Rand Paul Has Long Way To Go Before He Becomes a Real Patriot

Rand Paul Has  Long Way To Go Before He Becomes a Real Patriot

Lochner v. New York is widely viewed as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history. It is taught in law schools, alongside decisions upholding segregation and permitting Japanese detention camps, in order to instruct budding lawyers on how judges should not behave. Even Robert Bork, the failed, right-wing Supreme Court nominee who claimed women “aren’t discriminated against anymore”, called Lochner an “abomination” that “lives in the law as the symbol, indeed the quintessence of judicial usurpation of power.”

Lochner fabricated a so-called right to contract in order to strike down a New York law preventing bakery owners from overworking bakers, but its rationale has implications for any law intended to shield workers from exploitation. In essence, Lochner established that any law that limits any contract between an employer and an employee is constitutionally suspect. If desperation forces someone to agree to work 18 hours a day, seven days a week, for a dollar a day in a factory filled with toxic air, then courts must treat that law with heavy skepticism. Not every workplace law was struck down during the so-called Lochner Era — the justices of that era sometimes valued sexism more than they valued exploiting workers, for example — but Lochner placed any law benefiting workers on constitutionally weak footing. Needless to say, the “right to contract” it invented appears nowhere in the Constitution.

Nevertheless, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) took several minutes out of his lengthy talking filibuster yesterday to praise this “abomination” of a decision on the Senate floor:

    You get to the Lochner case. The Lochner case is in 1905. The majority rules 5-4 that the right to make a contract is part of your due process. Someone cannot deprive you of determining how long your working hours are without due process. So President Obama’s a big opponent to this, but I would ask him — among the other things I’m asking him today — to rethink the Lochner case. . . . I think it’s a wonderful decision.

Watch it:

Although its not entirely clear what exploiting workers has to do with drone strikes, the primary subject of Paul’s filibuster, the senator seemed to think that Lochner was relevant because that case claimed that its fabricated right to contract flowed from the Constitution’s “due process” guarantee.

Paul’s speech also includes a somewhat rambling attempt to claim that Lochner helped “end Jim Crow,” a claim that would cause anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of civil rights history to scratch their head. Lochner was decided in 1905, and, while Paul is correct that the Lochner Era justices very occasionally struck down discriminatory laws, Jim Crow was still very much alive when Lochner was overruled in the 1930s. The Supreme Court decision that did the most to eradicate Jim Crow — Brown v. Board of Education — rested on the Constitution’s guarantee that no person shall be denied the “the equal protection of the laws,” not on some fabricated right to contract. And Brown alone was insufficient to overcome the campaign of “massive resistance” segregationists mounted in defense of Jim Crow.

What finally killed American apartheid was big, centralized government of the kind Paul and his fellow tea partiers love to hate. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 required business owners to contract with minorities — something that would undoubtedly been unconstitutional under Lochner. And, of course, the same Voting Rights Act that is now endangered in the Supreme Court tore down Jim Crown voter exclusions. Sen. Paul, for his part, has incorrectly suggested that the Civil Rights Act violates the Constitution.

Paul’s endorsement of Lochner reflects a disturbing evolution in Tea Party thought. For much of Obama’s first term, Tea Party conservatives rallied behind “tentherism,” the false belief that most of what the federal government does is unconstitutional. Unlike tentherism, which applies only to federal laws, Lochnerism prevents both the federal government and the states from enacting necessary legislation. Although a handful of the most radical federal judges openly embrace Lochnerism or similar reasoning, this particularly virulent misreading of the Constitution was largely absent from elected officials’ rhetoric until Paul’s speech yesterday.

Rand is a like a pig. Sometimes he gets up out of the mud and finds a mushroom. At the end of the day he is still a creature of anti-American muck.

How Republicans Are Using Austerity To Tank The Economy or Why Do Conservatives Hate America

How Republicans Are Using Austerity To Tank The Economy or Why Do Conservatives Hate America

Congress will not avert the dreaded sequester – the government’s latest wheeze to deal with the phony “deficit crisis.” Never mind that the very same deficit is projected to fall under $1 trillion this year for the first time since 2008, according to the CBO. Politicians and the chattering classes rail about the deficit, while in the meantime, Americans can’t find jobs. Our neighbors, friends and fellow citizens have suffered from a persistently high unemployment rate of 8 percent through 2012, and worse, an underemployment situation of around 15 percent. Why doesn’t this very real crisis generate concern? Why all of the fuss about a nonexistent emergency?

Conservatives talk indignantly about government profligacy to justify their deficit obsession. But our large deficits (which peaked some three years ago) can almost always be expected to result from recessions because of what economists call “automatic stabilizers.” These are safeguards that have been in place since the Great Depression – things like unemployment insurance, welfare, food stamps and the like. These programs were introduced precisely to avoid the kind of human misery a great many of our citizens experienced during that earlier catastrophe. These income transfers are also the reasons -- not the bailouts to our banks -- why the economy has escaped the kind of freefall experienced in the early 1930s.

A major consequence of this policy choice, which is supported by the vast majority of Americans, is that budget deficits in the US are largely automatic and non-discretionary. So recessions create budget deficits, much as private sector booms reduce deficits.

True, we are not booming by any stretch today. But even against this sluggish backdrop, over the last three years, the deficit has experienced a 30 percent drop as a percentage of GDP. That suggests the patient is slowly recovering, but not fast enough. The current rate of job creation is not only insufficient to replace the jobs lost since the crisis, but can’t even keep up with labor force growth. At the recent pace of job creation, we only fall further behind. Withdrawing the medicine prematurely risks creating a relapse in the economy.

And there is much more to do. We need to use this period of historically low interest rates to borrow so as to improve our productive capacity as an economy going forward. As anybody who wanders around major American cities can see, the country has fallen into disrepair. Just ride in any New York City taxi cab and see how well your back survives the journey. But before we can rebuild our pothole-ridden roads, repair our decaying grids, or deal with energy or climate change, we must challenge and reject all of the nonsense about long-term budget deficits, national bankruptcy or insolvency, and even “fiscal responsibility” that we are hearing from Congress and the chattering classes.

The real fiscal responsibility lies in understanding how we invest in the future with jobs, education and decent roads and bridges. Letting our country fall apart, on the other hand, is the height of irresponsibility.

If the US continues to make headway on the jobs front, it will do even better on the deficit front, which is why any sensible economist will tell you that deficit reduction per se should never be an object of government policy. In a market economy, employment is the main source of income for most of the population. Economic growth creates jobs. Without paying jobs, individuals are unable to pay taxes.  In capitalist, wage-labor societies, therefore, joblessness creates a long list of other kinds of waste that Congress never talks about—the breakup of families, rising alcoholism and drug addiction, higher crime rates, absolute and relative poverty, damage to social status and self-respect, adverse psychological and physical health effects, stress, suicide, crime and other anti-social behavior.

During WWII, the government’s deficit -- which one year reached 25 percent of GDP -- raised government’s public debt ratio above 120 percent, much higher than the ratio expected to be achieved by 2015. Further, in spite of the siren songs warning of the evils of high national public debt, US growth in the postwar period was robust—it was the golden age of US economic growth. And guess what? The debt ratio came down rather rapidly, mostly not due to budget surpluses and debt retirement, but rather due to rapid growth that raised the denominator of the debt ratio.

More here, Pundits Still Getting Sequester and Budget Debates Wrong and here,  The most striking and disconcerting thing about the latest round in the budget war is that the debate within the Republican Party is proceeding on the basis of completely false premises.

How Did Romney Supposedly Win The Debate? By Being Himself, One of the Most Morally Corrupt Liars in Politics

How Did Romney Supposedly Win The Debate? By Being Himself, One of the Most Morally Corrupt Liars in Politics

Political reporters and pundits lean heavily on the horse race method of coverage, which has badly hurt Mitt Romney for most of the campaign. Last night it helped him. Romney was forceful and articulate and dodged his association with almost all the most unpopular aspects of his platform. But his success at doing so was built upon two demonstrable untruths.

The most important was taxes. Romney asserted, “I cannot reduce the burden paid by high-income Americans.” Let me explain how this is untrue even by his own campaign’s accounting.

Obama badly flubbed this topic by allowing Romney to change the baseline of the discussion. Romney is promising to extend all the Bush tax cuts and refuses to accept even slightly higher revenue as part of a deficit deal. On top of that, he is proposing a huge, regressive income tax rate cut that would reduce revenue by an additional $5 trillion, but promises to make up for it by closing tax deductions. Obama directed his fire almost entirely at the additional tax cut, leaving mostly untouched, until the end, Romney’s pledge to never bargain away any of the Bush tax cuts.

Obama’s case was sound. The Tax Policy Center has shown that the stated parameters of Romney’s plan don’t add up — even under favorable assumptions, there are not enough tax deductions for the rich to close to pay for the rate cuts. Romney has disputed this and cited a series of studies that, in various ways, change the parameters of the Tax Policy Center study. Some of these studies find that it could be theoretically possible that Romney could cut rates and, by closing loopholes, do so without losing revenue or raising taxes on the middle class — if you lower the bar on who is middle class from $250,000 to $100,000, or count the repeal of Obamacare to help pay for the tax cuts, or use really wildly optimistic growth assumptions.

None of these studies back up Romney’s claim that he won’t reduce taxes on the rich. They confirm that he will reduce taxes on the rich. They merely suggest that he could make up the revenue some other way than taxing the middle class or increasing the deficit — that the economic growth will help the tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves, or that some of the lost revenue can be made up for by cutting off subsidies for the uninsured. Romney flat-out misstated his position.

The other issue was health care. Romney has promised to protect health insurance for people with preexisting conditions who maintain continuous coverage. That caveat is vital, because that right has existed since 1996. It’s a very minor protection. Phrasing his promise this way has allowed Romney to make a promise that sounds like he would keep Obamacare’s protections for people with preexisting coverage without committing himself to anything at all (except, I suppose, keeping in place a 1996 law that didn’t do much).

At the debate last night, Romney didn’t phrase his promise in this misleading-but-true fashion. He promised, “preexisting conditions are covered under my plan.” That is not true. He dropped the legalistic mumbo-jumbo that renders his promise meaningless and promised something. But his plan doesn’t do that. And his adviser Eric Fehrnstrom, asked after the debate if Romney was really promising to cover people with preexisting conditions, admitted that he isn’t. (“With respect to pre-existing conditions, what Governor Romney has said is for those with continuous coverage, he would continue to make sure that they receive their coverage.”)

Romney won the debate in no small part because he adopted a policy of simply lying about his policies.

More here, Debate fact check

10:20 — Romney left his heart in Zurich: Romney tells Obama, “The place you put your money is a pretty good indication of where your heart is.” The obvious rejoinder, ready-made for a DNC attack, is that Romney’s heart must be in the Cayman Island, Bermuda or Switzerland, where Romney has put his money.

10:10 — “The same f*cking bill”: Romney says his healthcare plan in Massachusetts is very different from Obamacare. The guy who designed both the plans calls them “the same f*cking bill.”

10:00 — Romney sees death panels: Romney comes dangerously close to invoking death panels, saying Obamacare has “a board that will tell people what kind of treatment they’re going to get.” He’s referring to IPAB, a board of doctors, hospital officials and government officials who try to find best practices to reduce the cost of Medicare (and only Medicare — no one else’s healthcare — which is already a government plan). IPAB does not decide on individual cases, is subject to congressional oversight and is legally prohibited from rationing care. In August, Paul Ryan told Florida seniors Obamacare has a “rationing board.”

9:45 — Obamacare still doesn’t cut Medicare: Romney revived one of the most repeated falsehoods of the campaign – that Obamacare cut over $700 billion from Medicare. It’s not true, and Paul Ryan’s budget included the same cuts; Ryan and almost every other Republican in the House voted for them. Obamacare did cut funds from Medicare, but from providers, not beneficiaries. The actuaries in charge of the program say the savings will actually extend the life of the program and experts say the cuts won’t affect benefits.

9:40 — NFIB fib:  Romney uses as a cudgel against Obama’s tax plan a study from the National Federation of Independent Business. The NFIB sounds like an anodyne business group, but like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce it is actually a very partisan Republican group funded mostly by large corporations, not small businesses.

There is more at the link. Conservatives and the conservative movement is based on the Big Lie so of course they are thrilled with Romney's performance. And that is what it was, Mitt the snake oil salesman conning America into believing falsehoods that are easily checked. Republicans learned nothing from the economic collapse their policies caused or the Iraq debacle. Romney plans to increase the too big too fail economic pyramid and his foreign policy team is stacked for former Bush advisers. Some people - conservative Republicans - just get a thrill from abusing America and they'll keep doing so until Americans wise up and call them out on their dangerous agenda. 

Mitt Romney's top economic adviser Greg Mankiw said the "offshoring" of American jobs was a good thing.

Mitt Romney, who lambasts the "failures" of government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, profits from investments in the firms.

Mitt Romney said that catching bin Laden would be "insignificant" and it's "not worth moving heaven and earth."

Mitt Romney pledged to expand a Bush-Era policy of permitting doctors to deny women access to contraceptives.

Mitt Romney said he supported the Ryan Republican budget plan that would effectively end Medicare.

Paul Ryan embraces the extreme philosophy of sex cultist Ayn Rand.

Paul Ryan wants to raises taxes on the middle class, cut them for millionaires

Paul Ryan thinks Social Security is a “ponzi scheme.”

Paul Ryan supports $40 billion in coporate welfare subsides for big oil.

Dear Clint Eastwood and other reality challenged conservatives.

Dear Clint Eastwood and other reality challenged conservatives. Take responsibility for the havoc you reeked on the economy. You broke it, you own it.

About the July Jobs Report

Job growth picked up in July, but a strong labor market recovery remains elusive.

    Private and government payrolls combined rose by 163,000 jobs in July, a significantly faster pace than in the prior three months.  Private employers added 172,000 jobs, while government employment fell by 9,000.  Federal employment fell by 2,000 jobs, state government employment fell by 6,000, and local government employment fell by 1,000.
    This is the 29th straight month of private-sector job creation, with payrolls growing by 4.5 million jobs (a pace of 157,000 jobs a month) since February 2010; total nonfarm employment (private plus government jobs) has grown by 4.0 million jobs over the same period, or 138,000 a month.  The loss of 543,000 government jobs over this period was dominated by a loss of 392,000 local government jobs.
    Despite the 29 months of private-sector job growth, there were still 4.7 million fewer jobs on nonfarm payrolls in July than when the recession began in December 2007 and 4.3 million fewer jobs on private payrolls.  Payroll job growth has averaged 151,000 over the year, and July’s 163,000 jobs are still well below the average of 252,000 jobs a month that the economy created in December through February (although warmer-than-usual weather played a role there by, for instance, allowing for more outside construction jobs).

Conservatives in Congress have blocked all job creation legislation in order to increase their chances in the election. Rep Michele Bachmann famously hoped that unemployment would remain high. Senate conservative leader Mitch McConnell(R-KY) famously quipped that his only goal was to make sure Obama had a failed presidency. Why do Republicans love the goals of the conservative movement and hate the USA. Perhaps Clint could ask that empty chair. In 2008, before Obama was elected Republicans ruled over a loss of about $17 trillion dollars of the nation's wealth. Yea, great idea, let's return these dangerous zealots back to power.

Mitt Romney's Double Backflip Medicare Lie

Mitt Immoral Elitist Romney's Double Backflip Medicare Lie. Romney Lies About His Medicare Plans Than Lies About Obama. Where Is Your Honor Mr. Romney?

Fact checkers call Mitt Romney's claim that the duo will preserve Medicare 'eye-popping' considering that Ryan calls for reworking it from the ground up.

    Romney vowed the duo would "preserve" Medicare, an eye-popping claim considering Ryan wants to transform the program from the ground up.

As to the predictable charge that President Obama will take $700 billion out of Medicare, they not only dispute this but say that "you could fill an arena with the facts this statement leaves out". It is shocking to see someone finally calling them out for what they are.

    ROMNEY: "Unlike the current president, who has cut Medicare funding by $700 billion, we will preserve and protect Medicare and Social Security and keep them there for future generations."

    THE FACTS: You could fill an arena with all the details left out in this statement. Ryan's reputation as a fiscal conservative is built on a budget plan that would overhaul the Medicare program and introduce a voucher-like plan that future retirees could use to buy private health insurance. Whether that results in a better or worse situation for Medicare recipients is a matter of debate. But under Ryan's plan, traditional Medicare would no longer be the health insurance mainstay, just one of many competing options.

They go on to give a hypothetical example of a senior under President Obama's plan and conclude that slowing the growth of spending is tantamount to a spending cut in Washington. They add the detail about the 'cuts' coming from Medicare Advantage. (How The Romney/Ryan Medicare Plan Would Affect Today’s Seniors)
They next criticize Romney's statement that he will 'preserve' Social Security leaves out the fact that he proposes changes such as increasing the retirement age and means testing the wealthy.

On Romney's bipartisan record as Governor of MA:

    THE FACTS: For a Massachusetts governor, balancing a budget is a requirement of state law.

    Ryan's claim that Romney didn't raise taxes to comply with Massachusetts' yearly balanced budget requirement is also misleading.

    And while Romney himself didn't raise income taxes, he benefited from a huge $1.1 billion tax hike passed by Democrats the year before he took office. It was responsible for roughly half of the deficit Romney helped cut in his first year in office.

They add that Romney, working with the Democratic Legislature,  raised hundreds of millions of dollars through new fees, but doesn't call that 'tax increases'.

On Romney/Ryan claims that they have provided specific, 'bold' solutions that don't duck the truth:

    THE FACTS: So far, vital specifics are missing from Romney as he pledges broad cuts in federal spending, but more money for the armed forces, and significant tax cuts. He proposes to cap federal spending at 20 percent of gross domestic product by the end of a first term, an ambitious goal that is not fleshed out with the painful choices that will be necessary for that to happen.

On Ryan's claims of President Obama's failures in his first 3 1/2 years in office:

    THE FACTS: Obama succeeded in achieving a stimulus plan, the automakers' bailout, his health care law, new rules in the financial services sector and more. But he had failures, too, a promised immigration overhaul and climate change legislation among them. Ryan's assertion that the Obama agenda "didn't make things better" is primarily a political judgment call. But no one seriously argues that the stimulus plan or the auto bailout made no difference at all. The question is whether such spending was worth the gains that were made.

    Obama's $800 billion-plus stimulus, enacted in February 2009, created both public-sector and private-sector jobs, even if not as many as its sponsors had hoped. The director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Elmendorf, estimated that the stimulus saved or created more than 3 million jobs. Princeton University economist Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, estimated that the stimulus, together with the bank bailout started by President George W. Bush and continued by Obama, saved or created more than 10 million jobs. An earlier CBO analysis estimated that stimulus trimmed the unemployment rate by 0.7 to 1.8 percentage points.

On Romney's claim that Ryan has shown an ability to work with members of both parties: Not exactly.

On the 'You Didn't Build That' meme:

    THE FACTS: Ryan, like Romney and scores of Republicans in recent weeks, has used comments Obama made at July 13 campaign appearance in Virginia against him. But the rhetorical jab takes Obama out of context. Republicans have seized on only part of Obama's quote — "If you've got a business, you didn't build that" — but the full quote makes clear Obama is talking about the conditions that help businesses and individuals succeed, such as teachers and infrastructure.

There is a lot more detail that fair use prevents me from repeating. The media rarely does such a thorough job of debunking falsehoods promoted by those running for office.  I urge everyone to go to the link, recopy in its entirety and paste it into an email to every rightwinger you know making these arguments, every on the fence family member and coworker,  retweet, and share as widely as possible. 

Drive-by Bigot Mitt Romney Calls Kettle Black

So it's come to this. Less 24 hours after airing his latest demonstrably false, racially-driven ad about welfare, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney accused President Obama of waging a "campaign of division and anger and hate." By any measure, Romney's is an amazing--and cynically conscious--case of projection. After all, with a wink and nod Romney has coddled, aided and abetted his Republican Party's birthers and bigots, its union-busters and gay-bashers, its Muslim-haters and misogynists and more. He's insulted people his backers proudly hate as well as many whose support they claim to seek.

Speaking at a rally in Chillicothe, Ohio, Governor Romney informed his audience that it is in fact Barack Obama who is "dividing us all in groups":

    "He demonizes some. He panders to others. His campaign strategy is to smash America apart and then cobble together 51 percent of the pieces. If an American president wins that way, we all lose," Romney said. "So, Mr. President, take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago, and let us get about rebuilding and reuniting America."

That was an unfortunate choice of words. After all, Mitt Romney didn't just refuse to repudiate his Obama birth certificate fabulist Donald Trump. Cobbling together a majority, Romney announced, was what his candidacy was all about:

    "You know, I don't agree with all the people who support me and my guess is they don't all agree with everything I believe in," Romney said. "But I need to get 50.1% or more and I'm appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people."

No doubt, many of the people Trump claims "are screaming, 'Please don't give that up'" attended Romney's "Dine with the Donald" fundraiser. And if they missed that shindig, they might have joined Trump and Romney at the New York City birthday bash for Mitt's wife, Ann.

It is Ann Romney, by the way, who her husband says "regularly reports to me" about what American women care about. But when one of those women, Sandra Fluke, testified in March to Congress about contraception policy, right-wing storm-trooper Rush Limbaugh called her a "slut." But with a Republican nomination to win, Romney was too cowardly to cross his party's kingmaker:

    "I'll just say this, which is, it's not the language I would have used. I'm focusing on the issues I think are significant in the country today, and that's why I'm here talking about jobs and Ohio."

Five months later, Romney used the same dodge to avoid risking the ire of the Tea Party Islamophobes who dominate today's Republican Party.

 If Mitt Romney has values than so does every other scumbag on the face of the earth. Shame on Romney, Ryan and the radical anti-American conservative Republican movement for defining values as something base and repulsive to normal Americans.

Washington Post Columnist Charles Lane Thinks the Elderly Are Wealthy Because They Can Afford to Pay Off Their Mortgage. Conservatives suck at math as well.