America Hating Conservative Freak E.W. Jackson’s ‘Prosperity Gospel’ Is Fraud Perpetrated On Low-Income Virginians

America Hating Conservative Freak E.W. Jackson’s ‘Prosperity Gospel’ Is Fraud Perpetrated On Low-Income Virginians

Ever since Virginia’s Republican Party chose E.W. Jackson as its nominee for the Lieutenant Governor’s race last week, media outlets and political commentators have shed light on the pastor-turned-politician’s alarmingly extremist views. But as Americans balk at Jackson’s often vitriolic statements about LGBT people and AIDS victims, there is another side of his public persona that could spell even worse news for low-income Virginians: His theology.

Potential lawmakers such as Jackson are entitled to their own religious views, and the U.S. Constitution prohibits subjecting political candidates to a “religious test.” But Jackson, a former minister of the so-called “prosperity gospel,” insists on making public connections between his theological convictions and his political actions. According to Jackson’s campaign website, he is founder of Staying True to America’s National Destiny, or S.T.A.N.D., an organization “dedicated to restoring America’s founding values which were informed by the principles found within the Jewish and Christian faiths.” What’s more, Jackson, who has accused Democrats of being “anti-God,” is also head of “Exodus Now”, a national effort that encourages “Christians and other people of moral values within the black community” to leave the Democratic Party.

To get a better look at what Jackson’s politicized theology could mean for Virginians, Think Progress looked at a copy of Jackson’s 2008 book Ten Commandments To An Extraordinary Life. In it, Jackson offers an extensive – and often unsettling – peek at his bizarre religious views.

Jackson, for instance, suggests in his book that people should prioritize giving to the wealthy, not to the poor:

    “One of the common mistakes made by those who have a heart is to assume that the only appropriate giving is downward, i.e. to the poor. While giving to the poor is important, the most powerful giving for wealth building is upward giving.” (page 177)

In fact, Jackson seems to hold up wealth as the ultimate religious ideal, and even indicates that having money makes someone a better person in God’s eyes:

    “Money is not evil, nor does it make people evil. Money magnifies the character of an individual. It gives you more opportunity to be who you really are. God is the creator of silver and gold. He has nothing against money, in fact he values it.” (page 172)

Finally, Jackson provides a framework for how the simple act of positive thinking can force God to provide believers with personal wealth:

    “God says He will prosper you. Believe it in the face of overwhelming financial hardship, and your poverty will become prosperity. God says he has healed you. Believe it when every fiber screams sickness, and your sickness will become health.” (page 18)

These unorthodox religious claims may appear inscrutable, but Jackson’s theology is actually a form of American Christianity known as the “prosperity gospel.” The controversial — but growing — movement teaches believers that they can get rich by thinking positive thoughts and by giving large sums of their money to their church and pastor. Not surprisingly, prosperity gospel preachers have been fiercely criticized by a wide array of religious leaders, including conservative evangelical leaders such as Rick Warren and Jerry Falwell, who decry its rabid focus on accruing personal wealth as heretical.

In fact, the lavish lifestyles and questionable financial practices of several prosperity gospel preachers led to a federal probe by Senator Chuck Grassley (IA-R) in 2007. Grassley attempted to evaluate the records of six prosperity gospel televangelism ministries to see if they violated federal regulations, but the probe ended in 2011 after most of organizations refused to cooperate with investigators.

E.W. Jackson continues a long tradition of using religion as an instrument of hate and profit. No wonder so many Americans are trending towards not being affiliated with any organized religion.

Red States Rejecting Obamacare Medicaid Expansion Need It Most

From the beginning, the defining irony of the never-ending debate over Obamacare is this: health care is worst in those states where Republicans poll best. The map of the states with the worst health care systems largely mirrors GOP strongholds in the Electoral College. Red state residents are generally the unhealthiest and more likely than their blue state cousins to be uninsured. Nevertheless, the New York Times reminded readers on Friday, Republican governors and legislators are rejecting the ACA's expansion of Medicaid that could bring health insurance to millions more of their residents.

Conservatism is a special kind of cancer, composed partly of pure spite. Many conservative politicians would rather their constituents be in bad health or dead, than adopt a program passed by Democrats, but which ironically, was first conceived by a conservative think tank.

The USA Voted For Real Values and Re-elected President Obama

The USA Voted For Real Values and Re-elected President Obama

President Obama's re-election was never much in doubt, except perhaps briefly when he took a plunge after the first debate and we didn't know where the bottom was. But by the end of the campaign, Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium was giving Obama a better-than-99% chance of winning. Nate Silver of the New York Times, more cautious, put the odds Tuesday at about 90-10 in favor of Obama.

Those who point to the popular vote as evidence of a very tight contest, as much of the media did before the election, should consider two things: first, that is not the way the game is played here (unfortunately). If the popular vote determined the presidency, the Obama team would have put more resources into big states like California and New York to ensure that Obama would win the popular vote by a wider margin. Instead, the resources went into swing states, in order to ensure a victory in the electoral college vote. ( this was written before some votes were counted: President Obama won the popular vote and the electoral college)

Second, the country is nowhere near as closely divided as the popular vote indicates. That's because non-voters, who were about 43% of the electorate in 2008, favor Obama by a margin of about 2.5 to one.

Indeed, the resources and political power that Republicans mobilized in an effort to deny millions of Americans their right to vote, and to suppress voter turnout, raise serious questions about their legitimacy as a political party. A legitimate political party does not rely on preventing citizens from voting, in order to prevail at the polls, any more than a legitimate government relies on repressing freedom of speech or assembly in order to remain in power.

How did Obama win?

In this election, as in almost every presidential election for decades, the biggest block of swing voters has been white working-class voters (however defined: for example, without college education). No Democratic candidate has won a majority of white voters for decades, since the Republicans adopted their "southern strategy" in the wake of historic civil rights legislation, and became the "white people's party". (In fact, Obama did better among white voters in 2008 than John Kerry did in 2004 – his racial identity was not a handicap because most voters who wouldn't vote for an African American don't vote for Democrats.) But in this contest, Obama had to win enough of the white working-class voters in battleground states to win the election, while winning about 95% of African-American voters and a large majority of Latino voters.

This he did primarily by making a populist appeal to working-class voters, more populist than any major party presidential nominee in decades. In the last debate, which was supposedly about foreign policy, Obama repeatedly referred to Romney as someone who wants to make sure that rich people "don't play by the same set of rules" as everyone else. Throughout the campaign, his team attacked Romney for being a rich, unscrupulous politician who didn't care about working people.

Of course, it helped that Romney fit the stereotype – a rich corporate raider, a private equity fund CEO, who said he "like[s] being able to fire people", and paid less of his income in taxes than millions of working Americans. His infamous secretly-recorded remark dismissing 47% of Americans as moochers – "my job is not to worry about those people" – was a gift from God, and became one of the Obama campaign's most effective TV ads.

But for those who have followed Obama's political career, his re-election was always extremely likely – and indeed, it would hardly have been in jeopardy if he had actually debated in the first debate. We knew that he would be as populist as he needed to be in order to win. Even with 23 million people still unemployed or underemployed (as Romney repeated endlessly), it's not that hard to convince a lot of working-class voters that Romney and his party don't have their interests at heart – if you are willing to make the kind of economic populist appeal that Obama ultimately made.

The downside risk, for a candidate, is the potential loss of rich campaign contributors and media; but Obama was willing to take these risks in order to win. This was a historic difference from previous presidential campaigns: Democratic candidates such as Michael Dukakis and Al Gore flirted briefly with economic populist appeals, but backed off in the face of media pressure.

The media are a huge factor in most elections in the US, and outside of Fox News and the rightwing press, most of the major news outlets were more sympathetic to Obama than to Romney. They still helped Romney quite a bit, however, especially with swing voters, with poor reporting on key economic issues. Most Americans didn't know that the federal stimulus had created an estimated 3m jobs; in fact, they didn't even distinguish the stimulus from the unpopular federal bank bailout. They didn't understand the benefits that people would derive from Obama's healthcare legislation. They didn't know that they'd had their taxes cut under Obama. And millions believed the hype that federal deficit spending and the US public debt were major problems. (For the record, the US currently pays less than 1% of GDP in net interest annually on the federal debt – less than it has paid during the past 60 years.)

The confusion on economic issues was probably the most important influence on swing voters, who supported Romney against their own economic interests, thinking that the economy might improve if he were elected. For this, and other misunderstandings, we can thank the major media, although we should also include the public relations blunders made by the Obama team. Perhaps the biggest strategic error was President Obama's refusal to go after Romney's proposal to cut social security, thereby losing the majority of senior citizens' votes (a big vote in swing states like Virginia and Florida), which he could potentially have won by defending America's most popular anti-poverty program.

Obama's silence on social security is a bad omen for the future of his second administration, when – facing almost immediately the "fiscal cliff" – political, media, and business leaders will be pressing for a "grand bargain" on budget issues that will screw the vast majority of Americans. It will take a lot of grassroots pressure to prevent the worst outcomes: likewise, to get us out of Afghanistan and to prevent another disastrous war, this time with Iran. Obama's foreign policy has been mostly atrocious and the never-ending "war on terror" continues to expand, while most Americans' living standards have been declining.

It's going to be an uphill fight for progress, but it could have been a lot worse.

Like an increasing number of Americans I'm not sure what conservatives like Romney stand for. They chant 'small government" like a mantra, but when you look at the details what they mean is gutting social safety net programs like Medicare and Social Security, doing away with food inspections, gutting safety standards for water so industry can dumb as much toxins as they like ( that is also how conservative Republicans define freedom - just let business give America the shaft in the name of increasing the wealth of people who are already wealthier than 90% of the population). Conservatives deserve to lose every office they were running for. They wave the flag a lot, but have seized to stand for patriotism, and instead stand for hateful unhinged nationalism.

A Letter to Conservatives

Paul Ryan Has Been Trying To Sell Himself as Moderate, Old Video Shows He Is a Radical Conservative on Social Security

Paul Ryan Has Been Trying To Sell Himself as Moderate, Old Video Shows He Is a Radical Conservative

When they booed [5] Paul Ryan at the American Association of Retired Persons last week, most people didn't even know he called [6] Medicare and Social Security "third party or socialist-based systems." Or that he said [7] he wants to privatize them in order to "break the back" of a "collectivist philosophy."

On recently transcribed remarks from an audio recording, Ryan said his ideas and values were shaped by an extremist author who thought humanity must "reject the morality of altruism," and that his opinions on monetary policy are guided by a fictional speech which says "the words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality."

That author says the "collectivist philosophy" Ryan ascribes to Social Security and Medicare is a "looters' credo." By that reckoning, anyone who receives assistance from the government -- including disabled combat veterans or impoverished children -- is a "looter."

"Seniors are looters." Wonder how that would have gone over at the AARP?"Disabled veterans are looters." How would that play at the local VFW?

This recording confirms that the GOP's Vice Presidential candidate is the most politically extreme major-party candidate in living memory. His views have already drawn the opposition of Catholic theologians, as well as advocates for lower-income people, the middle class, seniors, the disabled and children.

If those views were better known, they'd also alienate independents, Democrats and seniors, as well as most Republicans and Tea Party members.

1] http://www.ourfuture.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/richard-rj-eskow
[3] http://www.alternet.org/hot-news-views/paul-ryan-called-ending-social-security-speech-ayn-rand-fans
[4] http://www.alternet.org/hot-news-views/paul-ryan-minorities-victimhood-has-gotten-them-nothing
[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DvaR2CuvDQ&feature=youtu.be
[6] http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/09/paul-ryan-ayn-rand-divorce.php
[7] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/20/1134273/-Paul-Ryan-Laughs-about-Destroying-privatizing-Social-Security

As usual there is some massive hypocrisy in Ryan's wacko world view, as a teen he collected Social Security death benefits that allowed him to go to college.

Republican William Jacobson of Cornell University is a morally degenerate liar, Elizabeth Warren did not do anything illegal or unethical. No, Elizabeth Warren Did Not Engage in the Unauthorized Practice of Law

Paul Ryan vs. The Stench

Though Ryan had already decided to distance himself from the floundering Romney campaign, he now feels totally uninhibited. Reportedly, he has been marching around his campaign bus, saying things like, “If Stench calls, take a message” and “Tell Stench I’m having finger sandwiches with Peggy Noonan and will text him later.”

Even before the stench article appeared, there was a strong sign that Ryan was freeing himself from the grips of the Romney campaign. It began after his disastrous appearance on Friday before AARP in New Orleans. Ryan delivered his remarks in the style dictated by his Romney handlers: Stand behind the lectern, read the speech as written and don’t stray from the script.

Ryan brought his 78-year-old mother with him and introduced her to the audience, which is usually a sure crowd pleaser.

But when Ryan began talking about repealing “Obamacare” because he said it would harm seniors, one woman in the crowd shouted, “Lie!” Another shouted “Liar!” and the crowd booed Ryan lustily.

Underneath Ryan is not the serious thoughtful wonk advertised, he is a wacky repeat of Sarah Palin.

Romney and Ryan Lack The Courage and Morals To Honestly State Their Plans To Detroy Medicare

The Venal, Morally Corrupt Serial Liar and Corporate Socialist Mitt Romney Tries To Explain His Medicare Magic Trick

Mitt Romney offered a white board presentation during a news briefing in South Carolina on Thursday morning that sought to untangle the campaign’s contradictory message about Medicare. Over the last week, Romney and Ryan have twisted themselves into a pretzel to attack President Obama for “stealing” $716 billion from Medicare, while trying to explain why Paul Ryan included the savings in his FY 2013 budget. Romney had previously pledged to sign the document into law.

During the presentation, Romney tried to lay out the differences. Obama takes the money out of seniors’ Medicare Advantage plans and cuts payments to providers, causing some to lose his coverage, he argued. The program’s trust fund would go bankrupt by 2024, under Obama, and seniors would lose access to the care they need. His plan, alternatively, would preserve the program for current retirees and keep it solvent indefinitely.

ThinkProgress explains why this is wrong:



The Obamacare savings slow the growth of Medicare over the next decade by, in part: eliminating overpayments to private insurers in Medicare Advantage, reforming provider payments to encourage greater efficiency, tying reimbursements to improvements in economic productivity, and reducing fraud and abuse. The law does not impact patient benefits.

As a result of these savings, “growth in spending will be restrained” and the life of the Medicare trust fund is expanded by eight years, the government estimates. Sixteen million seniors are also benefiting from the savings by receiving preventive benefits without deductibles or co-pays and saving more than $3.9 billion on prescription drugs.

Should Romney restore the $716 billion — and unless he institutes other yet to be specified reforms — we would move back to the old system of overpaying private insurers and providers. He’d be re-inserting inefficiency back into the system, jeopardizing the benefits that seniors are currently enjoying, and shrinking the solvency of the Medicare trust fund from 2024 under current law to 2016.

 Romney vs. Ryan On Medicare’s Solvency

Via Twitter, David Phillippe pointed out today that Paul Ryan has directly contradicted Mitt Romney on how to extend the solvency of Medicare. At issue are cuts to Medicare included in both Obamacare and the House GOP budget engineered by Ryan, which now total $716 billion over the current budget window. Mitt Romney told CBS on Wednesday he would undo those cuts and restore Medicare’s payments to their prior level, and claimed this move would extend the program’s solvency:

    ROMNEY: The president’s cuts of $716 billion to Medicare, those cuts are going to be restored if I become president and Paul Ryan becomes vice president… My commitment is, if I become president, I’m going to restore that $716 billion to the Medicare trust fund so that current seniors can know that trust fund is not being raided and we’re going to make sure – and get Medicare on track to be solvent long-term on a permanent basis.

Meanwhile, Ezra Klein notes that back in July, Paul Ryan told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that the exact opposite approach would extend solvency:

    STEPHANOPOULOS: Your own budget, which Governor Romney has endorsed, would also have [$716 billion] in Medicare cuts.

    RYAN: Well our budget keeps that money for Medicare to extend its solvency. What Obamacare does is it takes that money from Medicare to spend on Obamacare.

Paul Ryan has the right of it — maintaining these cuts will extend the solvency of Medicare’s trust fund, while undoing the cuts as Romney insists will shorten its solvency. That’s because the cuts do not target seniors’ benefits, but rather the payment rates to health care providers. Overpayments to private insurers in Medicare Advantage are trimmed, overall provider payments are reformed to encourage efficiency, and reimbursements are tied to improved economic performance.

Since the securities flowing into the trust fund come from the payroll tax, which is not cut, the funding remains the same while the services-per-dollar those funds can purchase goes up. As a result, the solvency of Medicare’s trust fund is extended, and the gap over the next 75 years between Medicare’s funding and its expected payments shrinks.

Of course, Ryan’s implication that Obamacare uses the money from the cuts to pay for its own spending instead of extending Medicare’s solvency is also wrong. Trust fund accounting, which deals with Medicare’s solvency, is a conceptually separate framework from the unified budget accounting under which Obamacare’s spending falls. It’s perfectly feasible for the same cut to make room for new spending under the latter, while simultaneously improving Medicare’s solvency under the former. As Paul N. Van de Water put it, “That’s no different than when a baseball player hits a home run: it adds to his team’s score and also improves his batting average.”

So Romney contradicts Ryan on whether these cuts extend Medicare’s solvency, and both incorrectly claim Obamacare fails to do so. Welcome to politics.

Romney, Paul Ryan and sate level Republicans are in an absolute panic trying to get seniors to believe they are not going to cut Medicare. At the same time these gutless conservatives are lying about how Democrats and Obama strengthened the Medicare program.  No, “ObamaCare” Doesn't Cut Medicare

I’m sorry, but do Republican politicians have no shame? They’ve been running with the bold faced lie that “ObamaCare”, aka the Affordable Care Act, “cuts Medicare” since the day it was signed into law. Jesse Kelly pasted signs that “Gabby voted to cut $500 Billion Medicare” on his campaign signs in 2010. What do you do when a lie doesn’t stick? Tell a bigger lie. Now that Mitt Romney has selected Paul Ryan as his running mate Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” Budget Plan that converts Medicare into a voucher system that will result in much high medical cost for future retires has become a campaign issue. So Romney figures the best defense is a good offense and has dusted off the old “Obamacare cuts Medicare” lie and upped the ante – now he claims the Affordable Care Act “cuts Medicare” by an absurd $700 Billion.

Whatever amount you want to use, the Affordable Care Act doesn’t “cut Medicare” – it saves Medicare by reducing expenses. Let SeniorCorps.org explain:

    Despite the doom and gloom tactics of some members of congress and talking heads, the cuts will come from two prime sources; (1) eliminating Medicare fraud, and (2) a reduction in the amount of payments that are paid into Medicare Advantage programs that are offered by private insurance companies.

Medicare fraud cost the program an estimated $60 Billion every year. By beefing up the enforcement of fraud detection, the Affordable Care Act enables the Medicare Administration to significantly reduce this waste. As for Medicare Advantage program, that was a program passed by a Republican Congress under the theory that private business can always do something better than government. Enron anyone? Medicare Advantage benefits typically cost much more than benefits directly from Medicare. As my blogging colleague Denise in her Medicare and More blog explains so well in her Paul Ryan’s Medicare Plan article today, Medicare administrative costs average 3-4%, while private insurance companies’ administrative costs average around 15%. One reason is that the Medicare Administration doesn’t pay hundreds of millions in salaries & benefits to CEOs like the big insurance companies do. And private insurance companies don’t like to lose money, so they got the Republicans to include a “risk adjustment” factor into the Medicare Advantage program that guarantees the insurance companies will always get paid more than their actual cost. It doesn’t matter if their higher costs are from bloated administrative costs or actual benefits paid out to enrollees, they always get paid more. The Affordable Care Act remedies that by reducing and capping payments to insurance companies offering Medicare Advantage policies. The leaner, more efficient companies will do just fine and continue to offer policies, while the companies with bloated costs will abandon the market. Capitalism at its finest. And seniors don’t lose a single benefit – if they don’t fine find a Medicare Advantage policy that meets their needs they simply re-enroll to get those benefits directly from Medicare.

How Fox's Distortion Of Obama's "Build" Comments Went Mainstream

How Fox's Distortion Of Obama's "Build" Comments Went Mainstream

Known Criminal and Governor of Florida Rick Scott(R) Tries To Hide Disease Outbreak in The Name of Austerity

Known Criminal and Governor of Florida Rick Scott(R) Tries To Hide Disease Outbreak in The Name of Austerity

On March 26 this year, Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott signed a bill that slashed the state Department of Health’s budget and closed a state hospital where bad cases of tuberculosis were treated. Nine days later, the federal Center for Disease Control (CDC) detailed in a report that Florida was experiencing its worst TB outbreak in 20 years in Jacksonville. Since then, the governor’s office has either ignored or suppressed news of the outbreak, and it rushed ahead with plans to close the TB hospital as local officials kept information about the outbreak from the public. This, all according to an excellent investigation by the Palm Beach Post’s Stacey Singer, who was stymied by state officials at every turn when she tried to learn more about the outbreak and about why the state hadn’t responded to it in a concerted way.

While the CDC report came out after Scott had signed the law, the strain of TB responsible for the outbreak had been identified as early as 2008, and the report only existed because local officials in Duval County requested federal help in dealing with the overwhelming uptick in new TB cases. Meanwhile, the Duval Health Department is also a victim of budget cuts. In 2008, when the TB outbreak was first identified in an assisted living facility for people with schizophrenia, the department had 946 staffers and $61 million in revenue. “Now we’re down to 700 staff and revenue is down to $46 million,” Director Dr. Bob Harmon told the Post.

The fact that the outbreak began where it did and that it has so far spread mostly among homeless people, mental health patients and drug addicts who encounter each other in soup kitchens and shelters may have made the issue seem less urgent to state officials. Setting aside the dignity of all human life, there is already evidence that the disease has spread beyond the underclass and is continuing to grow, unmonitored, in the Sunshine state. The governor’s office did not comment for Singer’s story, and the state health department has stuck to its message that statewide TB cases are down over last year, suggesting the closure of the hospital was valid. (The hospital closed at the end of June.)

The case underscores the real human consequences of austerity budgeting and conservatives’ drive to slash government whenever possible. Since austerity came into vogue with the Tea Party beginning in 2009 and was then put in place nationally after the Republican wave in 2010, there have been countless examples where cuts or attempted cuts impact preparedness. After the the Japanese tsunami, it was noted that Republican budget cuts targeted the agency responsible for tsunami warnings. The same was true about earthquake monitoring after a temblor struck the eastern seaboard (though funding was restored). House Majority Leader Eric Cantor also tried to hold up disaster funding for tornado and earthquake cleanup, demanding it be offset with cuts elsewhere. Republicans’ proposed budget last year would have cut funds for the CDC and food safety monitoring. Meanwhile, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal spoiled his big national debut in 2009 when he gave the GOP rebuttal to President Obama’s first state of the union address in which he attacked supposedly wasteful spending on volcano monitoring in Alaska. Just a month and a half later, a volcano erupted in Alaska that threatened Anchorage.

Scott is another corporate vulture capitalist who has a history of stealing from the public, undermining Constitutional rights, invading citizen's privacy, bring back Jim-Crow-Lite laws, lying to the public, undermining public safety and perverting democracy. Did Florida conservative Republicans punish Scott for his anti-American criminal history. No. They rewarded him with a governorship. Conservative Republicans hide their radical anti-American agenda behind the flag and god. No matter how they try to disguise it, radical UnAmerican policies like what they are.

Mitt Romney's offshore volcano lair

Elizabeth Warren on what Republicans are trying to repeal

Mitt Romney is So Patriotic he Won't Burden American Banks With His Deposits

Mitt Romney is So Patriotic he Won't Burden American Banks With His Deposits

§ What is in Romney’s offshore accounts? He has sheltered much of his wealth in tax havens such as Bermuda, but he has not disclosed anything about those investments. For instance, Shaxson writes, “There is a Bermuda-based entity called Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., which has been described in securities filings as ‘a Bermuda corporation wholly owned by W. Mitt Romney.’ He set it up in 1997, then transferred it to his wife’s newly created blind trust on January 1, 2003, the day before he was inaugurated as Massachusetts’s governor…. Romney failed to list this entity on several financial disclosures, even though such a closely held entity would not qualify as an ‘excepted investment fund’ that would not need to be on his disclosure forms. He finally included it on his 2010 tax return. Even after examining that return, we have no idea what is in this company, but it could be valuable, meaning that it is possible Romney’s wealth is even greater than previous estimates.”

§ Why is Romney still being paid by Bain Capital? He left the firm more than ten years ago. Given its varied investments, could the fact that he is still being paid by them create a conflict of interest in office? Shaxson writes, “Though he left the firm in 1999, Romney has continued to receive large payments from it—in early June he revealed more than $2 million in new Bain income. The firm today has at least 138 funds organized in the Cayman Islands, and Romney himself has personal interests in at least 12, worth as much as $30 million, hidden behind controversial confidentiality disclaimers.”

§ Why has Romney opened foreign bank accounts, such as a Swiss account with $3 million that appeared on his 2010 returns but not his 2011 returns? How much has kept in offshore accounts in the past? Was he betting against the strength of the US dollar? How might such financial interests affect his policies as president?

§ Are Romney’s blind trusts really blind? Their trustee is Bradford Malt, his personal lawyer. Malt invested $10 million of Romney’s money in the Solamere Founders Fund, co-founded by his son Tagg and Spencer Zwick, a Romney campaign fundraiser. Malt’s and Romney’s claims that this is coincidental and Romney knew nothing of it strains credulity. If Romney knows what his blind trusts invest in, how might his investments influence his political decisions?

§ How much has Romney invested with Elliot Associates? Shaxson reports, “Elliott buys up cheap debt, often at cents on the dollar, from lenders to deeply troubled nations such as Congo-Brazzaville, then attacks the debtor states with lawsuits to squeeze maximum repayment. Elliott is run by the secretive hedge-fund billionaire and G.O.P. super-donor Paul Singer, whom Fortune recently dubbed Mitt Romney’s ‘Hedge Fund Kingmaker.’ (Singer has given $1 million to Romney’s super-pac Restore Our Future.) It is hard to know the size of these investments. Romney’s financial disclosure form lists 25 of them in an open-ended category, ‘Over $1 million,’ including So­lamere and Elliott, and they are not broken down further.”

§ How did Romney build a $102 million Individual Retirement Account (IRA)? Did he avoid paying taxes in doing so?

Romney has never had the pleasure or responsibility for doing work, producing a quality product or service, or earning money like most Americans. Nope, Mitt Romney is a vulture in the financial industry. He picks off the earnings of the work produced by others. Mitt is a vulture. One could call him a vulture capitalist, a corporate socialist, a lazy two faced elitist, a crooked con-man, a leach capitalist or a delusional exploiter of the working class. One thing Mitt Romney is not is a good moral American patriot.It is not just time to reject Mitt Romney, it is time to reject the radical conservative movement and its goal of returning the USA back to the glory days when the royalty living up on the hill dictated to the serfs below.


10 Reasons Most People Like Obamacare Once They Know What's Really In It
Some people are suspicious of Obamacare in the abstract, but when it gets to the specifics they tend to like it a lot better.

America Hating Senator Mitch McConnell(R-KY) : I’m ‘Not Convinced’ Congress Should Prohibit Insurers From Discriminating Against The Sick. In the 20th century one of the most prominent features of fascism was social-Darwinism. Long time America hater McConnell is a poster boy for social-Darwinism.

Romney Caught in Two More Lies - When He Left Bain and His Ownership of Medical Waste Company

Romney Caught in Two More Lies - When He Left Bain and His Ownership of Medical Waste Company

Earlier this year, Mitt Romney nearly landed in a politically perilous controversy when the Huffington Post reported that in 1999 the GOP presidential candidate had been part of an investment group that invested $75 million in Stericycle, a medical-waste disposal firm that has been attacked by anti-abortion groups for disposing aborted fetuses collected from family planning clinics. Coming during the heat of the GOP primaries, as Romney tried to sell South Carolina Republicans on his pro-life bona fides, the revelation had the potential to damage the candidate's reputation among values voters already suspicious of his shifting position on abortion.

But Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney founded, tamped down the controversy. The company said Romney left the firm in February 1999 to run the troubled 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and likely had nothing to with the deal. The matter never became a campaign issue. But documents filed by Bain and Stericycle with the Securities and Exchange Commission—and obtained by Mother Jones—list Romney as an active participant in the investment. And this deal helped Stericycle, a company with a poor safety record, grow, while yielding tens of millions of dollars in profits for Romney and his partners. The documents—one of which was signed by Romney—also contradict the official account of Romney's exit from Bain.

The Stericycle deal—the abortion connection aside—is relevant because of questions regarding the timing of Romney's departure from the private equity firm he founded. Responding to a recent Washington Post story reporting that Bain-acquired companies outsourced jobs, the Romney campaign insisted that Romney exited Bain in February 1999, a month or more before Bain took over two of the companies named in the Post's article. The SEC documents undercut that defense, indicating that Romney still played a role in Bain investments until at least the end of 1999.

All politicians hedge on the truth a bit. We all expect that. Mitt Romney - Mr Values Mr. Stand-up Guy - Mr Morals seems to think this election cycle is a contest to see how many and often he can tell big lies. If Romney is the moral standard of Republican conservatism that say a lot about how far down in the stinking gutter conservatism has sunk. Many American seem to have learned nothing from the Bush-Cheney years - that when conservatives say they stand for values - they mean deeply repugnant values.

Crazy Conservative Carly Fiorina — a Mitt Romney surrogate Falsely Claims That Obamacare Would Harm Breast Cancer Patients. Carly studied truth telling at the Soviet Politburo when she was growing up.


Is there some wealth redistribution going on in the USA. Yes there is. Corporate America is taking all the profits from worker productivity. Can we call it class war yet? Corporate profits are at an all time high; wages are at an all time low

Free markets run the world? 'Monopoly': Calling the Global Financial Sector What It Is

Free markets run the world? 'Monopoly': Calling the Global Financial Sector What It Is

New York Times columnists Protess and Scott report that Barclays Bank is paying some US$450 million to regulators in the US and UK to “resolve accusations” surrounding its manipulation of a key interest rate, the London Inter-Bank Offer Rate (Libor), during the first years of the ongoing global financial crisis.  According to the article, the Libor rate is used as a benchmark rate to price some US$350 trillion in financial products worldwide each year, from credit cards to derivatives and student loans.

The Financial Times reports that the investigation now spans 12 regulators—from the US to Europe and Japan—and 20 banks, including the multinational giants JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, UBS and Deutsche Bank. The general idea is that the big banks—so far only Barclays has admitted wrongdoing—misreported the rates at which they borrowed from other banks, influencing the LIBOR rate so as to profit the banks. Barclays has also admitted to allowing consultations between various bank departments, and between itself and other banks, before reporting its rates to Libor, an illicit practice.

In most accounts, blame for such unsavory practices are spread around from bank managers and employees seeking higher profits and lower losses, to regulators who were asleep at the wheel, to the secretive and opaque process by which the Libor rate is set.  Yet, behind the regulators and the greedy bankers, lies the ‘m’ word that no one dares utter in the business presses—monopoly. The global financial system is increasingly run by a few big firms operating in a highly uncompetitive market place and wielding enormous power, often behind a veil of secrecy, (intentional) regulatory blindness, and technical complexity.

As any introductory economic textbook shows, imperfectly competitive marketplaces (e.g. monopoly, monopsony, oligopoly and oligopsony) are defined by the ability of a few firms, or only one firm, to manipulate prices and other exchange terms.  As markets concentrate, and free competition is replaced by collusion and superprofits, firms gain the market power to influence market rules and prices in their own interest.  Indeed, any college freshman in an traditional economics department could foresee that growing concentration in global credit markets would result in price distortions, to the detriment of consumers and other less powerful actors.  And, some might also be able to cite a few examples of the manner in which market power confers political power, another dangerous dimension of monopolistic market structures frequently noted in the Marxist tradition, among others (think, say, of Goldman Sach’s ability to staff the US Treasury and Federal Reserve).

Reintroducing the concept of monopoly into public discourse is critical for seeing patterns of injustice in the global economy, continuities that are otherwise obscured by national, geographic, partisan and sectoral distinctions. And not just in the financial context.  The word “monopoly” helps to understand why it is that Greek citizens suffer austerity even as financial institutions get rescue packages, just as it helps us to understand how it is that Starbucks could rake in record profits from its coffee sales even as world prices fell to record lows during 1998-2002.  The word “monopoly” helps us to see why our pigs and cattle are raised in confinement with antibiotics and without any trace of humanity, just as it helps us to see why small farmers in India are killing themselves by the tens of thousands.  The word “monopoly” untangles the Mexican tortilla crisis, just as it unravels the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala and Mossadeq in Iran.  The word “monopoly” helps us to understand why it is that Presidents Bush and Obama have such a similar economic agenda, despite their playing for two different political teams.  And, just today, the word “monopoly” helped me to understand how it is that it is illegal for me to collect rainwater in my backyard here in Denver.

Justice demands that we call things what they are—indeed, we must name the system to change it.  In this context, the “m” word allows clarity of thought and analysis in the face of often overwhelming economic complexity. The “m” word allows us to strip the economy of its competitive veil, allows us to de-robe the trusts and combines of the 21st century. The “m” word prevents us from lapsing into the view that all of these injustices—from antibiotic resistance to farmer suicide to coup d’etat—must be treated separately by different movements and different peoples.  The “m” word allows us to see the architecture of the global economy for what it is—a playground for the new robber barons, a collection of corporate fiefdoms, an integrated system of monopolies, with all of the typical injustices that such arrangements usher forth.

Sasha Breger Bush is a Lecturer at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.  Her new book, Derivatives and Development: A Political Economy of Global Finance, Farming and Poverty, is due out this month from Palgrave Macmillan.

It is laughable to hear conservative Republican twits say the U.S. is becoming Marxist. there is a kind of socialism at work, some would call it corporate socialism. Big banks and corporations have all the power and workers have less and less. Which is mostly what Republican finger pointing is about. They demonize the critics of our bloated plutocracy so they can prevent change to a worker centered and humane competitive capitalism. Mitt Romney is their champion because he promises to shift the balance even more towards billionaires being our modern lords and masters, a conservative Republican dream come true.

Will Fox Report On Fortune Bombshell That Fast And Furious Didn't Involve Gunwalking? Call or e-mail your congressional rep and ask them to censure Darrell Issa (R-Ca) for using his political power to drum up a phony scandal that has cost the tax payers millions.

Suck it conservatives: BREAKING: Supreme Court Upholds Individual Mandate As A Tax

This Week's Assault on Freedom: Mitt Romney Has a Deep Sense of Morality - Like Letting His Friends Buy Him The Presidency

This Week's Assault on Freedom: Mitt Romney Has a Deep Sense of Morality - Like Letting His Friends Buy Him The Presidency

Though he has been one of Mitt Romney’s most visible supporters, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) took aim yesterday at both Romney’s Super PAC and one Romney’s most controversial talking points. In an interview on PBS’s NewsHour, McCain told Judy Woodruff that because casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson makes a huge portion of his profits from a casino in Macau, his massive spending in support of Mitt Romney and other right-wing candidates is a form of foreign money influencing American elections:

...Romney, of course, said in August that “corporations are people, my friend,” a claim that he and his campaign surrogates have vigorously defended since.

Adelson gave $10 million to the pro-Romney Restore Our Future Super PAC this week — after giving millions more to fund a pro-Newt Gingrich Super PAC’s attacks on Romney during the GOP primaries. According to Forbes, Adelson and his wife are willing to spend a “limitless” amount in order to defeat President Obama.

Though it is illegal for non-citizens to spend any money to influence U.S. selections directly, the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United ruling left the door wide open for the American employees of American subsidiaries of foreign owned corporations — and even sovereign wealth funds — to spend millions or billions from their corporate treasuries on “independent” expenditures.

Adelson may spend as much as $100 million on buying the kind of sleazy attack ads, filled with falsehoods, that the conservative Republicans used with the scurrilous Swftboat ads against war hero John Kerry (D-MA). Adelson is not the only one - most of the money flowing into anti-American conservative Mitt Romney's campaign is from billionaires - Can 46 rich conservative proto-fascists buy an election? Conservative Republicans claim they have the best 'ideas' for running the country. So how odd that they cannot win based on their ideas. They have to rely on propaganda, lots of money and most of all on lies, to win. Get ready America for the fake patriots to ram unadulterated gutter swill down down your thraot for the next five months.

Conservatives cannot go back in time and win the Civil War for the traitorous Confederacy, but they can turn the USA into a nation of plantation wage slaves: The Exploitation of U.S. Worker Productivity

One of our worse presidents was George H.W. Bush or Bush 41 as he is commonly referred to on the web. Since his son may the worse or second worse president in U.S. history, H.W. does not seem that bad. Though the attempts by An ti-American conservatives to make him into a saint are just as ridiculous as everything else they stand for - The Three Word Legacy of George H.W. Bush. The senior Bush was just a less aggressive kind of cancer than some others.

 Star Parker hates America and Our Ideals, so what better place for her to find a sympathetic audience than the bedbugs at Fox News. If anyone has lies to tell about taxes, Fox would be happy to hear from you.

Though she purported to give the view of what the American people think about tax increases, her repeated invocation of "taxed enough already" were really a reference to the tea party; "tea" is the acronym for "taxed enough already." This came as no surprise considering Parker has tea party ties.

In reality, Americans support tax increases as part of debt reduction.  A CBS News/New York Times poll from April found that a majority of people believe upper-income Americans pay less than their fair share of taxes.

Federal income taxes are the lowest they have been since the 1950s. Perhaps Star and her friends should consider moving to China - they hate the truth, freedom and taxes.

Mitt Romney Beleives in Voodoo. In Other Words He'll Be Bush 3.0

It was a Bush and Conservative Republican fairy tale that tax cuts would pay for themselves and create jobs. That while trickle down supply-side economics did not work under Reagan and has never worked any where for long, this time, with a little magic and wishful thinking voodoo economic would work. Mitt is not one to give up on the belief in voodoo economic magic. Many Americans Will Buy Romney's Economic Fairy Tales Just Like They Bought Bush's

Mitt Romney delivered a speech today about the budget deficit. It’s hard to wrap your arms around Romney’s argument, because it’s an amalgamation of free-floating conservative rage and anxiety, completely untethered to any facts, as agreed upon by the relevant experts.

In the real world, the following things are true: The budget deficit was projected to top $1 trillion even before President Obama took office, and that was when forecasters were still radically underestimating the depth of the 2008 crash. Obama did propose temporary deficit-increasing measures, an economic approach endorsed in its general contours, if not its particulars, by Romney’s economists. These measures contributed a relatively small proportion to the deficit, and their effect is short-lived. Obama instead focused on longer-term measures to reduce the deficit, including comprehensive health-care reform projected to reduce deficits by a trillion dollars in its second decade. Obama put forward a budget plan that would stabilize the debt as a percentage of the economy. Obama has hoped to achieve deeper long-term deficit reduction by striking bipartisan deals with Congress, and he has tried to achieve this goal by openly endorsing a bipartisan deficit plan in the Senate and privately agreeing to a more conservative plan with John Boehner, both of which were killed by Republican opposition to any higher revenue.

The story told by Romney is one in which all of these things are either untrue or could not possibly be true.

Romney elides some inconvenient facts — for instance, by asserting “Then there was Obamacare. Even now nobody knows what it will actually cost,” which is literally true in the sense that precise cost estimates are always impossible, but sounds to his audience like a claim that the program will swell the deficit in vast, unknowable ways. But most of Romney’s speech doesn't even refer to the facts stated above. It's simply orthogonal to facts. It’s a story, one in which Obama increased the deficit because he loves big government and Europe and hates the private sector.

Not only does Romney elide vast swaths of established facts about the deficit, it’s fairly clear that he does not operate within the mainstream understanding of the term “deficit” at all. As Jonathan Bernstein has repeatedly explained, modern Republican behavior and even language in relation to the deficit is completely nonsensical if you understand “the deficit” to mean the gap between revenue and outlays. Republican use of the term only makes sense if you define “the deficit” to mean “spending Republicans don’t like.” That’s why Republicans consider it impossible to believe that one could simultaneously extend health insurance to the uninsured while reducing the deficit.

Look at Romney’s terms to describe deficits, and it’s pretty clear he has adapted himself to his party’s conceptualization of it. His speech includes the following phrases:

    a financial crisis of debt and spending

    Washington has been spending too much money

    out-of-control spending sprees, or to piling up massive amounts of debt

    This is why I do not, for one moment, share my opponent’s belief that our spending problems can be solved with more taxes.

In Romney’s telling, the terms debt and spending are essentially interchangeable. When presented with Obama’s position — that the solution to the debt ought to include both higher taxes and lower spending — he rejects it out of hand. Naturally, Romney has admitted before that his budget plan “can’t be scored.” It’s an expression of conservative moral beliefs about the role of government. While loosely couched in budgetary terms, Romney is expressing an analysis that resides outside of, and completely at odds with, mainstream macroeconomic forecasting and scoring assumptions.

Cannot be "scored" means that no unbiased expert will say that his plan will reduce the deficit. No unbiased expert will say that the Romney plan will not gut Medicare. Tax cuts did not create jobs from 2001 to 2008 - employment remained flat. Extending tax cuts did not create jobs from 2008 until today ( the stimulus created jobs). never mind the facts, Romney will have more tax cuts for millionaires because conservatives believe the elite should not pay their fair share for the cost of America's infrastructure. America's wealthiest citizens and corporations are the biggest group of welfare recipients. They are supported by a middle-class that is shrinking every year.

Mitt Romney has a long history of attacking firefighters and their unions, going back to his days in Massachusetts

President Obama was right, Wages haven’t kept pace with recovery, study finds.
The stock market is improving. Corporate profits are up dramatically. But workers’ wages don’t seem to be rising, a study finds.

Isn't Truth a "value" ? Romney Just Making Stuff Up Now

Isn't Truth a "value" ? Romney Just Making Stuff Up Now

A couple weeks ago, Mitt Romney quoted Noam Scheiber’s book about the Obama administration’s economic rescue, The Escape Artists, in a highly misleading way. Yesterday he did it again, only this time Romney altered his description so that whatever shred of truth that once existed in his telling is gone, and nothing remains but a pack of lies. Here’s Romney’s incredibly false account:

    A book that was written in a way that’s apparently pro-President Obama, was written by a guy named Noam Scheiber and in this book he says that there was a discussion about the fact that Obamacare would slow down the economic recovery in this country and they knew that before they passed it.  But they concluded that we would all forget how long the recovery took once it had happened, so they decided to go ahead.  The idea that they knowingly slowed down our recovery in order to put in place Obamacare, which they wanted and they considered historic but the American people did not want or consider historic, is something which I think deserves a lot of explaining …

The lies. Let us tote them up.

First, and most importantly, at no point did anybody in the Obama administration ever believe that passing the Affordable Care Act would “slow down the recovery.” Nothing close to that is ever described. Romney presents the book as revealing that Obama believed health-care reform, through its "big gummint" regulations, would harm the recovery, but cackling that he wanted to pass it out of some belief that Americans wouldn’t notice mass economic suffering. This bears no relationship to anything the book says.

In the book, Noam Scheiber asked Larry Summers if he believed that the decision to pass health-care reform cost Obama the chance to pass a second stimulus, and thus came at the cost of a faster recovery. Summers answered that he did not think the health-care law prevented a second stimulus, but that even if that were the case, he would have supported it anyway.

Not only is it false for Romney to say Obama “knowingly slowed down our recovery,” it’s not even true that Obama knowingly passed up a chance to accelerate the recovery. The notion that anybody in the administration believed that the health-care law would actually slow down the recovery is complete fiction. It does not appear in the book anywhere and it’s pretty obviously untrue.

What’s more, the notion that the book is “pro-President Obama,” and hence some damning indictment that slipped into a laudatory account, is also wrong. You don’t have to read the book to know this. You don’t even need to listen to my account (I have read it). All you need to do is read all the way to the book’s subtitle: “How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery.” That is not the subtitle of a laudatory book.

Noam — not Obama or his aides — believes that Obama should have shelved health-care reform in order to pass more stimulus. I’ll note that, according to Romney’s most frequently professed theory, stimulus made the recovery slower. (“[Obama] bailed out the public sector, gave billions of dollars to the companies of his friends, and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined. The consequence is that we are enduring the most tepid recovery in modern history.”) So, by Romney’s analysis, shelving health-care reform to pass a second stimulus would have slowed down the recovery even more.

Having stripped away the multiple layers of distortion Romney has coated onto his account, at the bottom there is actually an intellectually interesting question. Did Obama blow it by turning to health-care reform rather than passing a second stimulus? That’s the case Noam makes in his book (though it’s primarily a narrative rather than an argument), and has continued to press. If Obama loses his reelection bid, some version of this will become the primary liberal narrative: He failed because he neglected to get enough stimulus.

Romney cannot even get the facts about the Recovery Act (stimulus) correct. The CBO and the vast majority of economists think the economy would be in much worse shape down than if no Recovery Act was passed ( see chart above for differences in impact on GDP before and after stimulus) & here: CBO Director Demolishes GOP's Stimulus Myth. Another irony is that Romney is claiming he did not create many jobs as governor because he inherited a bad economy( from his conservative predecessor by the way) - Obama inherited the worse economy since the Great Depression so the worse Conservatives can say is that Democrats did not fix the giant cluster fu*k Republicans gave the country fast enough.

Mitt Romney is an Anti-American Vulture, Not a Capitalist

Romney is an Anti-American Vulture, Not a Capitalist, Why Mitt Romney’s Time At Bain Capital Matters

As we discussed yesterday, Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital is once again back in the news — big time. As President Obama said, this is not a distraction, it’s central to the main question of this campaign: do we create an economy that works for everyone, not just the wealthy few, or, do we double down on an economy where the game is rigged for the rich at the expense of the middle class?

It’s also not a distraction because Mitt Romney himself has made his business experience the centerpiece of his campaign, saying just today that “of course” he welcomes a discussion of his record at Bain Capital.

Here’s the rundown on Mitt Romney’s time at Bain Capital — and why it still matters today.

Jobs

While running Bain Capital, whose investments he still profits from to this day, Mitt Romney amassed a quarter-billion dollar fortune by bankrupting companies, laying off thousands of American workers, closing factories and sending jobs overseas.  As experts on the private equity industry and even his own former Bain colleagues openly admit, Romney’s job was not to create jobs, it was to create wealth for himself and other investors.

Romney and his campaign have made a wide variety of claims regarding how many jobs he created while at Bain: thousands, tens of thousands, 100,000, and even “well in excess of 100,000.” Neither Romney nor Bain has offered any proof to substantiate any of these claims and multiple independent fact checkers have concluded that Romney’s claims on job creation at Bain are simply false.

The most important job for our next president is to create jobs and get the economy moving faster. When asked today to predict the unemployment rate under a Romney presidency, he predicted that it would be 6 percent at the end of his first term in 2016 — which is exactly where economists predict it will be anyway.

A Rigged Game

One of the reasons Romney has been able to amass such an immense fortune is because he’s been able to take advantage of a tax code that is rigged to favor the wealthy few. He pays a lower tax rate than millions of middle class workers because of a variety of loopholes and giveaways, including one major loophole available only to private equity and hedge fund managers like himself and his partners at Bain Capital.

The Safety Net

While at Bain Capital, Romney left thousands of workers without  jobs, health insurance, or the pensions they’d been promised.

In order to partially offset the cost of his giveaways to the very wealthy, Romney slashes Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and vital programs that benefit the middle class every day and are the key to economic growth.  Earlier this year, Romney famously said that he’s “not concerned about the very poor,” which is reflected in his support for a budget that would throw 13 million people off food stamps and 1 million off Pell grants.

Jobs Here or Jobs Overseas?

Under Romney’s leadership, both Bain Capital and his administration in Massachusetts sent jobs overseas.  Now, Romney has signed a pledge to protect all tax giveaways, including those that reward companies who ship jobs overseas.

President Obama, by contrast, has put ending those tax giveaways in order to pay for rewarding companies who bring jobs back to the U.S. on the to-do list he recently submitted to Congress.

IN ONE SENTENCE: Mitt Romney’s past at Bain Capital was the prologue to a presidential campaign based on policies that will benefit the very wealthiest Americans at the expense of the middle class.

Do you believe in fairness? Do you believe that people should do work to earn their money? Do you believe that having great ideas like a cure for heart disease or a new energy saving refrigerator should be rewarded? Do you believe that is how capitalism should work. Then you cannot support Mitt Romney or the kind of back door crony vulture capitalism that Romney represents.Romney and like minded conservatives swoop down on the capital created by the work of others and exploits that for profit. For a short film on how the crony corrupt capitalism of Mitt Romney works see here -  How Did Mitt Romney Get So Obscenely Rich?

If Anti-American Conservatives James Pethokoukis and Ann Coulter Used Their Math at NASA All Missions Would Crash and Burn

If Anti-American Conservatives James Pethokoukis and Ann Coulter Used Their Math at NASA All Missions Would Crash and Burn

I was late to the excellent MarketWatch story debunking the notion that President Obama’s been on a spending binge; I spent most of Tuesday traveling. But after my “Hardball” segment on it Wednesday, Ann Coulter tweeted: “Joan Walsh says that Marketwatch chart is ‘unbelievable’! Why yes it is, in the sense of being untrue.” That’s when I saw that there was shrill but lame GOP pushback on Rex Nutting’s excellent story, from both Coulter and the American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis. I don’t normally reply to Coulter’s right-wing delusions — I haven’t written a column about her in five years – but since I think Nutting’s findings are a crucial corrective to GOP lying, I wasted my Wednesday night trying to understand the GOP attempt to discredit him. You’re welcome.

Coulter admits she relies on Pethokoukis, so let’s go directly to the source. To recap, Nutting crunched Office of Management and Budget and Congressional Budget Office numbers to find that under Obama, spending has risen at an annualized rate of 1.4 percent, less than any president since Dwight Eisenhower. It jumped 8.1 percent in the last three years of the George W. Bush presidency, and in fiscal year 2009, for which Bush approved the budget, it jumped 17.9 percent. But Bush isn’t the most profligate Republican: Ronald Reagan increased spending an average of 8.7 percent in his first term.

Pethokoukis quarrels with Nutting’s assigning Bush’s budget to Bush, because “Obama chose not to reverse that elevated level of spending; thus he, along with congressional Democrats, are responsible for it.” Exactly how one president undoes the spending approved by another president under a different Congress goes unexplained. The AEI pundit also argues that we should look at federal spending as a percent of GDP, and he notes that’s gone up under Obama, attempting to prove that Nutting is mistaken – but that’s a useless metric during a recession, which by definition shrinks GDP.

Coulter goes even further (of course). “It turns out Rex Nutting, author of the phony Marketwatch chart, attributes all spending during Obama’s entire first year, up to Oct. 1, to President Bush.” (The italics are in the original; they’re where the good writing is supposed to be.) She continues: “That means, for example, the $825 billion stimulus bill, proposed, lobbied for, signed and spent by Obama, goes in … Bush’s column.”

Shockingly, Coulter is … wrong. First of all, only about $120 billion of the stimulus was spent in fiscal year 2009 – and Nutting counted it in Obama’s column.

 Why do conservatives lie so often and so blatantly without the slightest regard for values like integrity. because they cannot win arguments if they have to stick to the facts. Bush 43 started his presidency with a federal surplus. he ran up the largest spending spree in US history. Conservative Republicans who ran all three branches of government for 6 of those years made no attempt to pay for their spending. Then they crashed the economy (conservatives and Wall Street  crashed the economy, not Freddie Mac or Fannie May).

Anti-American web site The Weekly Standard, Cherry-Picks BLS Data To Attack Obama's Economic Record

Typical American Worker Would Need 244 Years To Match CEO’s Annual Salary