The bipartisan debt-limit deal, famously called a “Satan sandwich” by a prominent Democrat this summer, is looking more heavenly to the left.
Republicans crowed after striking the agreement with President Obama, while congressional Democrats cried foul. Despite the White House’s endorsement of the bill, 95 House Democrats voted against it.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the Budget Committee, subsequently said Republicans called Obama’s bluff. Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said he got 98 percent of what he wanted in the deal.
Three months later, members of both parties are looking at the deal much differently.
A GOP lawmaker who requested anonymity told The Hill that “it’s the 2 percent that’s killing [Boehner] … I’ve never understood why we thought 12 people could come up with a solution any better than we could.”
With the supercommittee deadlocked, the sequestration cuts of $1.2 trillion are now likely to be triggered. Those reductions would hit national security programs, but not call for structural reforms to Medicare, Medicaid and/or Social Security.
Republicans on the House and Senate Armed Services committees were wary of putting defense cuts in the trigger, but Democrats essentially said the GOP would have to choose between tax increases or cuts to the military. Republicans opted for the latter, despite major concerns expressed by House Armed Service Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.).
Now, in sharp contrast to this summer, Democrats say they are in the driver’s seat. They note that Republicans are already vowing to torpedo the sequestration cuts to the Defense Department, something Democrats say they will not go along with.
Many Democrats would prefer the sequestration cuts over a deal that would make major reforms to entitlement programs.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), who voted against the debt deal on Aug. 1, is openly rooting for the super-panel to fall short.
“I hope that they cannot reach an agreement,” Nadler told Capital New York.
Nadler favors major cuts to the military — which could happen in 2013 if Congress cannot pass a deficit-reduction bill.
Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), who dubbed the debt deal a “Satan sandwich,” has tempered his critique.
He, along with dozens of congressional Democrats and Republicans, has called for the supercommittee to “go big” and find deficit savings in the $3 trillion to $4 trillion range. Part of that savings, Cleaver has made clear, should come from the expiration of the Bush tax rates.
My favorite bit is Hensarling's little warning to his colleagues. I think this is the first time I've heard a Republican publicly acknowledge that they might not win the White House.
Recent coverage of the supercommittee budget negotiations has trumpeted the fact that some Republicans have agreed, in theory, to increase tax revenue. But this isn’t any kind of compromise, and Democrats would be crazy to take this so-called “concession,” even if it came attached to no spending cuts at all.
The Republican offer is a response to the fact that Democrats hold all the leverage. At the end of 2012, the Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire. If that happens, tax rates would return to Clinton-era levels, and revenue would increase by $3.7 trillion over a decade. That would solve the medium-term deficit problem without cutting a single dollar in spending.
Of course, it would also effectively hike taxes on the middle class, which Democrats oppose, or claim to oppose. But if those tax cuts expire in a way that allows Democrats to avoid the blame, they could have a win-win.
It’s the flip side of the situation they faced at the end of 2010, the last time the tax cuts were set to expire. Democrats couldn’t afford to yank the economy off life support before the 2012 elections, and so agreed to extend the cuts in exchange for extending some stimulative measures like payroll tax breaks and unemployment insurance.
Now that the tax cuts have been extended through 2012, the Democrats can afford to hang tough. They can make the election a choice between the Republican vision of keeping Bush-era tax rates on the rich and slashing retirement programs, and the Democratic vision of higher levels of retirement spending financed by higher taxes on the rich. That’s a very favorable contrast for the Democrats. And if the two parties fail to reach an agreement, the tax cuts disappear automatically. The bottom line: The expiration of the tax cuts poses a huge threat to the GOP.
Republicans understand this problem, and their offer before the supercommittee is a tactical effort to reduce the potential risk. The GOP is offering to increase tax revenue slightly above current levels – about $250 billion over a decade – in return for locking in the Bush tax cuts permanently. And they are only offering this in return for Democrats agreeing to cuts in entitlement spending and privatization of Medicare.
I’d be willing to consider a deal that cut entitlements in return for higher revenue. But the GOP deal wouldn’t produce higher revenue — it’s merely a hedge. Jake Sherman and Manu Raju report that Jeb Hensarling, an arch-conservative on the supercommittee, has made exactly this case to his colleagues:
“In a 20-minute presentation Tuesday, Hensarling told his House Republican colleagues that it was in their interest to cut a deal now since Obama could keep the White House, and Republicans should look at the proposal as avoiding a huge rate hike in 2013, when the Bush tax cuts expire. The usually rambunctious House Republican Conference gave Hensarling a standing ovation.”
Republicans are publicly framing this offer as a concession, in return for which they must get tax reform and entitlement cuts. But if Democrats really want to cut a deal, they need to demand higher tax revenue without locking in the Bush tax cuts.
It is certainly true that many House conservatives are freaking out at the supercommittee Republican offer, insisting that the party can never allow taxes to go even one cent higher under any circumstances. But this is merely the expression of the party’s anti-tax fanaticism – they are so dogmatically committed to the anti-tax cause that they won’t even buy what’s essentially an insurance policy to protect against a huge possible tax hike. The split within the GOP is not a split between anti-tax fanatics and deficit hawks. It’s a split between anti-tax fanatics who understand how to protect their interests and anti-tax fanatics who are too uncompromising to do even that.
Yes, even here on a political blog, the Penn State Scandal's icy claw can reach in. But this was too good not to share.
To stand against the winds of adversity. To speak against the mob. Man, that's something.
This may be Veteran's Day, and there may be bolder, more life-threatening, more life-changing kinds of heroism than this, but in terms of what it means to be an American? You'll find few better examples.
And bear in mind, apparently the kid wearing the Dorsett jersey (not a good thing in my mind since I'm a Redskins fan) is a cousin of Dorsett's. All the cheap shots thrown his way? The kid didn't blink. Good for him. I hope he runs for office, because despite his nefarious Dallas Cowboys connection, he may just get my vote..
In his new book, Bill Clinton writes, as Politico puts it, that he was "mystified that Democrats last year would have agreed to Republican demands to extend the Bush era tax cuts without insisting on a simultaneous increase in the federal debt limit." That Obama — what an amateur! But yesterday, Clinton recanted his criticism, telling an audience at the New York Historical Society, "I was wrong."
Clinton — being interviewed by his daughter Chelsea Clinton — said he recently received a clarifying email from Obama economic adviser Gene Sperling, who also worked in the Clinton White House. Sperling, Clinton recounted, assured him that, “Oh, we tried.” The Democrats’ efforts, according to Clinton’s account of what Sperling told him, were thwarted by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who threatened to filibuster the entire package if an increase in the debt limit was included. Clinton said he incorrectly believed that Senate rules would not have allowed a filibuster of this type of fiscal measure.
Usually this is something you would try to find out before penning a criticism of a fellow Democratic president. Bill, you're worth a bazillion dollars — maybe spring for a research assistant next time.
There's a Politican named Imran Khan. He's attracting big crowds, getting a lot of attention, and he may be bad news.
First off, it seems he may be getting financial support from the ISI, but more importantly:
The real key to Khan's popularity lies in his public stance against U.S. foreign policy, and what he describes as Washington's interference in Pakistan's internal affairs. He has consistently condemned drone strikes against militants in Pakistan's tribal belt, and argued that Pakistan's alliance with the United States is the main reason why the country is now facing a Taliban insurgency. Khan was careful on Sunday to indicate that he would be open to continued ties with the United States if he came to office, but only on Pakistan's terms. This is a heartening message for millions of Pakistanis who are still reeling from the audacity of the unilateral U.S. raid against Osama bin Laden's compound in May, which many saw as a brash violation of Pakistan's national sovereignty and an act of betrayal by a so-called ally. If this tactic succeeds, Khan will not be the first Pakistani politician to convert anti-Americanism into votes.
Yeah, good luck with that.
Also, reeling from the audacity of the unilateral U.S. raid against Osama bin Laden's compound in May, which many saw as a brash violation of Pakistan's national sovereignty and an act of betrayal by a so-called ally?Bite me, Pakistan. Your Military and Intelligence command hid target number one and refused to cooperate in his capture, so we went in and got him. @#$% you.
One would think Mr. Khan also knows how to add, and will get into office, look at the amount of funding we're giving him and make his actual decision from there.
It's very possible that he'll still dial back the Pakistani-American relationship. Then again, we seem to be anxious to dial it back ourselves.
I hope Mr. Khan understands that should there be another High Value Target in his country, alliance or no, we're still taking him out, and there's incredibly little Pakistan can do about it, except maybe get off a lucky shot. (Remember Pakistan scrambled fighters to intercept our Raid Team's Choppers, but by the time we got there, they were already outta there, and UBL was dead.
Yes, Pakistan has nukes...but so does another country that's veeeery close to them...and we like them better.
A couple of years ago, the residents of my hometown, Washington D.C. were treated to the spectacle of Marion Barry's arrest, and his subsequent...
Well, I'm not going to say downfall...
Let us say his trials due to his addiction to crack cocaine.
(Note: if you've watched the above video, just so you know, Jesse Jackson did not run for Mayor.)
I was in my teens at the time when the problem first became apparent to one and all. I was living in heavily suburban, but black Prince Georges County, Maryland, just over the border from substantially poorer, but still black District of Columbia.
Years before he arrest, I was a sophmore in High School when I saw the Mayor onstage, making a speech about the dangers of drug addition, and doing it in a mania very reminiscent of present-day Charlie Sheen. I knew the man was doing drugs. I just laughed it off at the time as ironic, and went to buy more of these new-fangled things called CDs.
I was a Sophmore at the University of Maryland when they finally got him. I watched this very broadcast of the CBS Evening News after about a full days coverage from the Local News. These where the days when Oprah wasn't yet Oprah, and you could have 3-4 hours of Local News a night.
America (by which I mean White America) was all atwitter. A Mayor? An elected Official doing drugs?? Surely, America thought, this menace would be going to jail.
Hold up. Not so fast.
The problem for the outside world...and by outside world I mean the non-African-American world outside of the Washington D.C. Area, was that the champion for putting this man behind bars was prosecutor Jay Stephens, a white Reagan appointee (featured at the 1:49 mark of the video). Even I knew at that young, still somewhat politically naive age that there was no way Black Washington D.C. was ever going to let a white Reagan Appointee tell them who was or who wasn't going to be their Mayor.
Four years after the arrest, the black residents of D.C. proved me right when, even after spending two years in jail, Marion Barry was returned him his fourth and final term as Mayor of the District.
I believe we're starting to see somewhat similar circumstances flow around the Herman Cain situation. But instead of the hard-headed, prideful (sometimes overly so) black residents of D.C., this is about the hard-headed, hyper-prideful, rabid, hyper-right wing base of the Republican Party.
And there is no way that any D.C. Establishment Cocktail Party Republican is going to tell them they have to "accept Mitt Romney" as their nominee.
While these folks hate Mitt Romney, they probably hate the D.C. Establishment Republicans even more. These are the people who say they'd rather lose to Barack Obama with one of their faithful, than to even make it close with Multiple Choice Mitt.
These are people who hate the mainstream media so much, who distrust it so much that they'd rather stick a thumb in their own eye and flush their electoral chances down the tubes in order to prove to the world just how hardcore they are. More importantly, they'll do this to prove that they can't be pushed around by the Villagers in the D.C. Republican Establishment.
That's why I think we're seeing a bump in Cain's fundraising numbers and his polling numbers. The establishment is trying to tell the base that he's dead (as a Candidate), and the base is saying...hold up, not so fast!!
(Note: For those who want to relive the glory days of the 1990s, there was a Documentary made about two years ago called The Nine Lives of Marion Barry. It didn't get picked up for distribution, but was shown on HBO and is now available at the iTunes Store for 9.99. It was worth a look.)
Remember, Marco Rubio did not lie. He took advantage of a lie to promote his Political biography. And when caught, he has waffled between doubling-down on the lie he took advantage of, and well...waffling even more.
As Chris Matthews explains in the clip below, in Politics you are either attacking or explaining.
Rubio is now into week two of explaining.
This here's coming out an inch at a time...and there's at least a few more feet to go.
On May 18, 1956, Mario and Oriales Rubio walked into the American Consulate in Havana and applied for immigrant visas. The form asked how long they intended to stay in the United States.
"Permanently," Mr. Rubio answered.
Nine days later, the couple boarded a National Airlines flight to Miami, where a relative awaited.
So began a journey that seems as ordinary as any immigrant story, but decades later served as the foundation of an extraordinary and moving narrative told repeatedly by their third child as he became one of the most powerful politicians in Florida and then a national figure.
U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio has come under fire for incorrectly linking his parents to the Cubans who fled Fidel Castro beginning in 1959. He insists they are exiles nonetheless and angrily denounced the suggestion he misled for political gain.
"My upbringing taught me that America was special and different from the rest of the world, and also a real sense that you can lose your country," Rubio said in an interview this week.
But the visa documents cast clearer divisions between his parents, who came for economic reasons, and the Cubans who scrambled to leave their homeland but thought they could soon return. And the documents come to light amid new discrepancies since Rubio's time line came under scrutiny last week.
From Politico(and mind you, these are the stories from today):
In Miami’s Little Havana, the Cuban exile community has rallied to the defense of its favorite son, Sen. Marco Rubio, as he fights off allegations he embellished his family history to boost his meteoric political career.
But well beyond Calle Ocho, the freshman Florida Republican still faces a bigger challenge selling himself to the broader Hispanic electorate. Rubio is expected to encounter tough questions from voters and activists over his hard-line stance on immigration as he heads to Texas and possibly Arizona next week to court Hispanic voters and high-dollar donors. As his personal history morphs into a national political story, it’s clear Rubio still has plenty of skeptics in the Latino political community.
“He is a laughing stock in the Southwest … because people discovered he wasn’t telling the truth about his political Cuban exile history,” said DeeDee Garcia Blase, founder of Somos Republicans, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based GOP group that backs a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. “They are saying, at the end of the day, ‘He is just like us. His mom and dad came here; they migrated because of economic reasons, just like the rest of us.’”
The controversy about when — and under what circumstances — his family arrived in the U.S. has proved to be the first major test for the rising GOP star as he transitions from Sunshine State politics to the national stage, where the exile experience that he’s embraced doesn’t resonate among non-Cuban Hispanics as much as it does in the quaint cafes and bustling streets of Little Havana.
That cultural divide between his home crowd and the larger Latino electorate could pose a problem for Republicans who have billed Rubio, a favorite for the vice presidential spot in 2012, as their party’s great Hispanic hope.
Republicans who are eager to repair the party’s battered image among Hispanic voters and unseat President Obama next year have long promoted a single-barrel solution to their two-pronged problem: putting Sen. Marco Rubio on the national ticket.
The charismatic Cuban American lawmaker from Florida, the theory goes, could prompt Hispanics to consider supporting the GOP ticket — even after a primary contest in which dust-ups over illegal immigration have left some conservative Hispanics uneasy.
But Rubio’s role in recent controversies, including a dispute with the country’s biggest Spanish-language television network and new revelations that he had mischaracterized his family’s immigrant story, shows that any GOP bet on his national appeal could be risky.
Democrats had already questioned whether a Cuban American who has voiced conservative views on immigration and opposed the historic Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina justice, could appeal to a national Hispanic electorate of which Cubans are just a tiny fraction but have special immigration status. And Rubio’s support in Florida among non-Cuban Hispanics has been far less pronounced than among his fellow Cubans.
That ethnic calculus was further complicated by records, reported by The Washington Post last week, showing that Rubio had incorrectly portrayed his parents as exiles who fled Cuba after the rise of Fidel Castro. In fact, their experience more closely resembles that of millions of non-Cuban immigrants: They entered the United States 2 1 / 2 years before Castro’s ascent for apparent economic reasons.
Rubio made the exile story a central theme of his political biography, telling one audience during his Senate campaign, “Nothing against immigrants, but my parents are exiles.” A video, apparently produced for the conservative site RedState.com, shows black-and-white footage of Castro as Rubio speaks.
Even after the new reports of his parents’ entry, Rubio has said he remains the “son of exiles,” saying his parents had hoped to return to the island but did not because of the rise of a Communist state.
But in elevating exile roots over the apparent reality of his parents’ more conventional exodus, Rubio risks setting up a tension point with the country’s Hispanic voters — most of whom are Mexican American and have immigrant friends or ancestors who did not have access to the virtually instant legal status now granted to Cubans who make it into the United States.
“If he does take that mantle, there’ll be a lot of clarification that he’ll have to make on a whole lot of issues,” said Lionel Sosa, a longtime GOP strategist.
The oddity of the Rubio situation is that I don't recall such an obvious VP frontrunner in any previous cycle. Now, preseason Veepstakes is notoriously silly; after all, guessing the pick even when there's just a few weeks to go and we know who is doing the picking rarely works out well. And the usual caveat applies: the bottom of the ticket doesn't really matter very much in November. So I'm not speculating about whether Rubio will actually get the nod. But it is, I think, worth pointing out that near as I can tell there's been a pretty solid consensus that Rubio is the obvious selection, and that such a consensus is unusual. My guess is that this story doesn't really shake the current consensus -- although whether everyone's expectations now have anything to do with who actually gets the pick is unknown and unknowable.
Well, I'm not so sure about that. Courtesy Chris Cilliza:
Say what you will about the birthers, but don’t call them partisan.
The people who brought you the Barack Obama birth-certificate hullabaloo now have a new target: Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a man often speculated to be the next Republican vice presidential nominee. While they’re at it, they also have Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana and perhaps a future presidential candidate, in their sights.
Each man, the birthers say, is ineligible to be president because he runs afoul of the constitutional requirement that a president must be a “natural born citizen” of the United States. Rubio’s parents were Cuban nationals at the time of his birth, and Jindal’s parents were citizens of India.
The good news for the birthers is that this suggests they were going after Obama, whose father was a Kenyan national, not because of the president’s political party. The bad news is that this supports the suspicion that they were going after Obama because of his race.
Former longtime Congressman Dave Obey (D-WI) is joining the call among Democrats to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2012. He would also consider running as a candidate himself in such a recall -- but would prefer to see candidacies by either Sen. Herb Kohl, who is retiring in 2012, or Milwaukee Mayor and unsuccessful 2010 Democratic nominee Tom Barrett.
However, Obey also said that when he has talked to the other two men about running for governor, they politely told him to stop "pestering" them about it.
Obey told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial board that "there is so much anger out there" against Walker, predicting that Democrats would successfully collect enough signatures for the effort. (The Dems need to collect over 540,000 signatures, plus a significant buffer that campaigns routinely collect in order to protect against signatures being disqualified over one imperfection or another.)
This is the kind of reporting I like: raw. It still hasn't been filtered or formed.. The Editors and Producers haven't gotten ahold of it to shape it and change it (usually for the worse). It's basically as close to reporters notes as you can get.
In the last fortnight, National Transitional Council (NTC) forces mounted a major offensive against the city and succeeded in pushing Gaddafi loyalists back towards the sea.
The last significant pocket of resistance was reported to be in District 2, in the north-west of the city.
In the early hours of Thursday it appears that some pro-Gaddafi forces attempted to break out.
An armoured convoy of vehicles, which according to some reports contained key Gaddafi loyalists and his son, Mutassim Gaddafi, attempted to fight their way through NTC lines.
It is not clear whether Col Gaddafi himself was part of this convoy or whether the convoy itself formed part of a wider diversionary plan to allow him to slip away.
Air strike
At around 0630 GMT Nato aircraft are reported to have attacked the convoy, according to Daily Telegraph reporter Ben Farmer approximately 3-4 km west of the city.
There are some reports that Col Gaddafi was then initially captured, with serious injuries, at around noon on Thursday.
Pictures circulated by Agence France-Presse showed a large concrete pipe in which the deposed leader apparently took refuge.
Arabic graffiti above the pipe reads: "This is the place of Gaddafi, the rat... God is the greatest."
A fighter loyal to Libya's interim authorities told the BBC he found Gaddafi hiding in a hole and the former leader begged him not to shoot. The fighter brandished a golden pistol he said he took from Col Gaddafi.
A man claiming to be an eyewitness told the BBC that he saw Col Gaddafi being shot with a 9mm gun in the abdomen at around 1230 local time.
A fairly graphic video of Gaddafi being drug out of that sewer can be found here.
"The most vicious assault on the middle class and the working poor, and the most lavish giveaway to the rich, that has ever been proposed by a presidential campaign frontrunner."
-Lawrence O'Donnell
October 13, 2011
Herman Cain has not proposed three entirely separate taxes -- one a 9 percent corporate income tax, another a 9 percent consumption tax, and then a final 9 percent personal income tax. Rather, he has proposed an 18-9 plan: an 18 percent consumption tax and a 9 percent personal income tax. Or maybe he has proposed a 27 plan: a straight 27 percent payroll tax on wage income. Depends on which tax professor you ask and how deep into the details you want to go.
As Daniel Shaviro, a tax professor at New York University, notes, “a key part of 9-9-9’s intuitive appeal is the idea that, not only is 9 a low number, but the plan’s three 9’s appear to be spread out.” The only problem? The business tax and the sales tax are “effectively the same tax.”
The business tax is not a corporate income tax. It’s essentially a value-added tax. And a value-added tax is simply a form of a consumption tax. To tax wonks, this is comedy gold. Here they have spent years arguing whether a sales tax or a VAT tax is the better way to tax consumption, and Cain just went ahead and put both taxes in his plan. “So two of the 9’s in the Cain plan are simply redundant versions of almost the same thing,” writes Shaviro. That’s how you get to an 18 percent consumption tax.
From Glenn Kessler (whom I'm not quite as fond of, but always worth monitoring):
Bruce Bartlett, a former Reagan administration official who now calls himself an independent, also offered a critical examination this week on the New York Times Economix blog. He (as did Kleinbard) noted that the business tax allows for no deduction for wages, which he said “is likely to raise the cost of employing workers, even with abolition of the employers’ share of the payroll tax.”
Cain, in his television appearances, glosses over such details. “The fact that we are taking out embedded taxes that are built into all of the goods and services in this country, prices will not go up,” he asserted on MSNBC. “They will not go up.” He then gave an example of a family of four earning $50,000.
“Today, under the current system, they will pay over $10,000 in taxes assuming standard deductions and standard exemptions. I've gone through the math, $10,000. Now, with 9-9-9, they're going to pay that 9 percent personal — that 9 percent tax on their income. So that's only $4,500. They still have $5,500 left over to apply to this sales tax piece. …They are still going to have money left over.”
We’re not sure how Cain calculates that this family now pays $10,000 in taxes, but the reliable Tax Foundation calculator comes up with a much more reasonable figure: a total tax bill of $3,515 — $690 in federal income taxes and $2,825 in payroll taxes. (The family gets a big income-tax savings from the child tax credit, which Cain would eliminate.)
So, in other words, under Cain’s plan, this family would instantly pay $1,000 more in income taxes. They would also pay additional sales taxes, probably more than $3,000, on their purchases. It’s unclear how the business tax would affect the family’s tax bill but it appears this theoretical family would get no tax cut but instead a 100 percent tax increase.
(The picture changes somewhat if you assume that all the employer-paid payroll taxes automatically would revert to the employee. We’re not sure that’s a good bet given the design of Cain’s business tax, but pro-Cain advocates make that assumption with their own tax calculator. But even under this scenario, the family appears stuck with at least a $2,000 tax increase.)
We take no position on whether it is good or bad to make the tax code less progressive. Perhaps in response to questions, Cain appears to still be tinkering with the plan. In Concord, N.H., he said on Wednesday that, among other changes, he would preserve the deduction for charitable donations and would exempt any used goods, including previously owned homes and cars, from the new 9 percent sales tax.
The Pinocchio Test
We can excuse Cain inflating his adviser’s resume, but his campaign needs to do more to address the fuzzy math behind his tax plan. (We asked the campaign for a copy of Lowrie’s analysis but did not receive a response. UPDATE: The documents are posted below.)
Give Cain credit for thinking boldly, but he’s not talking clearly. As far as we can tell from the limited information Cain has provided, the plan he touts as a big tax cut would actually increase taxes on most Americans. Just like it would be wrong to claim pizza is a low-calorie meal, Cain’s description of the plan’s impact on working Americans is highly misleading.
Bruce Bartlett took a moment to note its effect on business...well, certain businesses:
Little detail has been released by the Cain campaign, so it’s impossible to do a thorough analysis. But using what is available on Mr. Cain’s Web site, I’m taking a stab at estimating its effects.
First, the 9-9-9 plan is actually an intermediate step in Mr. Cain’s plan to overhaul the tax system and jump-start growth. Phase 1 would reduce individual and business taxes to a maximum of 25 percent, which I assume means reducing the top statutory tax rate to 25 percent from 35 percent.
No mention is made on the site of a tax cut for those now in the 10 percent, 15 percent or 25 percent brackets. This means that the only people who would get a tax rate cut are those now in the 28 percent, 33 percent or 35 percent brackets. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, only 4 percent of taxpayers pay any taxes at those rates.
As for corporations, Mr. Cain’s proposal is primarily going to benefit those with revenues of more than $1 million a year, because they account for 98.7 percent of all receipts by C corporations. (A C corporation is a legal entity separate and distinct from its owners that is taxed as a corporation; its shareholders pay taxes individually on their gains.) Those companies with receipts over $50 million account for 88.8 percent of total receipts.
Other business entities — sole proprietorships, S corporations (which have between 1 and 100 shareholders and pass through net income or losses to shareholders) and partnerships — would not benefit because they are not taxed on the corporate schedule. But they represent 92 percent of all businesses.
It was a Q & A that if you were inclined to dislike or distrust Immelt, what he said there was hardly going to change your mind about him. (My own view got dramatically worse):
Business types really hate Barack Obama. Everybody sort of knows that, but it’s hard to get a sense of it if you’re not in the room listening to them laugh bitterly at questions like, “Does Obama understand the damage regulations are doing to business?”
In fact, this audience is so down on Obama that Immelt, who you have to assume is one of the more pro-Obama CEOs out there, is not willing to defend him or his policies before this audience. At all. Even a little. His only comment is that people need to roll up their sleeves and help rather than complain. And his answers to Maria Bartiromo’s questioning slyly suggest sympathy with the audience. Asked by Bartiromo how he’ll make the White House listen to him and the business community, his answer, with a smile, is “repetition.” Everyone laughs. “Our job is to make our ideas his ideas,” Immelt says.
This is the sort of audience that makes you think the White House is going to have a lot of trouble meeting its fundraising goals next year.
“When you criticize Wall Street, they don’t care. You’re hurting the guy in Illinois who wants to build a factory.”
I should say that this is more a comment on the conference and some of the other panels than on Immelt himself, but these folks really, really feel persecuted and unappreciated. The common response to this, of course, is that corporate profits have hit record levels in recent years and the top 1 percent has never been richer. But if you need more evidence that money doesn’t buy happiness, you should sit with some CEOs for an hour.
The President has reached out to these people, and this is the thanks he gets from them.
My own first reaction is say "@#$^ you" to Wall Street. (You can now see what side I'm on).
The President steps up, defends the Wall Street Protesters, telling the world he understands why they're pissed, and a lot of reaction from the Professional Left, as well as from some of the Wall Street Protesters has been to say "@#$% you, Mr. President. You've sold us out to the Banks."
I'm left wondering why the hell President Obama wants to bother. Why not just let the Professional Left run their dream candidate; let the Wall Streeters run Mitt Romney, and watch America pay the price.
The Council on Jobs and Competitiveness is the Obama administration’s answer to the charge that it doesn’t listen to the business community. It includes not just Immelt but executives from Xerox, DuPont, American Express, Kleiner Perkins Caufield &; Byers, TIAA-CREF, Southwest Airlines, Procter & Gamble, Boeing, Intel, Citigroup, Eastman Kodak, Facebook, Comcast, BNSF Railway and UBS Investment Bank. And today it released its interim report (PDF).
This is, in other words, the big moment: This is the business community trying to make its ideas President Obama’s ideas. But here’s the thing: Its ideas don’t seem to differ much from Obama’s ideas.
The report proposes “five common-sense initiatives to boost jobs and competitiveness.” Initiative No. 1 is more infrastructure and energy investment. The White House would happily check that box. Initiative No. 2 is a grab bag of proposals to help “high-growth enterprises,” ranging from more visas for skilled immigrants to patent reform, to amending Sarbanes-Oxley to make it easier to go public, to tax changes to make it more appealing to invest in start-ups. Then there’s the “National Investment Initiative,” which might as well be called “winning the future.” Fourth on the list is streamlining regulations. And then there’s worker retraining, educating more engineers and a second high-five for high-skills immigration.
I’m sure if you dug into the details of the policies on this list, you would find items the administration doesn’t support. Perhaps the business community would deregulate beyond White House regulatory chief Cass Sunstein’s comfort level, for instance. But all in all, you could lift most of these items out of Obama’s speeches. Judging from this report, business leaders’ thinking is substantially his thinking already. Which makes sense: Like many of them, Obama is an Ivy-educated datahead who likes reading boring reports. But sitting with a group of CEOs, you would never know that. In those gatherings, he’s often presented as a naive Marxist who is one bad day away from trying to throw everyone with a corner office into jail.
Perhaps the distance is greater than this report suggests. Perhaps the CEOs have a much more dramatic agenda than they were willing to put on paper. But I haven’t seen much evidence for that view. Most business leaders I talk to would love to see something along the lines of the Simpson-Bowles deficit plan pass, and at this point, so too would the White House.
Another possibility is that the gulf between the business community and the White House is more cultural and personal than it is substantive. Matt Yglesias had an interesting take on this last week. “A lot of what you have is . . . a kind of bitter feud between businessmen and the kids they went to college with who didn’t go on to become businessmen. What did they do instead? They became teachers or doctors or nurses or professors or lawyers or scientists or nonprofit workers. . . . The business coalition sees the service coalition as composed of useless moochers, and the service coalition sees the business coalition as greedy bastards.”
“If it were merely a clash of objective interests, it really wouldn’t be much of a clash,” Yglesias wrote. “A healthy business environment needs schools and hospitals and public infrastructure to backstop it, and nobody is made happy by a business cycle downturn. There’s tension at the margin, but it’s not a zero-sum world. Layered on top is, I think, a raw level of gut-level dislike — both kinds of people think the other kind of people are clueless about what really matters in life.”
Increasingly, I’m coming to agree with that analysis.
"Mr. Cain, you were in fact in college from 1963 to 1967, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, exactly when the most important demonstrations and protests were going on. You could easily as a student at Morehouse between 1963 and 1967 actively participated in the kinds of protests that got African Americans the rights they enjoy today. You watched from that perspective at Morehouse when you were not participating in those processes. You watched black college students from around the country and white college students from around the country come south AND BE MURDERED, fighting for the rights of African Americans. Do you regret sitting on those sidelines at that time?" - Lawrence O'Donnell, in a pretty horrifying interview.
Horrifying?
Yeah, he said horrifiying.
First off, to be clear, let me give you the definition of the Moore Award. This is from Andrew's own site, now. It is named after film-maker, Michael Moore - is for divisive, bitter and intemperate left-wing rhetoric.
Hm.
I'm personally horrified at how horrified people are at Lawrence's interview with Herman Cain. He treated Mr. Cain far more politely than I or virtually any other African-American I know would have given the circumstances.
My Father never suffered the physical jeopardy that other African Americans suffered in trying to get their due rights. He had a beer dumped on him during a Texas-Oklahoma game while sitting in the burnt orange section, but that was it. Mostly everything he experienced was delay, resistance and frustration.
Maybe that's why he thought it was important to find the time to test Restaurants during his stays at both Texas Schools. In the end, he knew it was his about him and his children, when he had them. So even though I wasn't even in glimmer in his eye, he was doing it for me.
He also met another student at the time who was also testing restaurants while attending Texas Southern University. Her name was Claudette Smith. I know her today as Mom.
One may argue that Herman Cain had a right not to participate in the Civil Rights Movement, and that may be true. But here's the problem, he's holding himself up as an example of, if not the very pinnacle of, the black community. (Just ask him, he'll be glad to tell you). He has gone so far as to suggest that Black People who do not support him (not give him a fair hearing, mind you, but out and out support him) have been brainwashed by the Democratic Party.
May I suggest that my Father and Mother were not brainwashed? May I suggest that they saw with their own eyes who was supporting Civil Rights and who wasn't; and their allegiance forevermore was aligned with the Democratic party.
And for the record, yes, there were Southern Democrats who voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They long ago switched parties and joined Herman Cain's party, the Republicans. I'm sure even Mr. Cain remembers Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act, and saying he was delivering the South to the Republicans for the next 40 years. He was wrong. Try 60-70.
The horrific part of the interview which apparently did not catch Andrew's eye, was Lawrence's first asking Mr. Cain if he wanted to back off that "brainwashing" statement. Mr. Cain did not. With him questioning my intelligence as a African-American, I had a a right to know where he stood in relation to the community he was questioning. I had a right to know what kind of African-American he was, and yes that is something I can judge given the questions Lawrence O'Donnell asked rather haltingly. I had a right to know what he had given to the cause. Because if he had stood with my parents, if he had marched with my parents, then African-Americans as a whole would have shrugged when he called us "brainwashed". At least, he earned the right.
But he didn't. He didn't march. He didn't sit-in. He didn't test. He didn't want to get involved, because frankly, it was probably more important to him to ingratiate himself to the white community, and if you look, it certainly paid off for him. I'm sorry to come off sounding like a member of the Black Panther Party, but African-Americans see people like Mr. Cain all the time. They're the ones who think they're better than the rest of us, smarter, and the only ones fit to lead, the only ones fit to be heard from. You know this because they spend a lot of time shouting down the opposition. These people ars not a symptom of ideology, it happens in both left-wing and right-wing circles. It comes from a life spent in front of, or behind the pulpit, where the Preacher was the most powerful man in our community.
In the end, Herman Cain is not powerful, he is a parasite. He is a man who will twist himself into any shape required to make his money, to ingratiate himself to the white community, and more importantly to show himself superior to the African-Americans that frankly he despises. Yet, with equal lack of character, he will do the same to ingratiate himself back with his fellow African-Americans because he suddenly needs their votes. Remember, though Mr. Cain wants those votes, he still feels those voters inferior to the greatness that his "him" and will let that attitude slip out on occasion; like he did when he called a great many of us "brainwashed".
Andrew is wrong, and just a little bit insulting. The African-American community will call Herman Cain out on his past. It may be regrettable that Lawrence O'Donnell a white Irish-American face was the one asking him the questions, but make no mistake, African-Americans wanted those questions asked, and we don't need Andrew Sullivan's permission or anyone else's approval to have it so.
Just remember, that smiling jackass standing next to the President (aka, Mike Dikta) briefly considered running against then State-Senator Barack Obama after Jack Ryan dropped out of the race. Wisely, he dropped out.
And notice that Dikta and Buddy Ryan are standing on opposite sides of the stage.
Cantor weighed in on the growing Occupy Wall Street movement in a speech to the social conservatives at the 2011 Values Voter Summit in Washington.
"I for one am increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and the other cities across the country," he said.
Uh, excuse me? White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said in the briefing today.
"I sense a little hypocrisy unbound here--what we're seeing on the streets of New York is a an expression of democracy," Carney said. "I think I remember how Mr. cantor described protests of the tea party--I can't understand how one man's mob is another man's democracy."
Note: I corrected a mistake in the text. For some reason identified the bold quote as coming from Cantor, which didn't make sense, given the story.
So, OWS...
Look, I support you, I support your goals, but at some point what you're doing is going to have to translate into some kind of political action. I know a lot of you feel let down by the Democrats and the President, but the Republicans are your mortal enemies. If you don't support the President in 2012, and he loses, what the hell was the point of all this if all you do is wind up handing power to the people who think you're nothing but an unwashed mob?
First off, a word of caution, watching this takes a strong stomach.
Herman Cain has accused me (however indirectly along with every other African-American who supports President Obama) of being brainwashed because I (as a black man) won't support him.
Herm, that tends to happen to black people who stab their own in the back. How can I say this? He was in College from 1963 through 1967, by his own admission, in his own worthless misbegotten book, and did not participate in the Civil Rights Movement.
He also got out of serving in Vietnam to work on Ballistics Analysis, which my Father assures me was an actual field...until computers did away with it.
Now, Mr. Cain can call me brainwashed all he wants, but to do so, he needs to give and every other black person and explanation of why he didn't march in the Civil Rights Movement. My personal assessment...and by the way, I don't have any facts to back this up, but...the words House N***** come immediately to mind.
Also, let me say for a guy who claims to be a Mathematician, most of the numbers he used were suspect at best, and outright lies at worst. I mean, c'mon, did Herman even know he was being interviewed by someone who used to write Tax Code for a freakin' living?
My father, who is an actual black Professor of Mathematics said that his computations of poor people's taxes were just flat out wrong, and his statement about the "percentage" GOP votes for the Voting Rights Act...also wrong, deceptive, and a curious editing of history. (see: Dixiecrats)
Rick Perry's fundraising haul for his first six weeks on the campaign trail was $17 million, almost as much as Mitt Romney raised in his first reporting period and significantly more than Romney raised over the past three months. And Maggie Haberman also reports that Perry has $15 million in cash on hand, about $2.5 million more than Mitt Romney had after his first report.
As Haberman points out, Perry's cash on hand is significant: if the campaign ends up becoming a war of attrition between Rick Perry and Mitt Romney.
...
As Kombiz Lavasany points out:
$15 million is a lot of money in IA and NH tv to remind voters that Mitt Romney has no real belief system and flip flops all the time.
Even if Geraldo Rivera was at the Zuccotti Park yesterday, Fox News has generally been a tad dismissive of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Foxnews.com (as of this writing) has no coverage of this national event on their front page stories. (Hard to imagine for a network that was so gung-ho about the Tea Party!) Red Eye‘s Bill Schulz went out to try to “prank” the protesters. Bill O’Reilly sent a producer minion out with the same mission: to belittle OWS’s cause by cutting up interviews to make people sound stupid.
Well, here is an interview that Fox News filmed, but doesn’t want you to see. The segment was shot on Wednesday for Greta van Susteren‘s show, (though it looks like the same producer from this O’Reilly segment questioning Michael Moore‘s anti-capitalist agenda) though the decision was made to leave it on the cutting room floor. The reason should be obvious pretty quickly.
The speaker giving Fox News the buisness is Jesse LaGreca, a vocal member of the Occupy Wall Street protests. This video comes courtesy of Kyle Christopher from OccupyWallSt.org‘s media team.
Now, no news organization is under obligation to air every interview they’ve filmed, especially when it makes them look bad. But you’d think that a “Fair and Balanced” network (that tells an interviewee that they are here to give them fair coverage to get any message they’d like to get out) would try to include at least a couple of opposing viewpoints to Mr. Shulz’s smarmy jokes or O’Reilly’s “infiltration” of the camp.
The ball is in your court, Fox.
Somebody book this guy on Lawrence tonight, or at least Olbermann or Rachel.
There is the Wall Street Occupation, and those of us who support it, but still want them to step their game up. What do I mean? The Teabaggers have a message, its mostly uniformly anti-Obama, but it is a message. What is the message of the Wall Street Occupiers?
One of the things that got on my nerves late last week was the Wall Street Supporters defending their lack of a message, even going so far so that that it's intentional. Well, that's bull@#%. You need a message. If you're protesting something, you need people who are not protesting to understand what you want.
Well, they took an important first step forward. It's still too long and I agree with Randi Rhodes' idea that it should be "Get The Money Out of Politics", but it basically says the same thing:
As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.
As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.
They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.
They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts. *
To the people of the world,
We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.
Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.
To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.
Join us and make your voices heard!
*These grievances are not all-inclusive.
That last part is not a joke added by me or anyone else, it's on the site.
Oddly enough, I was familiar with Biden story before seeing this headline. Familiar enough to know that Huffington Post's take (or at least the headline's take) was 100% bullshit.
“Even though 50-some percent of the American people think the economy tanked because of the last administration, that’s not relevant,” said the vice president. “What’s relevant is we’re in charge.”...
Biden said it is “totally legitimate” for the 2012 presidential election to be “a referendum on Obama and Biden and the nature and state of the economy.” He said Americans will need to make a choice between what the Obama administration is offering to address the problem and what is being offered by the eventual Republican nominee.
You can see why conservatives would jump on this — it gives them something to undercut the idea that Bush continues to deserve more of the blame for our current mess than Obama does. What Biden’s quotes really reflect, I think, is the tricky political spot the White House is in when it comes to the former President. White House advisers are aware that the public does still blame Bush more than Obama for our current predicament — this is confirmed in poll after poll, though that may be changing — but they also think voters probably don’t want to hear Obama telling them they should continue to blame Bush more than himself.
Conservatives constantly claim that Obama does try to fob off blame for the economy on to Bush, in order to dodge blame himself. But by and large, the real political argument Obama is making when he invokes the problems he inherited is one about the scale of the challenges we face, and how long they were in the making. It’s not finger pointing. It’s a plea for patience.
By the way, conservatives are right: Obama probably does “own” the economy in political terms right now. Indeed, it’s possible for the two following things to be simultaneously true: First, the public continues to blame Bush for originally tanking the economy; and second, this may be mostly irrelevant in 2012. The American people know Bush made an absolutely hideous mess of things. They hired Obama to clean up that hideous mess. They will judge Obama in 2012 on his progress towards completing that chore — whether the public will factor in GOP efforts to block Obama’s solutions remains to be seen — and will decide whether they think his GOP opponent would manage it any better. Obama will argue that his GOP foe plans to revive the ideas that tanked the economy under Bush in the first place. But that will ultimately be an argument over how to proceed in the future, not a relitigation of the past.
Bush broke it. Obama now owns it. Americans will judge his efforts to fix it — and will pick whichever candidate and party they think would best complete that job. Okay?
So Greg's right about Conservatives spinning the story this way...
...so why is Huffington Post doing the same thing?
A White House official and a reporter who was in the room today denied a report from an African-American radio host who says Obama told a group of black journalists that he tried to save Troy Davis.
The report from Rob Redding Jr. at The Redding News Review, which we were unable to confirm, says the president said he'd looked into saving the death row inmate for "three days" and inquired with the local authorities.
But White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer flatly denied the report to me just now, as did American Urban Radio Networks' April Ryan, who was among the reporters at the off-the-record meeting from which the story purported to draw.
"That article was completely, 100 percent wrong," said Ryan, who said she'd pressed Obama on Davis at the gathering with African-American media figures including radio hosts Joe Madison, Tom Joyner, and Michel Martin, though not Redding. Obama, she said, was "unequivocal" that there was "nothing he could do" in the Davis case, though he did tell the group that in general, he had concerns about innocent death row inmates, and that he'd worked in Illinois to improve the criminal justice system.
UPDATE: Redding emails, "In your report, even April D. Ryan says that the death penalty was mentioned at the meeting. She is clearly not the source of our story. We stand by the story, as posted on our websites."
I'm not sure what to make of this since its possible both sides are speaking the truth. All the Redding News said was that the President looked into it, and determined there was nothing he could do, which is not far from the: "Obama, she said, was "unequivocal" that there was "nothing he could do" in the Davis case."
So we're really arguing over whether or not he looked into it before realizing there was nothing he could do.
Obama's White House spent "three days" looking at how it could legally get involved in the case on a federal level, one source said. The Obama administration even called the state of Georgia about getting involved and were told "No".
"'We looked at every possible avenue legally,'" the source reported Obama said. "'There was not one there.'"
"'It was a state case and I could not intervene because it wasn't federal,'" another source reported Obama said.
His reaction to these always makes me smile. Most politicians have a "how dare you interrupt me" look on their face as this is going on. The President meanwhile has you "Are you done yet? Can I get on with my speech as the Secret Service knocks you into next week?"
