Prairie Weather

Are Republicans "beyond morality?

One month ago, nobody was talking about the former House speaker as a serious contender for the nation’s highest office — nobody except Gingrich himself. Late-night shows jestingly questioned whether he even wanted to be president. And pundits dismissed his viability, pointing to enough political baggage to fill a cargo hold: Ethics scandals, multiple marriages, a contentious reign as the top Republican in the House.

Just weeks later, Gingrich appears poised to win — or come close enough to it — in the key early states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, where voters will cast their ballots in January. ...The Hill

From the point of view of the opposition, it would seem that Gingrich is about the best target anyone could hand them.  He even embarrasses his own party.   Too many legal and ethical lapses litter his past.

How about the evangelicals?  Those "family values" people who beat their kids and stuff.  Will they accept Gingrich?  You bet!

Like many evangelicals in Iowa, Steve Deace, an influential conservative radio host, is wrestling with the possibility that Newt Gingrich may be the most viable standard bearer for family-values voters in the next election. It’s a conundrum, he says, that many others are also grappling with. "Maybe the guy in the race that would make the best president is on his third marriage," he says. "How do we reconcile that?"

One senses him trying. "I see a lot of parallels between King David and Newt Gingrich, two extraordinary men gifted by God, whose lives include very high highs and very low lows," Deace says. David, after all, committed adultery with the ravishing Bathsheba, then had her husband killed, among other transgressions. ...Newsweek

King David is a totem for "The Family,"  that secret Christian cult -- "the house on C Street" -- in which so many Republicans are indoctrinated into the belief that god chooses Republicans to lead and overlooks all their past sins.  Republicans are "beyond morality."

Journalist and investigator Jeff Sharlet infiltrated the cult, wrote about it, and has been interviewed frequently about it.

I was especially fascinated when Governor Sanford explained his decision not to resign by referring to King David.  He said, "Look, here's King David when the skies fell mightily but he went on."  By "fell mightily," he meant that King David had an adulterous affair and then had the husband murdered.  That's actually one of the core parables of "The Family" that I encountered and describe this experience with David Coe, the son of Doug Coe, who came around and gave us this long lesson and asked, "What made King David great?"  And the men I was with were all trying to say, well, he loved god and all this, and he said, "No, no, that's not it.  King David was a terrible man. He was an adulterer, a murderer. So why is he a hero of the bible?"  And the answer is, "Because god chose him. King David is beyond morality."  Their limited understanding of scripture.  That's a central parable in "The Family's" thinking and I could almost hear Doug Coe's voice when Governor Sanford is saying, "I need to keep governing because I'm like King David." ...PW

More about this cult can be found here.

I don't know that I've ever seen or could imagine a worse slate of candidates.  Okay, Bush/Cheney were worse.  It could be said that a slate of candidates reminds us what we have become, or at least what the party they represent -- nearly half of all voters -- has become.  They really do believe themselves to be "beyond morality."

So are Republicans better at business and economics?

No, just greedier, xenophobic, and burdened by racial and social  prejudices.   That's what Alabamians are finding out as they back away from their self-defeating immigration crackdown.

... Undocumented immigrants make up about 4.2 percent of Alabama’s work force, or 95,000 people in a state of 4.8 million. For all of the talk about clearing the way for unemployed Americans, there is no evidence that Alabamians in any significant numbers are rushing to fill the gap left by missing farm laborers and other low-wage immigrant workers.

The loss of job-filling, tax-paying workers may get even worse if Alabama is allowed to enforce a law requiring people who own or rent a trailer home to obtain an annual registration sticker. This puts the undocumented in a Catch-22 — criminals if they don’t have a sticker, criminals if they try to get one. For now, a judge has issued an order blocking enforcement. But if the state wins, many thousands may simply join the exodus, tearing more shreds in the economy.

The law’s damage is particularly heartbreaking in poor towns across the state, where small businesses are the economic lifeblood. We’ve spoken with Latino shopkeepers and restaurant owners in places like Albertville who say business is catastrophically down, with customers in hiding or flight. The situation isn’t much better in Huntsville and Birmingham.

There should be no doubt about the moral repugnance of Alabama’s law, which seeks to deny hardworking families the means to live. But even some of the law’s most enthusiastic supporters are beginning to acknowledge the law’s high economic cost. There is growing talk of revising or repealing the legislation. The sooner Alabama does so — and other states learn — the better. ...NYT

___

Next door, in Georgia, rightwing politics and racism trump good business practices.

A business owner in western Georgia instituted a new company policy recently: “We are not hiring until Obama is gone.”

Bill Looman, who owns U.S. Cranes, LLC in Waco, Georgia, explained that while “I’ve got people that I want to hire now,” he didn’t think he would be able to foot the expense “unless some things change in D.C.”

Not content to simply implement the new policy internally, Looman decided to plaster it on all his company’s trucks. ...Think Progress

Well, geez -- he has the right, doesn't he?  Sure, but there's more to this.

A cursory glance at Looman’s public Facebook page shows he is prone to anti-Obama conspiracy theories. Earlier this month, he posted a false report that Larry Sinclair – the man who claimed he did drugs and had sex with President Obama – had died and implied foul play, writing “MAKES YOU WONDER HUH?” Looman’s page is also riddled with pro-confederate and anti-Muslim postings. ...Think Progress

To top it all off, Looman really is a self-defeating business owner.

Looman’s assertion that he would be able to hire more workers but for Obama’s economic policies defies reason. In the last few months alone, Obama has proposed giving major tax credits to businesses that hire new workers, including a $4,000 credit for hiring the long-term unemployed. Just this week, Obama signed a law to give additional tax credits to businesses that hire veterans.

Ironically, despite the fact that he claims to want to hire new workers, Looman’s anti-Obama anti-hiring stance will prevent his business from enjoying any of these new incentives. ...Think Progress

Taxes needed: higher, smarter, and better for the economy, please

Obviously, revenues should be part of the deal.  We all know how revenues got pushed "off the table" and that Republican effort has been completely irresponsible.  Paul Krugman is right. We need the revenues.  We need to make cuts, but we absolutely need revenues.

And I don’t just mean a return to Clinton-era tax rates. Why should 1990s taxes be considered the outer limit of revenue collection? Think about it: The long-run budget outlook has darkened, which means that some hard choices must be made. Why should those choices only involve spending cuts? Why not also push some taxes above their levels in the 1990s? ...NYT

Too many Americans have been getting too easy a deal and, in return, did nothing for our bottom line.  Prosperity in the 1990's?  I think most grownups by now know a financial bubble when they see it.  Virtually none of the Wall Street flashmob have paid their dues for what they did.  But they could pay now.

Let me suggest two areas in which it would make a lot of sense to raise taxes in earnest, not just return them to pre-Bush levels: taxes on very high incomes and taxes on financial transactions. ...NYT

And don't fall for the math we've been handed, telling us that raising taxes on the very rich wouldn't raise that much money.

The I.R.S. reports that in 2007, that is, before the economic crisis, the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers — roughly speaking, people with annual incomes over $2 million — had a combined income of more than a trillion dollars. That’s a lot of money, and it wouldn’t be hard to devise taxes that would raise a significant amount of revenue from those super-high-income individuals. ...I’ve extrapolated that number using Congressional Budget Office projections, and what I get for the next decade is that high-income taxation could shave more than $1 trillion off the deficit. ...NYT

Compare that trillion with what proposed Medicare cuts -- for example, raising the elegibility age to 67 -- would accomplish in terms of deficit:  only $125 billion.

We really must stop letting conservatives frame the debate.  This is no longer about whether they're dumb or mean (or both).  The bottom line is they're wrong.  Take two countries, says Krugman, that charge a financial transaction tax:  Hong Kong and Singapore.  Look at what even their own conservative think tank -- the Heritage Foundation -- says about countries with the financial transaction tax:  it works!

If some conservative starts claiming that such taxes are an unwarranted government intrusion, you might want to ask him why such taxes are imposed by the two countries that score highest on the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. ...NYT

___

The Republican argument -- that the extension of the payroll tax "holiday" makes no sense -- is really about Republicans not making sense.  Dick Durbin calls them out.

Kyl also said a Democratic proposal to impose a so-called millionaire's tax to pay for extending the payroll tax holiday would be a mistake. "The payroll tax holiday has not stimulated job creation. We don’t think that’s a good way to do it," Kyl said, adding that the Democratic approach would amount to "taxing people who create the jobs."

Durbin, pouncing on the issue, professed to be mystified and perhaps slightly amused by the GOP position.

"The Republican position is they'd raise the payroll tax on working families," Durbin said. "That just defies logic. What we should do is to help these working families struggle through."

The one-year payroll tax holiday was agreed to by President Barack Obama and congressional leaders last December as part of a broad budget deal. ...Politico

___

The effective federal income tax rate for the 400 wealthiest taxpayers, representing the top 0.000258 percent, fell from about 30 percent in 1995 to 18 percent in 2008, the most recent data available. ...NYT

So how do the 1% dodge taxes?  The New York Times examines how Ronald Lauder does it -- he's the Estee Lauder heir who has something in the neighborhood of $3 billion.  Here's a sample of his tax maneuvering.  This is just the tip of the tax-dodger's iceberg.

... His vast holdings — which include hundreds of millions in stock, one of the world’s largest private collections of medieval armor, homes in Washington, D.C., and on Park Avenue as well as oceanfront mansions in Palm Beach and the Hamptons — are organized in a labyrinth of trusts, limited liability corporations and holding companies, some of which his lawyers acknowledge are intended for tax purposes. The cable television network he built in Central Europe, CME Enterprises, maintains an official headquarters in the tax haven of Bermuda, where it does not operate any stations.

And earlier this year, Mr. Lauder used his stake in the family business, Estée Lauder Companies, to create a tax shelter to avoid as much as $10 million in federal income tax for years. In June, regulatory filings show, Mr. Lauder entered into a sophisticated contract to sell $72 million of stock to an investment bank in 2014 at a price of about 75 percent of its current value in exchange for cash now. The transaction, known as a variable prepaid forward, minimizes potential losses for shareholders and gives them access to cash. But because the I.R.S. does not classify this as a sale, it allows investors like Mr. Lauder to defer paying taxes for years. ...NYT

Does anyone trust Mitt Romney?

Does anyone have a reason to trust Mitt Romney? 

Not really.

Barack Obama hates Thanksgiving and all that it represents.

Don’t believe me? Then consider his own words. On Wednesday, previewing our annual overconsumption of fowl, the president said, “Tomorrow is one of the worst days of the year to be American.”

O.K., fine, he didn’t say it exactly like that. I attached the bulk of a sentence near the start of his remarks to the last word of a later sentence, and if you want to be a stickler, his “worst” sentiment in its original form referred to the predicament of oven-bound turkeys, not the experience of people gorging on them.

Even so. He did utter each of those syllables, in that precise order. I smell a Mitt Romney ad in the making.

That's not fair to Romney.  After all, his party has been doing the same thing -- over and over again.  For years.  Next time someone tosses a slur at "the internets" or "those bloggers," let's remind them about Romney.  And Rove.  And Cheney.  And Bush... Frank Bruni, NYT

At least Republican lies are getting sillier and easier to debunk...  Those trips to Iraq to prove that WMD's didn't exist were expensive, hot, and demeaning.   Almost ten years later, Republicans have sucked the system dry and left us with nothing but pretense.

Is all of this hot air part of a broader climate of unprincipled hucksterism? As a country we’ve shifted emphasis from goods to services, manufacturing to marketing, and everyone natters on about the importance of brand rather than the quality of product — about the sell rather than the substance.

I think politics has followed suit, and politicians, stuck in a sclerotic system that renders real accomplishment difficult, lavish more energy on words than on elusive deeds. What matters is what they can convince voters of and how voters are left feeling about them — and their foes — as a result.

Look at the deficit-reduction supercommittee. As it sputtered to the finish line, how did its members spend the final days? Not with a last-ditch stab at compromise, according to many news reports, but with separate discussions among Republicans and Democrats about how to emerge from the debacle looking better than the other side. The endgame wasn’t about outcomes. It was about positioning. ...Frank Bruni, NYT

Of course, when you're marketing greed, superstition and authoritarianism, you may find there aren't many buyers left.

Okay. That's the end of mall shopping for this consumer.

Honestly, it's not about your knowing which book I'm buying.  Okay, it is about that and about the new [shhh!]  I can't really afford.  Frankly, your decision to track me is really troubling,  no matter how speedy and uninteresting my shopping trip is.

When somebody walks out of the Gap, into the Starbucks, out through the Nordstrom and on to the Auntie Annes pretzel stand, the mall will be monitoring.

Creepy? Maybe. But the information is anonymous and won't be used to target individual shoppers. Instead, it's part of a quiet information revolution among retailers to figure out how crowds move, where they cluster, and what stores they ignore. Tracking crowds isn't new. Tracking crowds through their cell phones is.

If you've got a problem with malls paying attention to your smart phone, you might want to stay away from the mall for, say, the rest of your life. The future of shopping, according to retail analysts I spoke with for a recent special report, is malls and phones talking to each other. ...Derek Thompson, Atlantic

Thank god for Amazon.  Oh... wait a minute...

Lobbying the Supreme Court: is that legal?

Corporations, unions, trade groups and advocates are expected to spend millions of dollars over the next few months trying to shape the court's thinking on whether the law's individual mandate is constitutional. Their efforts will include ideological appeals, popularity contests and recusal campaigns - none of which are likely to have much effect on the outcome of the case. ...The Hill

I don't know about that.  As long as we have people who behave like Justices Thomas and Scalia we are bound to doubt the integrity of the Court as a whole.  Both have taken money and/or favors from individuals or groups associated with the political right.  There is political pressure, very specific political pressure.

“On the Republican side,” [GOP strategist Michael]Wissot said, “the hope is to appeal to the [Antonin] Scalias and the [John] Roberts of the world when it comes to constantly referring to this as a 'government-run mandate,' using words like … 'overstepping its bounds’ … and 'invading' the lives of the private citizen.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), Wissot said, “has probably been echoing this message more than anybody” because Republican control of the upper chamber could be riding on the case’s outcome.

"Throughout the debate, Senate Republicans have argued that this misguided law represents an unprecedented and unconstitutional expansion of the federal government into the daily lives of every American," McConnell said when the court took the case. “Most Americans agree. In both public surveys and at the ballot box, Americans have rejected the law’s mandate that they must buy government-approved health insurance, and I hope the Supreme Court will do the same.” ...The Hill

And there's considerable popular support for dumping the Affordable Care Act.

The latest Quinnipiac University poll, released Wednesday, indeed shows Americans rooting for the Supreme Court to overturn the law by a 48 percent to 40 percent margin. ...The Hill

I still believe that if the law is overturned, the Republicans will -- at their earliest opportunity -- pass a very similar law with their name on it.  Because I still believe that this is less of an ideological divide than a political pride issue.