Mitt Romney has been touting his tax *plan* under which he proposes to reduce rates 20% across the board but keep the whole thing revenue neutral by eliminating certain unspecified deductions which benefit higher income taxpayers. He has been undeterred by the fact that the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has not been able to figure out a way to make this formula work as stated and in fact noted that it would result in big tax cuts for the wealthy and higher taxes for the middle class. But the refusal of the Romney campaign to actually explain or identify all the majik math (just trust us!) is AOK because he has six (6) nonpartisan, independent factoid laced studies backing up his assertions.
Chris Wallace, of all people, showed some journamalistic chops on Sunday by challenging Romney adviser Ed Gillespie on the reality of these “studies”:
More and more mainstream outlets are pointing out that they [the “studies”] fail to validate [the math’s] soundness. And on Sunday Romney senior adviser Ed Gillespie was challenged on Fox News by Chris Wallace, who questioned whether the studies are really nonpartisan.
“Those are very questionable. Some of them are blogs. Some of them are from the AEI [American Enterprise Institute], which is hardly an independent group,” Wallace said. “One of them is from a guy who is — a blog from a guy who was a top adviser to George W. Bush. These are hardly nonpartisan studies.”
“These are very credible sources,” Gillespie said.
Rilly? You decide.
Of the six studies, two are blog posts by the conservative American Enterprise Institute; one is a report by the Republican-friendly Heritage Foundation; one is a paper by Princeton professor and former George W. Bush adviser Harvey Rosen; the fifth and sixth are a Wall Street Journal op-ed and blog post by Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, an adviser to the Romney campaign.
In addition the studious studiers had to supply some arithmetistical contortions of their own to make the conclusions sorta come close to where they’d like. I think that’s called “cheating” or something. Fire breathing dragons don’t like cheaters!
ThinkProgress catches Romney surrogate Rudy “A Noun and a Verb, and 9/11” Giuliani being just a tad too candid from the safe confines of Fox News.
BILL HEMMER (HOST): David Axelrod made the claim Mitt Romney is doing his best to exploit this. Is there argument to be made there? How was this handled on?
GIULIANI: He should be, he should be exploiting it. I mean, there is real chance, there is a cover-up here. They’re trying to run out the clock. Hillary Clinton appoints a commission that will investigate. They will not report until next January or February.
The appropriate course of action would naturally be to come to conclusions before bothering to conduct any investigation, following the lead of Darrell Issa.
Meanwhile, Fox Nation has apparently outsourced its content provision to Babelfish:*
In the third-from-the-bottom paragraph in the Washington Post’s article — the 17th paragraph — on its new poll out this morning, showing President Obama leading, 49 percent to 46 percent, among likely voters:
Partisan identification fluctuates from poll to poll as basic orientations shift and with the sampling variability that accompanies each randomly selected sample of voters. In the current poll, Democrats outnumber Republicans by nine percentage points among likely voters; the previous three Post-ABC polls had three-, six- and five-percentage-point edges for Democrats. The presidential contest would now be neck and neck nationally with any of these margins.
under the Post’s poll manipulator if you go to D +3 (still very generous) Romney is up by 2 where just about every other poll is
Me neither. It seems a rather wordy translation of WAAAAH.
Talking of running out the clock, Mitt Romney is rapidly running out of quiet Fridays on which to drop his tax returns—at this stage, just one full set is obviously far more than you people deserve.
Too much crazy out there for me to cover right now. HALP!
Sen. Lindsey Graham, “angry white man” and chairman of the Republican Committee to Politicize the Benghazi Attack, appeared on CBS Face the Nation this morning to report his findings to the American people. The senator claims that the Obama administration has “been misleading us” on what happened during the fatal attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, because it doesn’t fit the White House “narrative” of what is happening in the Middle East.
And since we are all on the edge of our seats, waiting to find out if Obama lied to us about “what is happening in the Middle East”, before we go to the polls, Sen. Graham is willing to share all of the facts (well, maybe not “facts”) but all of his “gut feelings” and “beliefs” about what happened before, during and after the attack from his “safe haven” half-a-world away. And, because he is “the gentleman from South Carolina,” a man of vast experience and political integrity, we can trust that he would never allow any wisp of partisanship to cloud his vision . . .
Here’s what the senator had to say:
My belief is that was known by the administration within 24 hours. They’re trying to sell a narrative, quite frankly, that the Mideast, the wars are receding and al Qaeda has been dismantled. And to admit that our embassy has been attacked by al Qaeda operatives and Libya - leading from behind - didn’t work, I think undercuts that narrative.
They never believed the media would investigate. Congress was out of session. This caught up with them. I think they’ve been misleading us and it finally caught up with them.
Either they’re misleading the American people or incredibly incompetent. They’re very political when it comes to foreign policy. When something goes bad, they deny, they deceive and they delay… The truth is the foreign policy choices of President Obama is allowing the region to come unraveled.
Thank you, Senator Graham. That’s very helpful . . . hope it was good for you, too.
Just one teeny question: “don’t you think it’s possible that invading Iraq and our ten year sojourn in Afghanistan might have had something of a, well, destabilizing effect on the region? that might have contributed just a tad to the “region coming unravelled?”
Oh, yeah, I have another question: “isn’t it possible that the administration delayed a full journalistic expose of the attack in an attempt to protect the CIA presence in Benghazi that you and your merry band of GOP intelligence agent-wannabes outed on Cable TV? by televising a House investigation that should have been held in closed chambers, but wasn’t, so that you could make some political hay over it and deflect attention from the rank foreign policy amateurism of your presidential candidate? Wasn’t Romney “very political when it comes to foreign policy”?
Ooh, just one last question, please: “how can you keep a straight face when you say things like: ‘They never believed the media would investigate. Congress was out of session.’”
Seriously, Senator!?! Are you able to fart behind closed doors in your Capitol Hill office without the media investigating? And, is there really any qualitative difference between Congress being “in” or “out” of session?
There are a lot of serious people out there, right now, studying and debating and analyzing what the actual strength of al Qaeda is, in the Middle East and what we should realistically be doing to minimize threats to our national security. There are others who are doing the same on the subject of what drives the region today and why we see events roll out the way they do. And I say, more power to them, and, today as never before, we can all avail ourselves of the facts coming out of their scholarship, if we care to. It’s a good way to learn but it takes time and effort.
The lazy, deluded way is to listen to rich old, white career politicians, whose meal tickets have been punched by defense contractors for decades, sharing their myopic partisan insights with media talking-heads.
“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
~Jedi Philosopher and Teacher, Yoda
This is a couple of days old, but it’s been stewing in my neurons looking for a place of ventilation:
No, Ma’am, you study it out (is this a colloquial thing?) The woman in the above clip believes, much in the fashion of Alan Keyes or Victoria Jackson, that our President, Barack Obama, is in fact, a cryptocommiemuslimofascist. She can’t quite put her finger on what makes him a communist, and yet she knows. He’s also, for what it’s worth, not an American—no matter where he was born.
Which I think has always been the point. There’s a very particular definition of communist” and “American” at work here—and it’s always been beyond irony. It’s impossible to pwn, being self-pwning, solipsistic, tautological, and f’d up. The mental progression goes a little like this:
1) Anything not conservative (Republican) is communist.
5) So I should continue hating Communists to earn valuable points.
6) Useful against cognitive dissonance, challenged authoritah, or teh ghey. Wherever American values are sold!
Now, I could be accused of over-simplifying, but I think I might be on to something, especially since I’m into the third-beer part of the evening. Here’s one for you:
Nowhere in the known universe has a force as intense been measured as Charles Krauthammer’s clenched sensibilities Thursday night. Heavens above, the Vice President’s demeanor! Joe must have been studying Jack Nicholson! The Right-O-Sphere at large loved this “zinger” and passed it around delightedly, without realizing bringing their horror fantasy to fruition would fall to the likes of me. I don’t usually feel grateful to Charles Krauthammer, but for implying that Joe opened a bunch of hatchet on Paul Ryan just by laughing, I thank you, Charles. Let’s go out for a drink at the next debate. I promise not even to hint at a smile when the President says, “Oh Rmoney, I’m home!” lest you crumble to pieces on the spot.
Produced by Muppets and Muppet Sympathizers committed to keeping full employment for all Muppets through support of public funding for public broadcasting.
Strut your stuff for Puppet Power while supporting Americans’ right to be educated in the comfort of their own homes. Protect three generations from the nightmarish specter of Muppetcide at the hands of exploitative Plutocrats bent on turning back the clock to black and white blah-itude one microscopic expenditure at a time. (And yes! it’s for real.)
Tell ‘em, Animal!!! Do we really want something like this for America’s Future?
As the dust settles slowly from the VP debate, the election trundles on regardless, the polls take their own sweet time to give any clear indication of WTF is going on, and Paul Ryan fans feverishly adapt to the abject drubbing their idol took by collapsing onto the crowded fainting couches of denial, Philip Klein at The Washington Examiner twangs his readers’ last nerves by pointing out a quirk of the Constitution:
It might be hard to believe after his assault on Mitt Romney in last night’s debate, but there’s a scenario under which Joe Biden could serve as Mitt Romney’s vice president.
As noted in an earlier post, there are plausible scenarios under which next month’s election could result in a 269–269 electoral vote tie, which would send the presidential election over to the House of Representatives. Such an outcome would favor Romney over President Obama, according to an analysis by the Washington Examiner.
But in such a case, it would fall on the Senate to choose the vice president, with each Senator getting a vote. Given that it’s quite possible (arguably likely) that Democrats will retain control of the Senate, it means that they could vote for Biden to remain on as VP, even if the House elects Romney as president.
In theory, if the election outcome is a 50-50 Senate, Biden could be the tie-breaking vote for himself. This would allow him to remain on as VP and for the Democrats to retain effective control of the Senate. It would also usher in the Romney-Biden administration.
Somebody alert vanguard of the Biden underraters, the unspeakably unfunny aggro troll clown Jim Treacher, last seen emitting a butthurt squeal of a post titled “Last night, Joe Biden was a three-letter word: J-E-R-K,” having greeted news of the Ryan pick back in August with: “Fortunately, Biden wears Depends Or else there could’ve been an embarrassing scene when he heard the news.”
Clear some space around Treacher if you do, since Klein caps his musings with:
If the House ends up deadlocked in choosing a president, then the candidate the Senate chooses as vice president would be sworn in as commander in chief. In other words, this scenario could produce a President Biden.
Dozens of supporters of Mitt Romney at a rally in Ohio Friday did not surround a shaven-headed mook wearing a T-Shirt inscribed with the sentiment, “Get the White Back In The White House.” Not shouting, “Get the heck out of here!” “Who needs you?” and “This is no place for that sort of hatred,” the crowd did not give the shaven-headed mook the bum’s rush, and a phalanx of security did not have to hustle the racist away before the uninfuriated crowd didn’t boil over. The racist subsequently did not repair to his pickup to nurse his wounded ego with a few swigs of whatever racists swig, before not leaving smoking tire tracks in the parking lot, the crowd not cheering his exit all the way.
A Romney campaign spokesman commented that the “reprehensible” T-Shirt had no place in this election.
H/T: Buzzfeed, which has the original Getty Image that cannot be reproduced, though significant alteration in the course of producing an original work of art may possibly not invite a lawsuit.
So far, today, Joe Biden is taking a lot of undeserved heat from conservatives, over his debate etiquette—poor Mr. Ryan came armed with his Mr. Serious pomp and circumstance, his note-taking utensils and gallons of H2O, ready to take his rightful place at the grown-ups table. And then he opened his mouth . . .
And, of course Joe laughed—Paul Ryan was laughable, it is simply absurd that any American political party would consider a candidate like Paul Ryan a viable contender for its highest office. And no, I didn’t just, make a mistake. I know that Paul Ryan is only running for vice-president but candidates for V-POTUS are always only a heart attack, a plane crash or an assassin’s bullet away from becoming President.
It is an irresponsible voter that dismisses vice-presidential candidates as less-important walk-ons who can get by with flyweight qualifications and make it up with on-the-job training. Just as it is an irresponsible political party that fields a two-dimensional vice-presidential candidate to serve as window dressing to round out the slate’s appeal to the base (but then, again, this is the same party that put up Sarah Palin, so . . . ).
But back to conservatives’ demand for proper demeanor for their real boy, Rynocchio. Goodness knows he takes himself seriously, enough to object to TIME’s effort to embarrass him by publishing the wonderfully ludicrous photos he posed for, demand that Biden Call Him Mister, and whine that Biden interrupted his stream of falsehoods, and what’s more, couldn’t keep a straight face while Mr. Paul Ryan was talking! A portion of the MSM are obediently taking up Mr. Paul Ryan’s dropped tear-stained hankie today, but let’s harbor a hope that perhaps the sight of Little Lord FlauntaLie being confronted on his untruthiness will resonate with some of those Undecideds our country is depending on to get some kind of clue.
Who knows what effect last night’s VP debate will have once the spin dies down? But if it doesn’t cheer up Democrats and address any lingering enthusiasm gap, I’ve no idea what will.
The MSM and Romney camp spinners (spot the difference), of course, are hard at work claiming that Ryan “won,” that Biden’s a loon just laughing at serious issues, OH! THE INCIVILITY!!!!!, it was a “tactical draw,” or on occasion coming to the conclusion that Joe Biden’s a force of nature you underestimate at your peril, and Paul Ryan’s still wet behind the ears and various other places despite his years in Congress.
For those who missed the debate or are embroiled in discussions and arguments about it elsewhere, there’s a transcript after the fold. It’s too long for our blogware to handle in one post, so above you’ll see Part 2, on which comments are disabled.
You know there’s never going to be a better night than tonight to crack open a beer and insulate it in in a koozie with Fightin’ Joe’s visage emblazoned thereupon. If only it were possible for anxiety prone Joebots to crawl into a full-body koozie till it was over. Or at least don a head-koozie like the little Aynist’s up there, fashioned before the Republicans had cornered the market on tin-foil skull-coverings—hough the lining may very well be metallic and crinkly, much like its original wearer.
Below the fold, the YouTube livestream, so you need never leave the warmth and comfort of our Roasty den to follow along. If you are so inclined, though, the long-suffering Guardian writers are liveblogging and streaming here, nomenclature-superabled ZEGScoiner Charlie Pierce will be twittering here.
"[W]e wholeheartedly endorse the excellent Rumproast blog" -- Jim Newell, Wonkette
"Mind you, don’t let yourself be trapped dialoging with these guys: truth is their enemy; pyschological warfare and misinformation dissemination is their profession." -- TeaParty.org
