Isn't it funny how the GOP candidates who have "run a business" specialize in putting Americans out of work?

Mitt Romney insists that as a "successful businessman", he knows how to create jobs, despite the fact that his company, Bain Capital, was in the business of buying up companies and cutting their costs via mass layoffs.

Now we have Herman Cain insisting that as a "successful businessman" he too knows how to create jobs. There's just one problem: During his stint on the Board of Directors at Whirlpool, that company eliminated thousands of jobs via outsourcing, while at the same time paying no taxes, instead receiving huge government refunds:

The Benton Harbor, Michigan based Whirlpool corporation, which recently received a $19 million dollar stimulus grant from the Dept. of Energy to develop smart grid capable appliances, moved forward with plans to close it’s Evansville, Indiana refrigerator plant and build a new plant in Mexico.

Whirlpool closed the plant in June, eliminating 1,100 full-time jobs. They did this all the while the company is collecting public subsidies while eliminating jobs.

After buying the Maytag brand in 2006 Whirlpool shut down the manufacturing headquarters which at its peak Maytag had 4,000 workers in Newton, Iowa a town of 16,000 people 30 miles east of Des Moines. Newton is a great case study on what happens when the company town packs up and leaves. The devastating effects are quickly dominoed throughout the town and surrounding towns. Those 4,000 plus workers were supporting the other local businesses. When Maytag left, people had to leave to find work. When people left we have ghost towns that are popping up all over the United States. Towns that used to thrive, towns that people used to be proud to call home now sit mostly vacant. Is this the ‘new modern economy’ America will build it’s future around?

Taxes? That’s for poor people…

Whirpool, the world’s largest appliance maker, has been a major tax dodger. The company had negative income tax rates over the past three years, and reported a $64 million income tax benefit last year. It expects similar results this year:

Meanwhile sales at the appliance maker rose 7 percent to $18.4 billion last year after dropping during the housing slump of the previous two years. In the year-earlier quarter, the company attributed a rise in revenue to increased productivity.

Whirlpool had negative effective income tax rates in 2010, 2009 and 2008. Last year, the company reported an income tax benefit of $64 million and an effective tax rate of negative 10.9 percent, according to company filings. The company expects a similar tax benefit in 2011.

We keep hearing about how corporate taxes have to be cut in order for companies to "create jobs." When companies pay no taxes and still get refunds, how much more government largesse do they need?

If you look at the records of "successful businessmen' who run for President on the GOP side, you'll find that all of them involve active participation in the systematic gutting of this country's middle class.

Question Of The Day

How can Social Security be a contributor to the deficit when it is a holder of some of that debt in the form of Treasury bonds? To say that we have to cut Social Security to reduce the deficit is like saying we have to nuke China to reduce it.

Why do the media take these poeple seriously?

Things are at a sorry pass indeed when news media whose missions are supposed to be to inform become so enslaved to tabloid culture that they take their marching orders from guys like this (from The Smoking Gun):

JUNE 3--The Twitter user who first floated the rumor that a lewd photo scandal was brewing for Representative Anthony Weiner is not your typical conservative avenger, an investigation by The Smoking Gun has determined.

Mike Stack, a 39-year-old New Jersey resident, is known as “goatsred” in the Twitterverse, where he has helped lead a months-long assault on the New York City politician. Stack was joined at the hip in this pursuit by “patriotusa76,” who gave his name as “Dan Wolfe” and was the online avenger who happened last Friday night to discover the notorious tweet emanating from Weiner’s account.

As TSG reported yesterday, “Dan Wolfe” has conveniently evaporated in the wake of “Weinergate.” In fact, today Wolfe's entire Twitter page was deleted.

But Stack, the other Twitter Twin, remains online. An examination of his background has discovered:

* Stack, who aggressively pushed the story about Weiner’s underpants shot, has worked as a moderator on a pornography web site, and been a regular commenter on several other X-rated sites. Stack describes himself as a “Pervert” on one site, where his avatar, captioned “Antichrist,” is a drawing of President Barack Obama as Jesus Christ.

* New Jersey court records show that Stack was convicted of drunk driving in February 2008. He was previously arrested for domestic assault in July 2004 following a drunken fight that left his girlfriend with bruises on her arm (that case, though, ended with a dismissal in April 2005). Stack is pictured above in a mug shot taken by the Readington Township Police Department following his 2004 collar.

* Stack has twice declared bankruptcy during the past 14 years. His most recent Chapter 7 case ended in July 2008, around the time Stack lost his Hunterdon County home to foreclosure. At the time of that filing, Stack reported working as a warehouseman for Johnson & Johnson.

* The Internal Revenue Service last year filed a $5907 federal tax lien against Stack.

“The past is the past,” Stack said in an interview today. Describing himself as a “private person,” he added, “there’s no reason my records need to be public.”

Stack also contended that while he sent out the May 5 tweet first hinting that a “big time” Congressman was about to be ensnared in a sex scandal, he claimed that Wolfe actually provided him that information. Wolfe, Stack said, told him that he had heard the rumor from a source who worked for a well-known conservative web site.

After Stack sent out the initial tweet, Wolfe quickly ran with the rumor, attributing it--“via@goatsred”--to his online buddy. In retweets, Wolfe immediately attached Weiner’s name to the rumor, wondering “@RepWeiner are you this Congressman?” Stack did not have an explanation as to why Wolfe sought to launder the rumor through him. He also vehemently denied that he was Wolfe.

While Stack’s rap sheet and financial calamities may be of interest to “Weinergate” followers, his affiliation with porn sites might raise the eyebrows of the conservative coterie with which he is affiliated.

Probably not. We already know that hypocrisy is the currency of Republican and conservative politics. How else to explain the presence of potential GOP candidates at a conclave put together by a so-called "Christian leader" who, as Dennis G. points out, was exposed in the Jack Abramoff probe as "a money grubbing, hypocrite who had no problem scamming Christians into support gambling, human trafficking, sex slavery and forced abortions just to make a fast buck." John Edwards deserves everything that can be thrown at him for the same kind of hypocrisy that we usually see among Republicans -- passing himself off as a devoted husband to political supporters while fucking a grifter on the side. But it's becoming ever more clear with every scam that the Breitbart/O'Keefe axis comes up with, or that guys like Mike Stack (not to be confused with Mike Stark, whose modus operandi is only to make Rush Limbaugh look stupid on Limbaugh's own radio show) come up with, that conservatives will do anything...anything...and destroy anyone who gets in their way.

And by the way, what the hell are we growing in New Jersey, that both this guy Stack AND James O'Keefe were raised here?

OK, Republicans, so tell me: Where are the jobs?

We keep hearing, even admidst the debt hysteria, that we have to cut taxes even further so that business will "create jobs." But when the largest companies are paying an effective tax rate of NEGATIVE 1.5%, how much more do we have to shovel into their pockets before they hire?

Today, and not a moment too soon, the non-profit Citizens For Tax Justice (CTJ) has put out their findings revealing that twelve of the nations largest Fortune 500 companies, while making $170 billion in profits during the period of The Great Recession, paid an effective tax rate of negative 1.5%.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Not only have these twelve companies paid zero in taxes for the years 2008-2010, they actually received tax subsidies that added $62.4 billion to their bottom lines.

The companies were chosen by the CTJ to represent a range of industries, including manufacturing, energy, services, transportation and high tech and include – in alphabetical order – American Electric Power, Boeing, Dupont, Exxon Mobil, FedEx, General Electric, Honeywell International, IBM, United Technologies, Verizon Communications, Wells Fargo and Yahoo.

Here are the bullet points presented by the report:

• From 2008 through 2010, these 12 companies reported $171 billion in pretax U.S. profits. But as a group, their federal income taxes were negative: –$2.5 billion.

• All but two of the dozen companies enjoyed at least one no-tax year over the 2008-10 period, despite reporting substantial pretax U.S. profits in those no-tax years.

• Eight of the twelve companies reported net tax benefits over the full three-year period.

According to the study, not a single one of these companies paid an amount even close to the 35% statutory tax rate.

In fact, the tax rate paid by Exxon Mobile, when spread over the full three years, was only 14.2% – a full 60% below the 35% rate that corporations are supposed to be paying. And if we take a look at what Exxon paid over just the past two years, it totals a mere 0.4% on their pre-tax profits of $9.9 billion.

And get this – Exxon Mobile paid the most in taxes of any of the twelve companies on the list.

Here is my favorite part – had just these twelve companies paid at the actual 35% tax rate the GOP is telling us they are chaffing under, the sum would have added a full 12% to the totals the United States of America’s treasury received through corporate taxes.

We sure could use that money.

This morning, another in the parade of GOP idiots in Congress, Rep. Jeb Hensarling, was spouting the GOP talking point about "small businesses" being the engine of hiring. John McCain was spouting this nonsense in 2008, and was debunked by Factcheck.org, which noted that when the U.S. Small Business Administration refers to about 26.8 million small businesses, it includes about 20 million "non-employer" firms -- which includes people who sell their stuff on e-bay, the couple in the town next to me who have an errand-running service, the catsitter I use when we go away for a weekend, or Mr. Brilliant charging someone fifty bucks to de-virus their PC. These "small businesses" don't hire people, and the file at personal tax rates -- which means that corporate tax cuts do NOTHING to foster hiring.

So I repeat: The tax cuts originally advocated and signed by George W. Bush have been in place for a decade. The biggest companies not only pay no taxes, but got money back.

So...where are the jobs?

People are starting to wake up

Of course it's closing the barn door after the horse has escaped, but it's better than nothing. New tea bagger Congressman and former reality show contestant Sean Duffy held a town Hall recently and few were buying his Koch bros./Paul Ryan talking points:

More videos from thos town hall of informed Wisconsin citizens who recognize a line of crap when they hear it here.

But lies are part of the IOKIYAR rule

When you're a Republican, you can lie with impunity and the media will continue to applaud. As long as you're emphatic about what you say, and you say it with macho pride, the manly-men of the media and the Republican Party will call you "a strong leader":

New Jersey’s public-sector unions routinely pressure the State Legislature to give them what they fail to win in contract talks. Most government workers pay nothing for health insurance. Concessions by school employees would have prevented any cuts in school programs last year.

Statements like those are at the core of Gov. Chris Christie’s campaign to cut state spending by getting tougher on unions. They are not, however, accurate.

In fact, on the occasions when the Legislature granted the unions new benefits, it was for pensions, which were not subject to collective bargaining — and it has not happened in eight years. In reality, state employees have paid 1.5 percent of their salaries toward health insurance since 2007, in addition to co-payments and deductibles, and since last spring, many local government workers, including teachers, do as well. The few dozen school districts where employees agreed to concessions last year still saw layoffs and cuts in academic programs.

“Clearly there has been a pattern of the governor playing fast and loose with the details,” said Brigid Harrison, a political science professor at Montclair State University. “But so far, he’s been adept at getting the public to believe what he says.”

Mr. Christie, a Republican who took office in January 2010, would hardly be the first politician to indulge in hyperbole or gloss over facts. But his misstatements, exaggerations and carefully constructed claims belie the national image he has built as a blunt talker who gives straight answers to hard questions, especially about budgets and labor relations. Candor is central to Mr. Christie’s appeal, and a review of his public statements over the past year shows some of them do not hold up to scrutiny.

[snip]

Misstatements have been central to Mr. Christie’s worst public stumbles — about how the state managed to miss out on a $400 million education grant last year, for example, and whether he was in touch enough while he was in Florida during the blizzard in December — and his rare admissions that he was wrong. But Peter J. Woolley, a politics professor and polling director at Fairleigh Dickinson University, said there had been no sign, so far, that these issues had much effect on the governor’s political standing.

“People prefer directness to detail,” Professor Woolley said. “People know it’s not unusual for politicians to take the shortcut in public debate, that they’re not academics who are going to qualify everything.”

It's one thing to take shortcuts. It's one thing to try to explain things in a way someone who can't handle a more complex concept than 2 + 2 can understand. But it's another to outright lie and call it "straight talk" as long as it's done emphatically. This is what got us into an expensive, intractable and unnecessary war in Iraq based on lies about weapons of mass destruction that weren't there. This is what Bernie Madoff did when he convinced people that his 18% returns when the markets were flailing around were real. Just because you say something loudly doesn't make it true. And it's high time the media started doing their homework instead of this worship of "straight talk" that isn't straight at all.

Truth. Pass it on.

I'm serious. Start telling everyone who will listen the truth (from David Cay Johnston) about the Wisconsin state workers and their benefits:

When it comes to improving public understanding of tax policy, nothing has been more troubling than the deeply flawed coverage of the Wisconsin state employees' fight over collective bargaining.

Economic nonsense is being reported as fact in most of the news reports on the Wisconsin dispute, the product of a breakdown of skepticism among journalists multiplied by their lack of understanding of basic economic principles.

Gov. Scott Walker says he wants state workers covered by collective bargaining agreements to "contribute more" to their pension and health insurance plans.

Accepting Gov. Walker' s assertions as fact, and failing to check, created the impression that somehow the workers are getting something extra, a gift from taxpayers. They are not.

Out of every dollar that funds Wisconsin' s pension and health insurance plans for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers.

How can that be? Because the "contributions" consist of money that employees chose to take as deferred wages – as pensions when they retire – rather than take immediately in cash. The same is true with the health care plan. If this were not so a serious crime would be taking place, the gift of public funds rather than payment for services.

Thus, state workers are not being asked to simply "contribute more" to Wisconsin' s retirement system (or as the argument goes, "pay their fair share" of retirement costs as do employees in Wisconsin' s private sector who still have pensions and health insurance). They are being asked to accept a cut in their salaries so that the state of Wisconsin can use the money to fill the hole left by tax cuts and reduced audits of corporations in Wisconsin.

The labor agreements show that the pension plan money is part of the total negotiated compensation. The key phrase, in those agreements I read (emphasis added), is: "The Employer shall contribute on behalf of the employee." This shows that this is just divvying up the total compensation package, so much for cash wages, so much for paid vacations, so much for retirement, etc.

The collective bargaining agreements for prosecutors, cops and scientists are all on-line.

Read the whole thing here. The media will not tell your conservative, and even your not-paying-attention friends this truth. You have to.

That Woman Is An Idiot.

I don't work for MSNBC, so I can say it and Comcast can't fire me:

The best post you will ever read about Social Security

Blue Girl.

If Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility, why is Texas in such a mess?

If you live in New Jersey like I do, you're already seeing what happens to your local property taxes when Republican governors who buy the hype about themselves already have their eye on their next office. They cut state spending, leaving municipal governments accustomed to regarding local office as a cronyism mill to give no-bid contracts to their friends, holding the bag. Not that it matters much; towns in New Jersey always respond to the rhetoric about what will happen to the schools, or snow removal, or the condition of local ball fields, if you dare to protest the $500/year tax increase they are going to impose on you. But here in New Jersey, it matters naught to Chris Christie, who despite his overall repulsiveness, is being fellated regularly on Morning Asshole and other cable news shows.

But this is New Jersey, where Christie can blame Jon Corzine and Jim McGreevey and public employee unions for the state's fiscal condition and get a fairly long (and blind) honeymoon with voters in doing so. Because in most towns that are like mine, as long as the high school football team is ranked high and the grass on the soccer field is green, they'll do things like elect a mayor who runs on a platform of "change" after being on the council for thirty years. And they'll forget about earlier Republican governors like Christine Todd Whitman, who started the borrowing binge that got us into this mess, and was herself a rising star in her party until it went nuts -- and until she lied to all those Ground Zero recovery workers and told them that the air they were breathing was just fine.

But what about states that have been under Republican governance? What kind of shape are THEY in? Say, Texas for example. Here's a state that has been under Republican governance since 1995. That's fifteen years of Republicans. Texas ought to be in just dandy shape, having been in the capable hands of good old fiscally conservative Republicans for a decade and a half, right?

Perhaps not:

Texas faces a budget crisis of truly daunting proportions, with lawmakers likely to cut sacrosanct programs such as education for the first time in memory and to lay off hundreds if not thousands of state workers and public university employees.

Texas' GOP leaders, their eyes on the Nov. 2 election, have played down the problem's size, even as the hole in the next two-year cycle has grown in recent weeks to as much as $24 billion to $25 billion. That's about 25 percent of current spending.

The gap is now proportionately larger than the deficit California recently closed with cuts and fee increases, its fourth dose of budget misery since September 2008.

Against the backdrop of the acrimonious campaign between Republican Gov. Rick Perry and Democratic challenger Bill White, Texas' top elected and budget officials have guarded even more tightly than usual against leaks of information. But bad numbers continue to dribble out in legislative testimony and agency reports.

The bottom line: Public schools, college students and government employees, not just poor and needy Texans, might very well lose money, grants, benefits and even livelihoods during and after next year's legislative session.

"They'll have to cut," said former Rep. Talmadge Heflin, R-Houston, the House's budget chief during the last budget meltdown, in 2003. "When you look at the big numbers, I just don't think there's any way that you make it match without making some reduction in education, both higher [education] and public education," or grades K-12.

Even in the budget crises of the late 1980s, 1991 and 2003, Texas never cut state funding of public schools.

But declines in revenues, property values and federal Medicaid help have added between $3 billion and $4 billion this month to a late-August guess that the two-year shortfall could top $20 billion.

Ongoing expenses, including property tax cuts passed four years ago, cost between $95 billion and $100 billion in state funds, now that a federal flow of stimulus cash is winding down.

Dale Craymer, president of the business-backed Texas Taxpayers and Research Association, said next year very well could bring unprecedented retrenchments, including layoffs or furloughs.

"This budget's not going to be solved with a single magic bullet," said Craymer, a top budget adviser to former Govs. Ann Richard and George W. Bush. "It's going to be solved by a number of very hard decisions that cause a lot of pain in a lot of different areas. So furloughs may indeed be part of the solution," though even far-ranging layoffs of state employees wouldn't close the budget gap by themselves, he said.

[snip]

The options are few when it comes to finding $25 billion in the state's budget. Texas already ranks 50th nationally in per-capita state spending, so big cuts will have to come from essential services.

Teachers and welfare workers are paid mostly from local and federal money, so cutting those positions won't net much savings. To give you an idea how difficult this could be, we took an imaginary whack at state government and programs.

You could eliminate

state government functions

to save ...

•$2.4 billion (22 entire state government agencies, including the offices of the attorney general and comptroller)

•$437 million (state judiciary)

•$875 million (oversight of environmental regulations, water control and parks)

•$587 million (business and economic development programs)

•$312 million (31 regulatory agencies, including those overseeing insurance, racing and utilities)

•$354 million (the Legislature: budget planning, legal advice and staff)

And you could ...

•Fire half the prison, parole and probation officers to save $1.4 billion.

•Eliminate college financial aid/scholarships to save $1.2 billion.

•Spend half of the state's rainy day fund to raise $4.5 billion.

•Eliminate all grants for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families to save $131 million.

But after all that, you'd have saved just $12.2 billion, barely half of what probably will be needed.

Proven: Tax cuts for the wealthy do NOT create jobs

So can we stop with this horsepuckey that if you just shovel enough cash into the pockets of the wealthy they'll "create jobs"? This one ran last Friday. I'll post tonight's update when it's available.

UPDATE: Here you go:

This is what happens when you put Republicans in charge

Today New Jersey, tomorrow the nation.

Yesterday I wrote about Chris Christie's "The Dog Peed On My Homework" tactic in blaming Barack Obama for his own administration's failure to provide the correct information in applying for $400 million in money for education reforms. He painted the screwup as one of Washington bureaucrats being unwilling to make a phone call.

As it turned out, not only did said Washington bureaucrats ask for the missing information, but there's video to prove it here and here.

And here Christie was basking in the warm glow of being metaphorically fellated by Joe 'n' Mika the other morning and press coverage like this. He's even been mentioned as a potential GOP presidential candidate in 2012, which would almost be worth it to watch the double standard of the media in obsessing about Christie's girth compared to their relentless coverage of Bill Clinton's.

And now this.

So today Christie did what all good thugs do -- he pushed his loyal servant under the bus by jettisoning his Education Commissioner, Bret Schundler -- another formerly-fellated Republican who was touted as a GOP messiah not so long ago. Schunder is a particularly interesting case to me, because I remember when he was Gary Hart's Union County campaign manager in 1984. I remember because I volunteered for Hart's campaign and Schundler invited me to run to be a delegate -- something I had to decline because of my $12,500 salary which paid for my apartment and commuting into Manhattan every day. Then I turn around, and suddenly Schundler is a conservative Republican.

Chris Christie apparently hasn't learned anything about the price of lying from Schundler's experience. After a failed run for governor in 2001, he tried again in 2005, and got caught right before the primary using a photoshopped image of himself in a photo actually taken at a 2004 Howard Dean rally in a campaign ad. Schundler lost the primary to Doug Forrester, and that was the end of Bret Schundler, rising star. He floated the trial balloon last year of running for mayor again at the scene of his former glory, but Schundler's time had come and gone, and he cited financial reasons for dropping out.

So now Schundler is out of a job, reduced to asking to be fired so he can collect unemployment -- something that ordinary working people don't get when they are fired for cause. So here is Bret Schundler, conservative Republican, who went from Gary Hart supporter to a lucrative position on Wall Street, begging for what the Great Minds of His Party regard as something akin to welfare. Schundler says he needs the money because he has a kid about to start college and a mortgage. I guess he's shilling for Sharron Angle and the rest of the Republicans who seem to think Americans are getting rich on unemployment. The top rate for unemployment compensation in New Jersey is $560/week, which may sound like a lot if you are in Alabama or North Dakota, but in New Jersey, it is not going to pay for a mortgage payment, property taxes, and put a kid through college. So one has to wonder what Schundler did with all the money he made at Salomon Brothers after his foray into Democratic politics in 1984.

So it's all here -- Republican politics in a nutshell -- incompetence, thuggery, lies, and hypocrisy. And Americans are going to put these people in charge of the entire country again?

Snooki is a rocket scientist compared to Iowa Republicans

At least Snooki is good for derision, and she's a girl who knows her limitations. But Iowa Republicans participate in government. Here is the Iowa legislature in finely-honed Emily Litella mode:

If there is an aspect of the human condition that is unaddressed by the platform of the Republican Party of Iowa, adopted last month at the state convention in Des Moines, you’d have to look awfully hard to find it. Its 387 enumerated planks and principles range widely over politics, culture, and economics, from sweeping statements of belief (“America is good”) to the fine nuances of agricultural policy (“We support the definition of manure as natural fertilizer”) and touching on the mythical “North American Union” (against) and the gold standard (for). Even so, it’s a little startling to come upon section 7.19, which calls for “the reintroduction and ratification of the original 13th Amendment, not the 13th amendment in today’s Constitution.” Since the existing 13th Amendment bans slavery, while the “original” one was about something else entirely, the wording might give the impression that Iowa Republicans wish to reverse emancipation, which is not at all the case, according to state GOP Communications Director Danielle Plogmann. Like many aspects of Republican politics this year, it’s actually about embarrassing President Obama. But you have to wonder whether the delegates knew what they were getting into. In making common cause with “Thirteenthers,” as those who seek to restore the long-lost amendment are known, the party has ventured beyond the far fringes of conspiracy theory, into a mysterious lost land without lawyers or taxes. Maybe they knew what they were doing after all.


Return with us now to the tumultuous years leading up to the War of 1812, when fear of “foreign influence”—by England or France, depending on whether you were a Republican or Federalist—was a dominating issue in American politics. Jerome Bonaparte, the younger brother of Napoleon, had recently spent several years in the United States, where he married Elizabeth Patterson, the beautiful, ambitious daughter of a wealthy Baltimore merchant. In 1810, Jerome was on the throne of Westphalia, while Elizabeth was in America with their son, Jerome Napoleon. (The couple would never see each other again.) According to historian Michael Vorenberg of Brown University, having a nephew of the emperor of France growing up on American soil might have made the pro-British Federalists uneasy, or, just as likely, suggested to them a way to tie the Republicans to the French Legion of Honor, the Trilateral Commission of its day. Desiring to get out in front of the issue—or possibly seeking to score points against the Federalists, who had their own embarrassing ties to the British aristocracy—Republican Sen. Philip Reed of Maryland introduced an amendment meant to strengthen the existing “emoluments clause” in Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution.

This clause reads:

“No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

Reed’s proposed amendment extended the ban from office-holders to “any citizen of the United States” and made the penalty loss of citizenship:

“If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive or retain any title of nobility or honour, or shall, without the consent of Congress accept and retain any present, pension, office or emolument of any kind whatever, from any emperor, king, prince or foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them.”


[snip]

In the world of the Thirteenthers, though, it’s all a conspiracy, and the leading suspects are those shady characters who put “esquire” after their names. To quote the Web site Constitutional Concepts, “This Amendment was for the specific purpose of banning participation in government operations by attorneys and bankers who claimed the Title of Nobility of ‘Esquire.’ These people had joined the International Bar Association or the International Bankers Association and owed their allegiance to the King of England.” In other words—well, we’re not sure how to explain it any better, but Constitutional Concepts CEO Jim Barrus says in an e-mail that enforcement of the 13th Amendment would strike a blow against “the elected politicians who have grand plans of ruling every facet of America,” and would essentially delegitimize virtually every act of the federal government since 1819. Who wouldn’t want that?

[snip]

There are, of course, other implications of Thirteenthism, such as ensuring that the United States never again suffers the humiliation of having a president win the Nobel Peace Prize. That was just what the Iowa Republicans had in mind, according to Plogmann, who wrote in an e-mail that the plank “was meant to make a statement about the delegates’ opinion about Mr. Obama receiving the prize.” (Presumably they didn’t mind if, in the process, they were also making a statement about any American scientist or writer unlucky enough to win a Nobel.) Unfortunately for them, the Department of Justice looked into whether Obama needed Congressional approval to accept the Nobel under the existing emoluments clause, and based on the meaning of “foreign state” (which would not cover the Nobel Prize Committee) concluded that he did not.

Yes, friends, these nimrods think that Barack Obama winning the NOBEL prize constitutes accepting a title of NobIlity from a foreign entity.

But they don't even have the decency to say, "Oh. Never mind."

Dispatch from the "Holy Shit!" file

Andrew Sullivan dares to open that door again:

If any of the three scenarios Jonathan has pointed out is true, then Sarah Palin has no business running for president and should never have been picked for vice-president. Why? Because if her giving birth to a Down Syndrome child is a complete hoax, then she's simply psychotic to double down on such a crazy invention, and we should try and avoid psychotics as political leaders (yes, it's hard given the normal inclinations of a political class, but we can try, no?). If the scenario is merely a function of deep irresponsibility, an unconscious desire to miscarry her child by extreme recklessness, then the same applies. After eight years of Bush, it seems that willful recklessness that places the vulnerable and powerless in great danger is not a good idea. The last is easily the least worrying - pure fabulism, exaggeration, and a completely random relationship to reality. Yes, we're all human. But again, sane people who tell fibs once dial them back subsequently - they don't repeat them, embellish them even more, and concoct - in Going Rogue - a simply baroque, incoherent and, yes, nutty version of a labor story that defies all we know about human biology, space and time.

But in many ways, my real frustration here is not with Palin, who has behaved in ways that are rational for a gambler of such proportions. My frustration is with the media who have never questioned, let alone seriously investigated, the story, and who have actually gone further and vouched for its truthfulness and accuracy without any independent confirmation. I know why. It was because they wanted, as the WaPo ombudsman put it, to avoid any further damage to the mainstream media

"among conservatives who believe it is not properly
attuned to their ideology or activities.”

That's why the Washington Post actually operated as an extension of the McCain campaign against the press in the last election, through the Republican sock-puppet, Howie Kurtz. So my issue here is of the same kind as my issue with how the MSM missed the Hastings scoop. They are simultaneously in bed with the powerful and afraid of the masses. So they end up in this ghastly middle.

What's their excuse for not investigating or even asking? Their first is Palin's alleged family privacy.

But there is no family privacy once you have deliberately forced an infant with special needs into the bewildering public space, held him up at a convention way past his bedtime, made campaign speeches featuring him, hauled him around night and day on a book tour, and used him as the central prop in the construction of a political identity. Trig matters because Palin has insisted that Trig matters. If she had had a child under odd circumstances and insisted that it was private and kept the child away from cameras and ensured that he had all the care and privacy that such a child obviously needs, no one, including me, would have inquired further. But when you advance a political campaign using a child, it is imperative that the media investigate and probe the story.

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That Sullivan is "going there" is potentially quite huge. Many of us have long felt that Palin's Miracle Birth story had more holes in it than Albert Hall, but we were also regarded for a long time as loonies on a par with the birthers and the 9/11 Truthers. But if Palin is, as the mainstream media insists she is and seems bound and determined to make her, the next President of the United States, we DO need to know if she's just someone who embellished her tale of her son's birth for dramatic effect to prove a point, or if she's a) a hypocrite whose travel after her water broke was, as one blogger called it at the time, an attempted "fundamentalist abortion"; or b) a psychotic power-mad lunatic who isn't above somehow gaining possession of a Downs Syndrome baby to use as a political prop in much the same way as the Gregg Stillson character played by Martin Sheen in the movie adaptation of The Dead Zone does.

(Note to Palin acolytes: The link to the clip from the movie does not mean I advocate anyone taking a shot at anyone, least of all Sarah Palin. It is to illustrate a baby being used as a political prop in a movie. Good Lord, in addition to everything else, you think I want this nutball turned into a martyr? Yeesh.)

Bobby Jindal is a fucking liar

When even the mainstream media aren't buying your bullshit anymore, you know you've jumped the shark:

Watch CBS News Videos Online

I'm sorry, but South Carolina really IS the stupidest fucking place on the entire planet

As if Mark Sanford hiking the Appalachian Trail wasn't bad enough, now we have this:

With a bead of sweat rolling down the side of his face outside a Columbia bar, Republican S.C. Sen. Jake Knotts called Lexington Rep. Nikki Haley, an Indian-American Republican woman running for governor, a “raghead” several times while explaining how he believed she was hiding her true religion from voters.

“She’s a f#!king raghead,” Knotts said.

He later clarified his statement. He did not mean to use the F-word.

Knotts says he believed Haley has been set up by a network of Sikhs and was programmed to run for governor of South Carolina by outside influences in foreign countries. He claims she is hiding her religion and he wants the voters to know about it.

“We got a raghead in Washington; we don’t need one in South Carolina,” Knotts said more than once. “She’s a raghead that’s ashamed of her religion trying to hide it behind being Methodist for political reasons.”

President Obama’s father is from Africa. His mother is a white woman from Kansas.

On her website, Haley says, “Being a Christian is not about words, but about living for Christ every day.”

Knotts, a former boxer and cop from West Columbia, said he wasn’t worried about being called a racist for the remarks he made. He says he was elected to the Senate to represent his constituents which he says he does well. He says many of his supporters are black.

“This is Jakie Knotts trying to let the people know,” he said about his motivations for leveling the inflammatory charges against a minority Republican frontrunner for governor just days before the June 8 primary elections. He says he’s called her a raghead before.

Knotts is backing Republican Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer for governor.

Bauer this week fired one of his lead consultants, Columbia lobbyist Larry Marchant, for what he called “inappropriate conduct.” Marchant told the media shortly after that he’d had sex with Haley at a conference in Utah while they were both married. The claim comes after blogger Will Folks said he’d also had a relationship with Haley in early 2007.

Knotts showed up unexpectedly at the Flying Saucer bar in Columbia’s Vista for a live taping of the online political talk show Pub Politics, which is co-hosted by Senate Republican Caucus political director Wesley Donehue and his Democratic counterpart, Phil Bailey. Democratic S.C. Rep Boyd Brown of Fairfield County was a guest.

Knotts initially made the racial slur on the show.

Neither Donehue, Bailey nor Brown challenged Knotts on his remark during or after the broadcast.

“I was floored,” Donehue said after the cameras were off.

“Senator Knotts took it a step too far,” Bailey said afterward. “I don’t agree with it … [but] it’s not my job to question Jakie Knotts.”

After the broadcast, Knotts stood in a corner on the deck of the bar and defended his remarks.

“This isn’t the first time I’ve said it,” Knotts said. “I’m not on a crusade to downgrade her, but if someone asks me I’ll tell ‘em. And look here, someone wants to vote for her knowing the truth, vote for her.”

Knotts said that South Carolina is a religious community.

“We need a good Christian to be our governor,” he said. “She’s hiding her religion. She ought to be proud of it. I’m proud of my god.”

Sorry, Jakie, but your God thinks you are a shandeh.

Mr. Kirk, your pants are on fire

His military record appears to not be the only thing about which Mark Kirk is lying.

(Oh spare me your "hearsay" nonsense. This is what Mike Rogers does. And he has not been wrong yet.)

Obama will dither about this too

Remember how John Kerry believed that "Americans are too smart to believe these lies", when the Swift Boat Liars ran their ads accusing this decorated veteran of being a coward, and promoted George W. Bush, who spent the Vietnam War not showing up for the National Guard gig his daddy got him?

Let's hope Barack Obama doesn't make the same mistake about this:

WASHINGTON -- The zeal that Rep. Darrell Issa has brought to his pursuit of the allegations that the White House dangled some kind of job in front of Joe Sestak last year while they were trying to muscle him out of the Pennsylvania Senate primary is impressive, if also a little amusing. Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee, has been thundering about an alleged bribe, using scary words like "impeachable," "crime" and "ethics complaint." (Actually, considering how rarely the House Ethics Committee can be roused to do anything about lawmakers, that last one isn't so scary.)

But as Alex Pareene has already noted, this isn't exactly the first time someone in politics cut a deal for a job. When Sen. Judd Gregg was going to leave Congress to join the Obama administration -- which, in the end, he didn't do, because he realized he disagreed with everything President Obama stands for -- he wasn't going to take the appointment to become commerce secretary unless his replacement in New Hampshire's Senate seat would caucus with the GOP.

So Salon asked Issa's office what, exactly, the difference between the two situations is. At first, Issa's staff insisted they were nothing alike. "That never happened, at the end of the day," Issa spokesman Kurt Bardella said of the Gregg appointment quid pro quo. "It never played out."

That's because Gregg declined the appointment, and never vacated his seat. (Democrats are hoping to seize it in this fall's election, anyway.) But that isn't actually a distinction between the Gregg situation and the Sestak situation, because as it happens, the Sestak scenario "never played out," either; Sestak refused to drop out of the race and wound up winning the nomination. Bardella said that made the Sestak allegations even worse, because if he had taken the job and dropped out, it would have changed the course of an election. And at first, he said Gregg hadn't actually confirmed the contours of the deal the way Sestak had spoken of the offer from the White House.

After we hung up, though, I found a quote from a Gregg statement, making clear he wanted a Republican appointed (and another quote from Gregg's appearance with Obama, where he thanked New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch, a Democrat, for "his courtesy and courage in being willing to make this possible through the agreement that we have").

Which, to Bardella's credit, and Issa's, meant he changed his tune a little bit.

"If the White House had come to Judd Gregg and said, 'We will make you the secretary of commerce, in exchange for which we will guarantee the appointment of a Republican,' that would be just as wrong," Bardella said. (Which is, of course, exactly what happened.) "That would be worthy of the same scrutiny and would still be a violation of how [Obama] said he would govern. Once you vacate your seat, you announce your intention to take another job, you lose the right to dictate what should happen to that seat. No one person owns a seat ... Offices in the United States Congress should not ever be used as bargaining chips."

So to recap: Issa's staff says Gregg's deal is just as bad as the one Sestak alleged. We'll pause here to allow for the angry phone calls and e-mails back and forth between people who work for Gregg and Issa. (And while we wait, we also have a call in to Gregg's office for comment, which wasn't immediately returned.)

Let's not forget that Republicans regard ANY Democrat who is elected President by the will of the people as illegitimate. This is a party that has embraced the teabaggers and the birthers and is looking for ANY EXCUSE WHATSOEVER to remove this president from office. They did it before with Bill Clinton, when they tried to impeach him for lying about an affair -- something their peeps do all the time. They will trump up bullshit, and their lackeys in the media will huff and puff and clutch their pearls in outrage. Because where the media is concerned, the IOKIYAR rule always applies. (And yes, I'm talking to you, Chuck Todd.)

But remember one thing: Whatever this president's shortcomings, he's got a lot on his plate right now: a still-faltering economy, a persistent terrorist threat from the Middle East, a rise in right-wing violence and threats of violence here at home, tension between the Koreas, Europe on the brink of chaos, and an oil company run amok in the Gulf of Mexico. The last time the Republicans decided to impeach a president over nonsense, the effort failed because Americans regarded him as a lovable scamp. Barack Obama's cool aloofness will not serve him as well.

A refresher course in How They Do It

Yesterday I was listening to Newsradio 880, one of the local all-news stations. This is the most listenable of the local news outlets, despite a penchant for celebrity "news" and a creeping wingnut leaning that surfaces all too often. "Kim Kommando", the booming-voiced tech "guru" was talking about how to find out if all those e-mails you've gotten about Barack Obama are true. It was a masterfully-crafted piece that managed to get just about every looney rumor and falsehood about Obama out there before talking about Snopes.com.

And that is how they do it: First they talk about the "liberal media." They they spout utter nonsense and lies, which are lapped up by that same "liberal media", desperate to prove it isn't "liberal." Then once it's out there into the ether, and into the echo chamber, they repeat it over and over and over again, even in the face of empirical evidence to the contrary, until it takes on the patina of, well, truthiness:

Blogger Matt Yglesias fears that such tactics do nothing but work. "True or false," he writes, "the overwhelming evidence is that the media gets bored with these fact checks very quickly and that if you just put your head down and charge forward, you come out a couple of weeks later back into 'he said, she said' territory. The only real test for whether or not lying works is whether or not you can bring your ideological fellow travelers along. Will Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck echo your line? Will the Weekly Standard and National Review? Will the bulk of your legislative caucus? The answers are yes, yes, and yes."

Actually, we're already there. Just watch. Virtually every TV report on the financial-regulation bill you see will feature a sound bite from McConnell, who'll continue to shill for Citibank and Goldman Sachs while pretending to defend the little guy. Bailout, bailout, bailout. The fact that he's engaging in pure doublespeak is highly unlikely to be mentioned. Instead, you'll likely see a snippet from a Democrat making the opposite claim. For an awful lot of viewers, that's like flipping a coin.

For Fox News viewers and Limbaugh listeners, it's actually easier than that. Conditioned by decades of propaganda about liberal media bias, many react with overt hostility to any and all information from other sources. I must get 50 angry e-mails a week calling me a liar for citing some easily verifiable fact at odds with right-wing doctrine.

Recently, certain conservative intellectuals have begun to worry about whether this hasn't left the movement flying blind. "One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement," writes Cato Institute's Julian Sanchez, "is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross-promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted."

The movement, hell. It's making the whole country as dumb as a brontosaurus in a blizzard. Because reality eventually asserts itself.

But when it does, they'll come up with more nonsense to explain it. Probably something involving Hispanics, Muslims, or both.

The L Word

Rachel Maddow has had enough of Scott Brown trying to wrest money from potential donors based on lies about her nonexistent political aspirations, which seem to exist only in Scott Brown's mind:

This episode in Republican delusionality demonstrates clearly the Republican Doctrine: That something doesn't have to be true, you simply have to get it Out There, and if it could be true, it's the same as if it is. It's Dick Cheney's One Percent Doctrine, translated from actual war to political war. And it is now standard Republican boilerplate.

If we weren't living in an insane world, I'd almost think that Brown and Maddow were in cahoots, that both of them get good publicity from this. But we already know enough about Scott Brown, and about the Republican Party, to know that if they have to lie about the Threat of the Big Scary Lesbian in order to bring in the bucks, they'll do it. Yes, they're that cynical.

Cheer up, Rachel. It could be worse. You could be Raj Patel. Share International is now advertising on Countdown.