really seems to fit the bill.

I don't know how I got here. I remember a raging storm, and me in my little boat, but then I came to my senses here, my clothes torn and ragged, no supplies at all, and a big gap in my memory. So be it. I've started from scratch before, and I knew I could do it again.

I decided to settle in this old flood plain. At least, that's what it looks like. There's a river to the north and some hills to the south, but in between, it's flat and heavily forested. In fact, this pine forest extends to the west as far as I've explored, so far.

To the east is a vast desert, and to the south, past the wooded hills, there seems to be a range of mountains. I don't know how far that extends. To the southeast, at the edge of the desert, there's a native village. They seem uninterested in my presence. But then, it's hard to communicate without a single language in common.

So I settled in this pine forest, all green and beautiful in the sun. There was a crust of ice on the pond, which should have given me a clue, but I was still taken by surprise at the first snowstorm. It was a real blizzard, and I was lucky to be inside when it started. The snow still hasn't melted off most places.

One of the more interesting things about this location is the vast hole in the rock just south of my farmstead. I discovered that it leads down into an expanse of caverns - and those caverns themselves are bisected by a deep crevasse. Actually, it looks deep, but I don't know how deep it really goes, because it's too dark to see very far.

And the caverns are infested with monsters. Luckily, most of them seem to be stuck on the other side of the crevasse. But I've kept my underground exploration to a minimum, so far. First things first, and I needed to concentrate on basic survival.

(the NPC village)

So I built a little shack, where I could sleep in safety, and set about building my farm. Despite the cold weather, my wheat is doing well, though I have to go to extraordinary lengths to keep even running water from freezing. And I may end up building a greenhouse for the sugar cane.

There were sheep everywhere, so wool hasn't been a problem. But I had to search to find a few cattle and chickens, and I haven't found any pigs at all. Well, the forest to the west is positively infested with wolves. I've never before seen so many wolves in one place, and maybe for that reason, there's little other life there.

But although I'll definitely miss bacon - ahhh,... bacon! - I can survive without it. And I was able to tame one of the wolves for a pet. The rest of them don't bother me, and I don't bother them.

The monsters are a worse problem, especially the creepers. I've always been rather inept at combat, and I've had a hard time preventing creepers from blowing the hell out of everything I've built here. Still, they haven't gotten me yet, and everything else can be rebuilt.

Nevertheless, I've started building a stone wall around my settlement. Maybe, someday, it will be a real fortress, a vast structure of stone to keep out all possible enemies. Heh, heh. Sure, it's only me, so I don't exactly need such a place. But as long as my crops and my livestock do OK, why not? I've got plenty of time for a hobby.

I'll explore when I get tired of stonework. I'll need to find more coal - and mine lots more stone - anyway. I must say that I'm curious about those underground caverns. I wonder how far down they go?

PS. I don't know how long I'll play this. I've got lots of different games to play. But I'll probably post more again, sometime.

Winter

I grow fruit, as a hobby, so I'm always really busy in the spring and summer. By fall, I'm generally pretty sick of it, but I'll still have a lot to do outdoors.

So I tend to look forward to winter, when I'll have plenty of free time to read, to play computer games, and to get some things done around the house. But you know? It doesn't work out like that.

Oh, sure, I blog a lot more in the winter (I don't know if that's good or bad), but I still can't keep up with my email, and I can't visit all of the good websites I've found over the years. And I can play computer games, but I don't have time to play all I want to play. Besides, games take time away from reading, and vice versa.

My point is that I still can't do everything I want, not even close. And as far as getting anything productive done, well, that comes after everything else. So unless I absolutely have to do something, it tends not to get done at all.

Winter never ends up being what I think it will be. And all too soon, it's over. It won't be long before I have to start pruning my fruit trees - especially if I don't want to get as far behind as I was last year - and winter, for me, will be over.

And I'll wonder where it went. I'll wonder why I didn't get anything productive done. I'll wonder why I read so few books. I'll wonder what happened to all that time I thought I'd have. It just slips away...

Heh, heh. If you're not retired, yourself, you may think I'm crazy. How about all that time when I used to be at work? Or going to work or coming from work? But you know, I swear I'm busier now than I was before I retired. It's crazy, I know, but that's what it feels like.

Mitt the Ripper

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If corporations are people, isn't it murder to kill one?

An atheist's fear

Note that Amy is talking about the fear that she's betrayed her parents and her community because she "doesn't believe it anymore." I'd say that it's guilt, more than fear.

I never had this problem, because my childhood was different. I don't ever remember believing. But I sympathize. I know it's hard for people who did believe everything they were told.

Well, it's also the fear of causing her mother pain. She doesn't want to wrong someone she loves. I can understand that, too. But does that mean she has to live a lie?

This is an excerpt from the Atheist Experience TV show, episode #593, with Matt Dillahunty and Tracie Harris. (Note that, earlier, I posted a different excerpt from this same episode, here.)

American optimism 2012

(Tom Toles)

I like being able to fire people

I didn't like this video from the Democratic Party, when I first saw it. "I like being able to fire people"? That was taken completely out of context.

Here's what Mitt Romney really said:

I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep you healthy. It also means if you don't like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. . . . You know if someone doesn't give me a good service that I need, I want to say I'm going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.

OK, true, Mitt Romney has done far worse than that, himself:

From Barack Obama, in Mitt Romney's latest ad:

If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.

What Obama actually said, campaigning against John McCain on October 16, 2008:

Senator McCain's campaign actually said, and I quote, "if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose."

Just out of curiosity: How flat-out, knowingly false does something have to be before the press is willing to just call it a lie? We're about to find out!

Now that was bad! And the Romney campaign actually defended it:

You may recall a couple months ago, when Mitt Romney released an ad showing President Obama in 2008 quoting John McCain, but presenting it as if it were Obama describing his own position now. Romney’s campaign fiercely defended the violent wrenching of Obama’s words out of context, arguing at one point, “He did say the words. That's his voice.” 

And, of course, it's Republicans who think that corporations are just people, too. Romney himself has claimed that "Corporations are people, my friend." Aren't Democrats just taking him at his word? If corporations are people, then Romney clearly said that he likes firing people.

So it's hard to think that Romney deserves better. He doesn't. However, we deserve better.

And the thing is, Romney was wrong, anyway. They didn't have to distort what he said. They could have just explained why he was wrong. Admittedly, that wouldn't fit into a sound bite nearly as well.

Here's Jonathan Cohn:

But the argument that Romney was trying to make, about health care policy, deserves some scrutiny of its own, because you’re going to hear it again. Conservatives frequently claim that the health care system will be better off if people act more like consumers, shopping around for the best insurance plans. The best way to accomplish this, they say, is to transform Medicare into a premium support system and to repeal the Affordable Care Act, putting in its place a deregulated market with more insurance options. Romney has endorsed all of these ideas.

But unfettered choice is not a good thing in health care policy. One reason is that getting good, reliable information about insurance plans is difficult – as anybody who has ever tried to buy coverage on his or her own can attest. Another is that, even in a world with perfect information, the insurance market is prone to a particular kind of failure. Insurers don’t want to pick up bad risks and will do whatever they can to avoid them. Absent regulation, that makes it virtually impossible for people with serious medical conditions to get coverage. As Ezra Klein put it a while back, when Republicans were talking up this idea, "It's a great proposal if you don't ever plan to be sick, and if you don't mind finding out that your insurer doesn't cover your illness. And it's the Republican plan for health-care reform."

The thing is, you generally don't want to "fire" your health insurance company until you've got reason. When you're healthy, you don't have a reason. It's only when you get sick that you might discover how bad your insurance is.

But when you're sick, insurance companies want to be fired. Sick people cost them money. They only want healthy people as customers. In fact, before the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") made it illegal, health insurance companies would fire you when you got sick with something expensive, like cancer.

And then, it was good luck finding another health insurance company which would cover you at all, let alone cover your "pre-existing condition." They don't make money from sick people, they make money from healthy people.

This was the crazy thing about the House Republicans' plan to end Medicare. (And yes, PolitiFact be damned, giving the elderly vouchers and telling them to find their own insurance, if they could, is "ending Medicare." That might have been a health care plan of sorts, but it wasn't Medicare!)

Anyway, how many health insurance companies would be wanting to insure my 85-year-old mother, do you think? At any price, pretty much. There's no way they could make a profit from that! That's the whole point of Medicare, in fact. Health insurance companies never were clamoring to cover the elderly, for obvious reasons.

Right-wing ideologues have their pie-in-the-sky theories, but they're not backed by evidence. Conservatives just believe what they believe. Well, they're faith-based, not evidence-based.

Here's Igor Volsky:

Conservatives have long claimed that giving Americans more “skin in the game” — that is, increasing their sensitivity to prices — would encourage individuals and families to make more informed health care choices, avoid costly treatments and eventually lower health care costs. But there is very little evidence to suggest that asking people to pay more out of pocket would actually reduce health care costs, particularly since most of the spending is concentrated among the sickest Americans (those who suffer from multiple chronic conditions and cannot choose to forgo care).

As Yale professors Theodore Marmor and Jerry Mashaw pointed out in the Philadelphia Inquirer last year, “if free medical care led to more reckless overuse, countries like Canada and Germany, where patient costs are either zero or minimal, would suffer disproportionate inflation in expenditures or severe access pressures. They don’t.” Indeed, the theory doesn’t even hold up in the American health care system, where individuals with higher cost sharing in the employer based system with higher cost sharing don’t seem to spend less than Medicare enrollees with smaller cost sharing.

Derek Thompson makes a good point, too:

Romney says "the insurance company will have an incentive to keep people healthy." That's not true. The insurance company, as Romney knows, has an incentive to make a profit. One way to make a profit is to have way more healthy clients than sick clients. But that's not the easiest way. The easiest way is to rescind coverage when your healthy clients get sick, or to refuse coverage or discriminate on the basis of preexisting illnesses to ensure your group has only healthy people. Without regulation to prevent insurers from discriminating against or pushing off the sickest policyholders, healthy patients would all belong to cheaper plans and sick people would all get stuck in the same insurance program that death-spirals toward bankruptcy.

An individual market that moves away from company-defined health care requires group-underwriting regulations to prevent these kind of death spirals. But once we require insurance companies to accept all comers, we risk driving up premia unless we also compel all adults to buy health insurance whether or not they're sick. Otherwise, all healthy people could abstain from insurance until they contract an illness, knowing the insurance companies would accept them. Thus, you have the case for an individual mandate to make up the third leg in health care reform after government regulations and an "exchange" market for individuals.

Romney wants to give families the power to choose and fire insurance companies. That's commendable. It's also unworkable in a market where "people [only] own insurance if they wish to." That's the real gaffe from this morning.

I'm not sure if that was the "real gaffe," because I think the whole thing was wrong. But yes, that's another problem with Romney's new plan. (Obviously, his "old" plan is "Obamacare.")

Now, I realize that these arguments don't make a good political sound bite, not compared to "I like being able to fire people." And I also realize that Republicans seem to do very well by lying through their teeth like that (indeed, worse than that).

But do Democrats really have to choose between being inept and being dishonest? I don't think so. But maybe that's just what I want to believe, I don't know.

President Obama's anger translator

What can I say? I thought this was funny.

Happy is a choice

(Last Kiss)

There's something about this comic that really appeals to me. In a nutshell (yeah, inevitably, I'd be a lot wordier about it if I ever did try to give advice), it's what I'd say to a gay kid, I think.

But it's damn good advice for everyone else, too, don't you think?