Why Do Republicans Hate American Families - Senate Republicans Kill the Democrats' Infrastructure Jobs Bill

Why Do Republicans Hate American Families - Senate Republicans Kill the Democrats' Infrastructure Jobs Bill

Senate Republicans, again, filibustered a component of President Obama's jobs bill, the Rebuild America Jobs Act. In any other world, it would have passed 51-47, but this is a Senate, so a majority vote means that the bill dies. Go USA!

This bill had $10 billion to establish an infrastructure bank, a proposal that has received plenty of Republican support in the past, as well as $50 billion in immediate funding for roads, bridges and airports, something else Republican Senators have supported in the past. When they were just blowing hot air. When it wasn't the nation's infrastructure and economy at stake.

The measure would have been funded by a 0.7 percent surtax on people making more than a million dollars a year, or about 1/500th of American citizens, who would have seen an increase of about 1/217th in their tax bill. Just in case you were left with any doubt over whether Republicans stood with the 1 percent or the 99 percent.

12:46 PM PT: Sens. Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman voted with the Republicans (I know, you're shocked). The Republican version of the bill, which really didn't have anything m
Senate Republicans, again, filibustered a component of President Obama's jobs bill, the Rebuild America Jobs Act. In any other world, it would have passed 51-47, but this is a Senate, so a majority vote means that the bill dies. Go USA!


12:46 PM PT: Sens. Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman voted with the Republicans (I know, you're shocked). The Republican version of the bill, which really didn't have anything much to do with jobs, failed 47-53.

Conservatives think it is more important the economy be dragged down to make Democrats look bad than it is to do what is best for the country. Modern conservative Republicans are not patriots as much as they are right-wing zealots who only care about their radical agenda. to make America look like half like a third world country and the other half gated communities where the bankers and elite live.

Shady Right-wing Group is Trying to Paint OWS as anti-Semitic

Shady Right-wing Group is Trying to Paint OWS as anti-Semitic

Right-wing pundits and Republican Party figures are continuing their attempt to smear the Occupy Wall Street movement as anti-Semitic, but we now have more evidence that the charge is profoundly dishonest.

To review: the Emergency Committee for Israel (which, it turns out, is funded by Wall Street) released an ad last week claiming that Occupy Wall Street is shot through with anti-Semitism, and demanding that Democrats condemn the protests. That attack has now been picked up by various pundits and GOP officials. The Republican National Committee started using the line against Democrats Wednesday. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin inevitably piled on. Fox News is all over the story.

Exhibit A in the ad (watch it at link) is a sign-bearing man who yells that “Jews control Wall Street!” Now, as I’ve previously reported, Occupy protesters have taken to surrounding the man, who gave his name to me recently as David Smith, with rebuttal signs, including one that reads, “Asshole —>”. Smith has been hanging around Zuccotti Park nearly every day for a couple of weeks.

But as Josh Nathan-Kazis reports at the Forward, Smith started carrying anti-Semitic signs around the financial district long before Occupy Wall Street existed:

    Occupy Wall Street’s most visible anti-Semite was picketing the Financial District long before Zuccotti Park was occupied. …

    During a trip to Zuccotti Park to observe the early stages of the protest on September 19, two days after activists first set up camp there, the Forward’s Nate Lavey and I watched as Smith entered the plaza with his cardboard sign, was confronted by one vocal passerby, and then was chased out of the occupied plaza by a shouting mob of activists. Police eventually intervened to separate him from the crowd.

    Smith is a familiar face to those of us who work downtown. The Forward office is a few blocks from Wall Street, and I saw him at least once earlier this summer, picketing silently near the New York Stock Exchange.

That account matches the widespread hostility I’ve observed among occupiers against Smith. Given that Occupy Wall Street is based in a public space, occupiers simply don’t have the power to permanently kick Smith out. Of course anti-Semitism needs to be confronted when it crops up. And that’s exactly what the true occupiers have been doing.

Smith, according to a recent interview, is homeless and going blind from glaucoma. He previously told me that he made a sign reading “Google: Zionists Control Wall St.” because God told him to. And yet, as Nathan-Kazis notes, Smith has been endlessly written about, photographed and filmed. He now represents Occupy’s “anti-Semitism problem.”

Another man featured in the Emergency Committee for Israel ad is Danny Cline, who appears to be an aspiring YouTube star with no involvement in Occupy Wall Street beyond showing up at the park to film his own rants.

The reality is that the Occupy Wall Street movement is filled with Jews. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently noted its distinctly “Jewish flavor.” Fifteen hundred people attended a Yom Kippur service outside Liberty Plaza earlier this month, in what participants described as one of the most powerful and moving events of Occupy to date.

Still, the “Occupy Wall Street is anti-Semitic” meme — a classic example of a tactic known as “nutpicking” — spreads. Don’t expect the fact that all this is largely based on two or three trolls to stop the right from continuing the attacks.

OccupyWallStreet: Yom Kippur Celebration in Support of Occupy Wall Street 10/7/11

Time to Investigate Justice Clarence Thomas, Perhaps the Most Corrupt SCOTUS Judge In Modern History

Time to Investigate Justice Clarence Thomas, Perhaps the Most Corrupt SCOTUS Judge In Modern History

Twenty House Democrats called Thursday on the U.S. Judicial Conference to formally request that the U.S. Department of Justice investigate Justice Clarence Thomas's non-compliance with the Ethics in Government Act of 1978.

Justice Thomas indicated on his annual financial disclosure forms that his wife had received no income since he joined the bench in 1991, despite the fact that his wife had in fact earned nearly $700,000 from the Heritage Foundation from 2003 to 2007.

The Ethics in Government Act of 1978 requires Supreme Court justices to disclose their spouse's income.

"To believe that Justice Thomas didn't know how to fill out a basic disclosure form is absurd," Congresswoman Louise Slaughter (D-NY) said. "It is reasonable, in every sense of the word, to believe that a member of the highest court in the land should know how to properly disclose almost $700,000 worth of income."

"To not be able to do so is suspicious, and according to law, requires further investigation. To accept Justice Thomas's explanation without doing the required due diligence would be irresponsible."

The letter (PDF) comes a day after President Barack Obama asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, his landmark health reforms.

Seventy-four Members of Congress in February signed a letter calling for Justice Thomas to recuse himself from cases involving the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act because of his family's financial ties to groups dedicated to lobbying against it.

In response, Justice Thomas released his new financial disclosure form in May. It indicated his wife received a $150,000 salary from the group Liberty Central in 2010. The group, which she co-founded, fights to repeal health care reform, among other things.

The appearance of a conflict of interest merits recusal under federal law.

Let's count down how many seconds it takes for conservatives to start yelling witch-hunt...3....2....1. The problem with investigating conservative corruption is you have to break out a dictionary and explain what ethics are. This takes a few days to sink in. Than they're still not sure exactly what you're talking about.

Associated Press Pushes False "fact check" of President Obama's statements on Buffett Rule

Associated Press Pushes False "fact check" of President Obama's statements on Buffett Rule

The conservative media have echoed the criticisms made by a misleading Associated Press "fact check" of President Obama's statements about taxation and the Buffett Rule he has been promoting. Progressive economists have rebutted the AP's criticisms and lent support to his proposals.
AP: Millionaires Already Taxed More Than Their Secretaries

AP: "The Data Say" Millionaires "Are Already Taxed At Higher Rates Than Their Secretaries." From an Associated Press "fact check" by Stephen Ohlemacher:

    President Barack Obama says he wants to make sure millionaires are taxed at higher rates than their secretaries. The data say they already are.

    "Warren Buffett's secretary shouldn't pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett. There is no justification for it," Obama said as he announced his deficit-reduction plan this week. "It is wrong that in the United States of America, a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker who earns $50,000 should pay higher tax rates than somebody pulling in $50 million."

    On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.

    The 10 percent of households with the highest incomes pay more than half of all federal taxes. They pay more than 70 percent of federal income taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office. [Associated Press, 9/20/11]

Progressive Economists Back The Buffett Rule, Refute AP

Krugman: "The Obama/Buffett Claim Is Absolutely, Totally True." From Nobel laureate Paul Krugman's New York Times blog:

    Well, it seems as if a number of people in the media have decided that Obama was fibbing when he said that some millionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries -- because, as the usual suspects triumphantly declare, on average millionaires pay higher average taxes than middle-income Americans.

    This is, of course, stupid: the operative word is SOME.

    And we're not talking about one or two exceptional guys, either. Look at the IRS data on returns for the 400 highest incomes in America (pdf) -- specifically, Table 3. If you look at the numbers since 2004, you'll see that in a typical year between 30 and 40 percent of those super-high-income players paid an average tax rate of less than 15 percent; most of them paid less than 20 percent. Bear in mind that for the very wealthy the payroll tax -- the main burden on working-class Americans -- is trivial, because of the cap on Social Security and the fact that it only applies to earned income. And what becomes clear is that the Obama/Buffet claim is absolutely, totally true.

    So why the attack? Probably because it's such an effective line. And we can't have populism that actually strikes a chord with the public, can we? [The Conscience of a Liberal, The New York Times, 9/21/11]

CEPR's Dean Baker: Obama "Made A Simple And True Statement In His Speech On The Budget." From Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research:
    President Obama made a simple and true statement in his speech on the budget Monday. He said that there were millionaires and billionaires who pay tax at a lower rate than middle income families.

    Many news outlets went to town to point out that on average millionaires and billionaires pay tax at a higher rate than middle income families. Of course this is not what Obama said. He was pointing out that some of the richest people in the country (Warren Buffet was his model), get most or all of their income as capital gains and therefore only pay taxes at the 15 percent capital gains rate.

    The NYT gets this right today. Other outlets could have saved a lot of trees and better served their readers if they didn't work so hard trying to refute something that President Obama did not say. [Beat the Press, Center for Economic and Policy Research, 9/21/11]

Jared Bernstein: Buffett Rule Is A "Principle," A "Guideline For Tax Reform." From Jared Bernstein, Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

    Actually, let's look at this principle for a moment, for "principle" it is--in fact, it doesn't factor at all in the $1.5 trillion in revenue raised in the President's budget plan.   The administration laid it out as a guideline for tax reform, a kind of tripwire in the tax code to avoid the problem identified by billionaire Warren Buffet: because much of his income gets special treatment in the tax code, he faces a smaller effective tax rate than many in the middle class.

    [...]

    Now, it's not the case that every millionaire pays a smaller share in taxes compared to middle class families.  But, as my colleague Chuck Marr points out on the CBPP blog, if much of their income derives from non-labor earnings, like capital gains and dividend payouts from their equities, then they likely do pay less as a share of their income.

    And in fact, Chuck features a graph showing that the effective tax rate (taxes paid as a share of income) on income and payroll taxes are about 15% for a middle-class family with mostly earned income, compared to 12% for a millionaire (or higher) household with at least 2/3 investment income.

    Here's another look at the same data from the Tax Policy Center.  This figure shows the effective tax by share of investment income.  The effective rate drops by half going from left (more labor income) to right (more capital income).

    Source: Tax Policy Center, link above.

    Is there a rationale for such favorable, and potentially distortionary, tax treatment?  As noted here, I don't see it, and the research is supportive of that view.  It's just another loophole (and another victory for the winning side in the class war, but that's another issue...) [On the Economy, 9/20/11]

CBPP's Tax Policy Director Chuck Marr: "A Significant Group Of Very Wealthy People Pay A Smaller Share Of Their Incomes In Federal Income And Payroll Taxes Than Large Swaths Of The Middle Class." From Off The Charts, a blog of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

 Funny how conservatives suddenly decide, when convenient, that facts matter. They have lied, distorted and told half truths for fifty years to manipulate the American public into voting against their own best interests. Now that they have left president Obama with few tools to fix the economy they broke, they're lying in their tactics to once again avoid responsibility for keeping millions of Americans unemployed. Keeping Americans unemployed is their major campaign theme heading into 2012. They figure the worse the economy, the more they can shift blame.

Another Big Lie - Conservative Republicans Are Steeped in American History

Another Big Lie - Conservative Republicans Are Steeped in American History

When Tea Party darling Herman Cain announced his candidacy for president in May, he decided to cite words from the U.S. Constitution to underline his key points. Unfortunately for Cain, he got his documents wrong. The passage he chose was from the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.

Cain is not alone. There seems to be an epidemic of Tea Party Republicans botching historical accounts of the founding of the United States. Since Independence Day celebrates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, and given the recent Tea Party problems with history, I thought it would be fitting to look a little closer at Cain's gaffe, as it has both symbolic and substantive importance regarding modern American politics.

Symbolically, Cain's problem with historical accuracy represents a major characteristic of the modern Tea Party-dominated Republican Party. Whether it is Sarah Palin's butchering of Paul Revere's role in the American Revolution, or Michele Bachmann's truly revisionist mangling of the facts to claim the founding fathers tried to abolish slavery (not to mention her belief that John Quincy Adams was a founding father, even though he was born in 1767), the Tea Party has shown a disdain for knowledge, facts and learning. History is not something set in stone, but rather something to be twisted and manipulated to support the immutable, ideological beliefs of the movement.

So if Palin or Bachmann plainly get American history wrong, the response isn't to admit it (after all, the statements are not debatable; Revere was not riding to warn the British, and slavery was enshrined as legitimate in the Constitution, notably through the three-fifths compromise). No, instead, their supporters tried to change history to match the statements of their leaders, which in 21st century practice means Palin supporters editing the Wikipedia entry on Paul Revere to reflect her mistakes, and Bachmann's followers doing the same for the page on John Quincy Adams.

The ignorance of Cain, Palin and Bachmann holds importance beyond a "gotcha" moment to demonstrate that these three individuals aren't up to the task of being president (similar to Mitt Romney's gaffe of telling an unemployed attendee at one of his events that he, too, was unemployed). More importantly, the lack of respect (or even caring about) facts, both by the candidates and their supporters, is indicative of the larger GOP approach to political positions. For example, Republicans support lower taxes for millionaires because that is what their core constituency and base ideology calls for, but they justify the position through unsustainable assertions that such tax cuts somehow create jobs, even though we know they don't (also here and here). Or, Republicans reject the existence of climate change to keep costs as low as possible for corporations regardless of the consequences, but justify their position by denying the existence of climate change, even though the overwhelming majority of scientists say it is real.

There are myriad issues for which Republicans rely on patently false assertions to back policy positions that may be otherwise unpalatable to the American public ("We're creating jobs" plays better than "Rich people shouldn't have to pay a lot in taxes"), but nowhere is this lack of respect for facts and history more prevalent than in the party's attacks on Barack Obama. Rather than oppose his policies on the merits, Republicans have engaged in a two-prong strategy of personal attacks meant to score political victories: First, they opposed every proposal made by the president, even if Obama called for the adoption of a policy once embraced by Republicans (i.e. becoming the Party of No, although I have argued they have evolved into the Party of F You).

Second, the right, including politicians and the right-wing, Fox News/Limbaugh propaganda echo chamber, has engaged in a coordinated assault to paint the president as being out of the American mainstream, regardless of the facts. They want you to think he is dangerous and un-American, that he was born in Kenya, and that his policy proposals are radical, and that he has no desire to keep Americans safe from terrorists with whom he actually sympathizes.

(Never mind that he has governed as a centrist and consistent with his campaign promises, which resulted in a hefty victory. For example, the stimulus package was smaller than many economists supported and included a ton of tax cuts; he didn't push for a single-payer system or even a public option as part of health care reform, instead getting behind a bill that pushed tens of millions of new customers into the hands of private insurance companies; and he stepped up the pursuit of Qaeda and Taliban targets, including drone attacks, taking out more terrorists than his predecessor, including Osama bin Laden.)

In right-wing rhetoric, the president is a threat to the American way of life, a socialist who wants to change traditional American values, even though there is no actual evidence to support these claims.

Why do these attacks matter? Well, that question segues nicely into the substantive problem with Cain's Constitution/Declaration gaffe, since the Tea Party regularly invokes an Obama attack on liberties, drawing on the Declaration of Independence (even if Cain thought he was citing the Constitution, not an insignificant error since the Constitution is the law of the land, providing a framework for our entire political system, while the Declaration is mainly historical in nature).

In his speech, Cain said:

"You know, those ideals that we live by, we believe in, your parents believe in, they instilled in you. When you get to the part about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, don't stop right there, keep reading. Cause that's when it says that when any form of government becomes destructive of those ideals, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it. We've got some altering and some abolishing to do."

This kind of language should sound familiar, since it is the bread and butter of Tea Party ideology. And Cain is right about what the Declaration says (well, he got the wrong document, but he got the right sequence of passages). The second paragraph of the Declaration begins:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

And then the paragraph goes on to say:

"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Warms the cockles of the Tea Party heart, right? Well, with a little more perspective and examination, not so much. First of all, I'm sure it's no coincidence Cain stopped where he did, since the next line of the Declaration is:

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes."

So yes, the Declaration supports "the Right of the People to alter or to abolish" the government when it becomes "destructive" to "unalienable Rights." But not for "light and transient causes." What did the founding fathers think were big enough threats to warrant revolution? The answer is right in the Declaration, a laundry list of grievances that make up the bulk of the document. It is a litany of charges that the King of England had impinged on American liberties by, among other things, engaging in the hindering and dissolution of of legislative bodies, ignoring laws, preventing the adoption of laws (including, much to the Tea Party's disdain, I'm sure, the "Naturalization of Foreigners"), interfering with the judiciary, quartering English soldiers, interfering with trade, and imposing taxes without consent.

In short, the founding fathers bristled at being ruled by a dictatorial monarch. It is easy to see how in the over-hyped, rabid and, most importantly, false and historically inaccurate rhetoric of the Tea Party, such a connection would be apparent, from the tyranny of a King to a president looking to institute a socialist/Nazi/Islamist dictatorship in the United States.

Only, much like Bachmann's and Palin's lack of knowledge of our history, Cain (and it's not like he is the only Republican who talks about Obama's assault on our liberties) completely misunderstands and misapplies the content and context of the Declaration's call for revolution. Republicans can't seem to understand that if the president disagrees with them on how to address the country's roster of problems, it doesn't make him a tyrant. It's doubtful the founding father would look kindly on anyone trying to argue that the Obama presidency was comparable to the reign of King George III.

The language of the Declaration of Independence doesn't provide the support the Tea Party thinks it does.

(As an aside, the core charges of the Tea Party against Obama are all false: They complain about taxes, but Americans are experiencing their lowest tax burden since 1958, with taxes lower than they were under Reagan. They charge Obama with wanting to take away their guns, but the president hasn't signed a single piece of gun control legislation, nor did he veto bills with pro-gun provisions attached. I could go on and on.)

Cain (and Bachmann and Palin) getting history wrong isn't just about a funny media story. Rather, the Tea Party's ambivalence about facts and history is a necessary component of the GOP political strategy, as the party seeks to continue its drive since the 2010 elections to return the country to the 1920s (attacking social safety net programs like Medicare and Social Security, busting unions, cutting education, catering to corporate special interests and prioritizing eliminating abortion, all while further increasing the historically massive divide between the very wealthiest Americans and the rest of us). As Think Progress tweeted last week: "REMINDER: Current deficit + economy product of crisis created by deregulation + huge tax cuts. Solution isn't deregulation + huge tax cuts." (Just look at Tim Pawlenty's tax cut proposal, for example.)

Republicans, to win in 2012, are relying on Americans to forget history, not remember it.

So on this Independence Day, which commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, let's take the opportunity to read the document and better understand what it did (and did not) say, and, more importantly, against what the founding fathers were actually rebelling.

And let's try and stick to facts and accurate history when debating the issues. I know cognitive dissonance can be troubling for an ideologue, but here is a tip: If you find yourself literally trying to rewrite history, you're probably on the wrong side of a debate.

More often than not the facts of history support liberalism. A political philosophy espoused by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Thomas Paine. Maybe that is why rabid right-wing conservatives keep trying to rewrite history or invent their own.