Griper Blade

Scott Walker's Alternate-Reality Version of Wisconsin

2012-01-26T11:51:00.001-06:00

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker scheduled his annual State of the State address the night after President Obama delivered the State of the Union. It says a lot about how little press he hoped to get with his speech. He probably would've scheduled it for the same night, so it wouldn't have even been broadcast, but at a certain point the attempt to hide something becomes attention-worthy in itself, and I suppose that would've been a national news story. So the night after would have to do. In any case, the truth was not invited.

Wisconsin State Journal:

Facing a recall and speaking over a loud and angry crowd outside the Assembly chamber, an unbowed Gov. Scott Walker delivered a State of the State address Wednesday that touted the successes of a difficult year and promised better days ahead.

“During the past year, we added thousands of new jobs,” Walker said. “And we balanced the state budget. We balanced it without raising taxes, without massive layoffs and without budget tricks.”

How much of that is true? Well, pretty much none of it.

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Did we add "thousands of new jobs?" Probably. But the impression Walkers obviously wants to leave you with is that unemployment is improving. The opposite is true. Sure, new positions are opening here and there, but the new jobs aren't keeping pace with the job losses. Wisconsin is the only state in the nation to suffer six consecutive months of net job losses. There are far fewer jobs than when Scott Walker was sworn in.

And this shouldn't be surprising. Walker's bought into a certain flavor of mumbo jumbo economics favored by rightwing politicians -- i.e., if you cut taxes for the top wage earners and businesses, companies will flock to your state as a tax haven. The problem is that these tax cuts have to be paid for, so you cut benefits for public workers, slash programs that take the weight off families, and generally undercut consumer demand at every turn. The resulting "Come to Wisconsin, where the taxes are low but the customers don't have any money" sales pitch is not as enticing to businesses as the aforementioned rightwing politicians seem to believe.

I'm going to take the next point out of order -- that Walker didn't raise taxes. This ties in with my previous point. You can say that Walker didn't raise taxes only if you accept Walker's definition of what taxes actually are. In my book, if you pay more taxes, you're taxes have gone up.

Not so with Scooter. He cut the Earned Income Tax Credit, which helps low-income working families. Walker redefines the tax break as a "redistribution program... taking money from other taxpayers and giving it to individuals who have a limited tax liability." But the truth is that it's a refund on payroll taxes like Medicare and Social Security. The people receiving the credit actually did pay those taxes. No one's getting someone else's refund.

So did Walker increase taxes? If you take the plain, spinless fact that many Wisconsin families' taxes will go up, then yeah. When Al Franken had his radio show, he used to say, "Words mean things," and "increase" means "go up." Walker is just plain lying here. He raised taxes.

Did he balance the budget? Depends on who you ask. If you asked Gov. Walker last night, he'd say yes. But if you asked earlier in the week, he'd say no.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Gov. Scott Walker's administration has touted for months its efforts to balance the state budget, but now it also has acknowledged a significant way in which the budget isn't balanced.

To keep the possibility alive of making further cuts to state health programs, the Walker administration quietly certified to the federal government on Dec. 29 that the state had a deficit.

Federal law allows the state to drop tens of thousands of adults to save money on health care costs if the state can show it has a deficit. Walker has said he wants to cut health care spending in other ways, but hasn't ruled out dropping those 53,000 adults if the other methods aren't approved by the federal government.

While we're at it, I think both having and not having a deficit -- depending on what works out best for you at the moment -- qualifies as a "budget trick." That only leaves the "no layoffs" claim.

Yes, there were no "massive" layoffs (note that he couldn't claim no layoffs). But that was always a false choice. It was Walker who said -- in a typical Republican hostage-taking political move -- "pass my budget or the teachers get it." What he's really saying is that he didn't carry out a threat he made to get Democrats to come back from Illinois. His argument boils down to, "Yeah, I took 12,000 hostages, but I didn't have to shoot them. That makes me a hero!"

Not surprisingly, I disagree.

"[S]ome 200 protesters gathered in the Capitol rotunda during Walker’s remarks," WSJ reports. "They loudly sang anti-Walker 'solidarity' songs before his address. Once the speech started, the crowd grew louder, their chants bleeding into the chamber. A constant drumbeat could be heard throughout his 37-minute speech."

There's a metaphor there for truth bleeding into Walker's carefully crafted fiction. It's hard to lie to people about the things they're living, to get them to believe that their personal reality isn't real. Things are bad in Wisconsin and everyone knows it.

So that drumbeat keeps pounding, no matter how vigorously Walker works to convince us of it's silence.

-Wisco

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New Poll has Wisconsin Recall Effort at Slight Disadvantage

2012-01-25T12:10:00.000-06:00

Wisconsin is generally considered a swing state, despite the fact that it only seems to swing one way. In presidential races, it's usually a close race between the Democrat and the Republican, but when election day comes, the Democrat wins. In fact, the last time a Republican won the state was during the Reagan landslide against Walter Mondale. Wisconsin always seems tantalizingly within the grasp of the GOP candidate, before it slips away. Maybe Republican strategists have a different nickname for the Badger state -- perhaps one involving the word "heartbreak." Applying the "red/blue" measurement the media likes to use, Wisconsin is a purple state. But generally a bluish purple.

A new Marquette Law School poll shows a race shaping up to be like most other years -- the Democrat leads, but not yet with a majority.

The poll only measured an Obama/Romney race, which -- despite Mitt's recent polling decline -- still seems the most likely. If that race were held today, 48% would vote for Obama, while 40% would vote for Romney. Eight points is a decent lead and much better than the national average, which puts the president just 1.9% ahead -- a squeaker. But since Obama hasn't cracked 50% here, Team Mittens has to think there's some ground to be taken. It's not neck and neck now -- but it could be.

On the recall front, the situation is different. The best number for dems comes from a rematch with Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett -- the opponent Gov. Scott Walker eventually beat in 2010. Walker wins that 50%-44%. This may seem like good news for Walker, until you consider that he's already running a campaign to keep his office. He's been running ads statewide, trying to convince everyone he's just the best governor ever, and the best he can do is a six-point lead over a man who not only isn't running any ads at all, but isn't even a candidate yet. He hasn't officially declared. Scooter's been trying his little heart out and Barrett's within six without even raising a finger -- and that's within the poll's margin for error. In fact, of all the possible Democratic contenders in the poll, only one has numbers below the margin for error.

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"The old line ‘you don’t beat somebody with nobody’ is true. Other polls have asked only if Governor Walker should be recalled and have found closer races," says Professor Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll and Wisconsin journalists' political go-to wonk. "But in the end, some specific Democrat will face Governor Walker. This poll is the first of the year to match specific potential Democratic challengers against the governor. The results show a competitive race but one in which Governor Walker starts with an advantage."

But when you consider his other advantages -- the previously mentioned campaign head start, incumbency, fundraising, etc. -- that polling advantage doesn't really add up to much. My take here is that it shows that Walker is both vulnerable and eminently beatable.

And the thing is, you really have to view these races independently of each other. The recall and the presidential won't happen on the same day. That means that presidential coattail effects -- or anti-coattail effects -- won't really apply. It might be more helpful to think of the presidential election and the gubernatorial recall as two separate election cycles -- one right after the other.

But that doesn't mean that one can't be predictive or instructive of the other. The recall will almost certainly happen first. If Walker wins, his campaign machine keeps churning until the presidential election. If the democrat wins, the same will happen. The groundwork being laid by the recall will have a lot to do with who wins the state in the presidential. Two separate cycles, but one feeds the next. Reverse coattails, where the race for lesser office helps the candidate for the higher one.

Publicly, Walker and Republicans will take these numbers and do a media tour with them. Privately though, they've got to be worried. If this is what weeks of TV and radio ads gets them, it may not be enough. And one thing the poll didn't measure is enthusiasm -- one million signatures say recall supporters have that on their side.

Wisconsin the swing state may be swinging away from its own governor.

-Wisco

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Mitt's Poverty Level Tax Rate

2012-01-24T09:52:00.000-06:00

Nothing on Earth invites speculation from the punditry more than ignorance. Pundits get paid to do two things; to make predictions and to know things you don't. "I don't know" is probably written on some stone tablet of Forbidden Phrases somewhere. As a result, people take blind stabs at issues they couldn't possibly know anything about. One of those issues has been Mitt Romney's tax returns. Why was he reluctant to release them?

One of the blind stabs was that maybe Mittens didn't pay the required 10% tithe to the Church of Latter Day Saints. Score one for blind stabs -- he probably hasn't. "Mr. Romney reported $21.7 million in income [for 2010]," Wall Street Journal reports. "He paid $3 million in federal taxes, slightly more than the $2.98 million he made in charitable donations. At least $1.5 million of his charitable donations went to the Mormon Church." $21.7 million, $1.5 million tithe. You do the math. Mitt's shorting his church a bit.

But while that figure might get the attention of a certain Tabernacle in a certain Utah city, it's not what's drawing everyone else's. Our attention is drawn to the fact that Romney's tax bill adds up to somewhat less than even the absurdly low 15% estimate Romney gave in South Carolina. Specifically, 13.9%. You could argue that a little more than one percent difference amounts to splitting hairs, but when it's a percentage of a number like $21.7 million, we're talking about some pretty big and split-worthy hairs. It's the difference between the $3,016,300 Romney assumedly paid and $3,255,000 15% would've had him paying. You could feed and house a family on his rounding error.

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And there's the question of timing. Romney released the records -- for two years only -- after the debate in Florida last night. Not only did he make sure the numbers weren't an issue in the debate, but he clearly hoped the story would be buried by post-debate coverage. It hasn't been. At least, not as completely as Team Romney probably would've liked. Mittens is probably taxed at a lower rate than you are and this is something he'd really rather you didn't know.

Why? Because his own tax plan takes this disparity and just makes it worse.

Associated Press:

Republican Mitt Romney's tax plan would increase taxes on low-income families while cutting taxes for the middle-class and the rich, according to an independent study released Thursday.

On average, households making less than $20,000 would see their taxes increase by more than 60 percent, said the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research group that studied the Romney plan.

Households making between $50,000 and $75,000 would get small tax cuts, averaging 2.2 percent, or about $250, the study said. People making more than $1 million would get tax cuts averaging 15 percent, or about $146,000.

That 13.9% Mitt pays? It's too much. That's got to be shaved down a bit. And what the poor pay? Way too little. That's got to be bumped up a whole lot. Never mind that what Romney pays now is comparable to the rate a person at or near the poverty line might pay without deductions -- in his world, sound and fair tax policy has him paying less and the poor paying more. Like Gingrich's, Romney's contempt for people in poverty is palpable. He's just quieter about it.

And that contempt is odd. Generally when you wage class warfare like this, you don't do it against your own tax bracket. You'd think he'd feel more kinship with his fellow fifteen-percenters, many of whom are struggling along with food stamps.

-Wisco

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Big Labor for Newt

2012-01-23T12:16:00.000-06:00

In Florida at least, the strategy of labor is clear -- nominate Newt Gingrich. Labor giant AFSCME has made what Greg Sargent calls a "major ad buy in the state," drawing parallels between a past Bain Medicare scandal and a crime committed by Florida Gov. Rick Scott's former company.

The ad doesn't specifically endorse Gingrich, but at this point it looks like a two man race -- if Mitt loses voters, the lion's share run to Newt.

And it's not like Romney needs much of a push to send him over the edge. "Before South Carolina, Mitt Romney was some 20 points ahead in Florida," notes Josh Marshall. "Two new polls have come out in the last twelve hours. Both have Gingrich up by 9 points." Newt's post Carolina bounce is stratospheric. And Rick Scott isn't very popular in his own state. In all, only 38% approve of the job he's doing as governor and even one in five Republicans disapprove. Even among Scott supporters, accusations of Medicare fraud aren't likely to be a plus for a candidate. You have to believe they support Scott despite it, not because of it. It's something they're willing to overlook.

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At New York magazine, John Heilemann has a blog post up explaining what happens if Gingrich wins Florida. While it was written before AFSCME's ad buy, it goes a long way toward explaining it:

If Gingrich wins Florida, the Republican Establishment is going to have a meltdown that makes Three Mile Island look like a marshmallow roast. Why? Because the Establishment will be staring down the barrel of two utterly unpalatable choices. On the one hand, Gingrich's national favorable-unfavorable ratings of 26.5 and 58.6 percent, respectively make him not just unelectable against Obama but also mean that he would likely be a ten-ton millstone around the necks of down-ballot Republican candidates across the country. And on the other, Romney will have shown in two successive contests—one in a bellwether Republican state, the other in a key swing state—an inability to beat his deeply unpopular rival. If this scenario unfolds, the sound of GOP grandees whispering calls for a white knight, be it Indiana governor Mitch Daniels (who, conveniently, is delivering the Republican response to Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night) or Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan or even Jeb Bush, will be deafening.

Clearly, a Gingrich win in this scenario is best outcome, since he's likely to have an anti-coattails effect on congressional and gubernatorial races.

And of course, the contrast between Gingrich and Romney helps. Mitt Romney seems hopelessly out of touch -- at times almost robotic -- while Gingrich is just a jerk. The GOP base has been trained to like jerks. They think dickishness is a positive character trait. Look at talk radio; it's all loudmouths and bullies and liars and... Well, jerks. And check out wingnut comments on blog posts and news stories -- they think being creative with an insult constitutes a well-reasoned, logical argument. Who do you think a Rush Limbaugh fan hears "real" Republicanism from -- Gingrich or Romney?

Already, Gingrich's negatives are being spun into positives. Newt -- despite being an astonishingly poor choice as the candidate who can beat Obama -- is now being put across by some as the most electable candidate. The reasoning has it that Gingrich is "tough enough" to fight back. Completely lost on the people making this argument is whether general election voters are willing to blur the distinction between "tough" and "insufferable" the way Republican voters do. So far, there's absolutely no evidence that they will. If Gingrich catches fire with the GOP electorate, it'll be Sarah Palin all over again -- a divisive figure that divides the public unequally and not in that figure's favor. And, as they were with Palin, Republican voters will be completely blind the fact that their candidate is driving voters away, trapped as they are in their insular rightwing media echo chamber.

No wonder he's labor's candidate of choice. He's a GOP disaster waiting to happen -- and he can't happen soon enough.

-Wisco

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Senate Dems Make Up Most of Remaining PIPA Support

2012-01-19T12:07:00.000-06:00

The headline at Gizmodo reads, "PIPA Support Collapses, and Here’s a Full List of the Senators Who Newly Oppose It." It turns out that yesterday's internet blackout scared off eighteen Senators from supporting the senate's version of the draconian anti-piracy legislation -- it may not seem like many, but in a chamber with only one hundred seats, it represents a nearly 20% drop of support in a single day.

That's what you call a wildly successful protest.

But looking through the names, it's hard not to notice a certain fact. Only two Democrats -- Maryland's Ben Cardin (originally a co-sponsor) and Jeff Merkley of Oregon -- have changed positions. The bill originally enjoyed bipartisan support, but the rush to abandon it was not bipartisan at all.

Raw Story:

While Silicon Valley may have found their voice echos on Capitol Hill more loudly than expected, what remains after Wednesday’s protest is even more telling that what provoked it: Senate Democrats are, by and large, the core pillars of support for the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), which has not otherwise engendered a strict partisan divide among lawmakers.

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Far and away, the top beneficiary in the Senate from interest groups that support PIPA is Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), who’s taken in just short of a million dollars from those groups, according to data from OpenSecrets.org. She’s also the most recent Senator to co-sponsor PIPA, adding her name to the list on Dec. 12. The runner-up is Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), who’s taken $777,383 from PIPA-supporting interest groups, and has co-sponsored the bill since May 2011.

In fact, a list of the top 20 beneficiaries of special interest money in favor of PIPA reads like a list of the Senate’s most influential Democrats: Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY) in third; Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) in fourth; Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in fifth; Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the bill’s primary sponsor, in sixth; Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) in seventh; Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) in eighth; Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) in ninth; and Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) in tenth.

In fact, you don't hit a Republican until you get way down to fifteenth place -- Sen. Mitch McConnell, the senate minority leader.

This isn't extremely surprising. The Democratic Party has been awful at consumer protection from the entertainment industry since Clinton. It was under Clinton that media consolidation began in earnest, thanks to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which he signed into law. There are now fewer media voices because of it. The bill was sold as a way to increase competition. The opposite happened -- fewer media companies, a shift toward monopolism, and higher costs to consumers. Right wing talk radio boomed, for example, as Clear Channel took over station after station.

Needless to say, entertainment conglomerates and media companies thought this was wonderful. And Democrats reaped the rewards.

This is the corrupting influence of money in politics. PIPA is almost certainly doomed, since it's house sibling SOPA is pretty much done for. You could argue that, given this fact, there's no downside for Democratic Senators still supporting PIPA -- it's not going to happen, but they still get the Big Media largesse. But that doesn't explain why so many were for it in the first place. The $7,319,983 given to the top eighteen Democratic supporters of PIPA does.

There are a couple of lessons to be learned here; first, Democrats can't be counted on to be the good guys. A two party system is often characterized as choice between the lesser of two evils. Never forget that the lesser is still an evil.

Second, that as long as votes are for sale in Washington, you can't count on anyone to watch your back. We're going to have to do that ourselves.

-Wisco

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A Blackout is Working to Stop SOPA and PIPA

2012-01-18T12:38:00.000-06:00

As you're probably aware, several major websites have blacked out in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its senate sibling, the Protect IP Act (PIPA). Wikipedia is still usable, but it takes some futzing to get it to work. Otherwise, Reddit, Craigslist, Boing-Boing, Mozilla, SMBC, and other popular sites are effectively down for the day.

This has turned out to be an effective form of protest.

Politico:

An Internet blackout Wednesday by Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla and thousands of other sites against two anti-piracy bills in Congress has started to have its desired effect: Co-sponsors of the legislation have changed sides and other lawmakers have called for more debate before any vote.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — who was a co-sponsor of the PROTECT IP Act — became the latest lawmaker Wednesday to pull his support. In the House, Rep. Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.), originally a co-sponsor of the Stop Online Piracy Act, pulled his name from the list of sponsors on Tuesday. A spokesman for Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.), meanwhile, told the Omaha World-Herald on Wednesday that the congressman is also unable to support SOPA as written.

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The widespread Internet protest is even bringing new Washington voices into the fray. Mostly silent in the debate, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) tweeted Wednesday he doesn’t back the bills.

"I support intellectual property rights, but I oppose SOPA & PIPA," DeMint tweeted. "They're misguided bills that will cause more harm than good."

But the fact was that these bills were all but dead before the blackout. "[S]ponsors of the House and Senate bills ran into fierce and unexpected opposition, largely derailing their legislative plans. The White House didn’t issue a veto threat, per se, but the administration’s chief technology officials concluded, 'We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.' The statement added that any proposed legislation 'must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet,'" writes Steve Benen. "The White House’s position left SOPA and PIPA, at least in their current form, effectively dead."

Part of the problem here is that members of congress are often asked to vote on legislation dealing with issues they don't really understand. The members of the specific committees generally get the bills they generate, but outside those committees they're about as well informed as you or I might be. Think about it; do you really believe your congress critter is an expert on issues like internet commerce, international trade, the health insurance industry, nuclear power, and national defense all at the same time? Pretty doubtful.

As a result, congress members rely on lobbyists and their own colleagues to educate them. There's nothing wrong with this in and of itself, but the problem is that there's often incentive for these educators to be a lot less than honest. And it's not just corporate lobbyists who present this problem, but citizen groups as well. Imagine being a member of a group committed to eliminating online porn -- giving congress the tools to shut down websites could be an inviting first step in realizing your goals. This is a precedent you want to set and you're obviously not going to give a presentation that includes a "here's the downside" PowerPoint slide (actually, small money lobbyists probably just write a letter or submit a study, but you get the idea).

It's hard to see how this can possibly be avoided. Even if we reduce the money influence of lobbyists, you could make a pretty damned good argument that the educational influence of lobbyists is almost necessary. You've seen congress. Some of these people are dumber than a sack of doorknobs. Their only actual skill seems to be in getting elected. I, for one, don't want Rep. Louie Gohmert trying to figure out NASA'a latest rocket science project or trying to figure out the math behind monetary policy. If you gave a monkey a shotgun, he'd do less damage.

So what's the answer? You're looking at it. Pressure from citizens and businesses that would be affected by SOPA and PIPA have severely hobbled the legislation's progress. Co-sponsors are jumping ship and the White House is suggesting it's heading for a dead end -- assuming it moves forward at all. It's not the blackout itself that's causing the problem for lawmakers, it's the message that websites are putting up instead of their usual content, a message they've been pushing for weeks now -- call your congress members, tell them to oppose these bills.

It's just like dealing with hate speech. If the answer to hate speech is more speech, not censorship, then the answer to misleading educational lobbying is more lobbying -- in this case, from actual voters. If you contact your representative or senator, it has an impact. If you tell them that you're going to do more than just vote against them -- that you're going to volunteer for and donate to their opponent in the next election -- it counts that much more.

If you doubt that your opinion matters, look at what's happening today and reassess that conclusion.

-Wisco

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Wisconsin Budget Kabuki and a Regularly Scheduled 'Crisis'

2012-01-17T13:01:00.000-06:00

It's my opinion that the words "budget crisis" should be banned from political conversation in Wisconsin. This state, like many states, has a constitutional requirement for a balanced budget, so whenever it's time for a new budget, we're facing a "budget crisis." Every time, without fail. Both parties use the term to bludgeon the other party into submission -- "Gah! It's a budget crisis! Why aren't you helping us save Wisconsin?" -- and the media always plays into it. Face it, "Budget Crisis!" makes for better headlines than "Same Kabuki BS That Happens Every Two Years is Happening Again." If the biennial budget constitutes a "budget crisis," then Wisconsin has had over a century of incredible luck in resolving these crises. We're always on the verge of... I don't know, being a failed state I guess... and every time, we manage to be pulled back from the brink of certain doom.

This is why I don't give Gov. Scott Walker a lot of credit for solving the "budget crisis" with his union-busting and his attacks on the middle and lower classes. Walker has managed to do what every single governor before him has done (some of them less burdened by the weight of intelligence than even Scott, by the way), making this less of a towering achievement and more of just a routine. Scott Walker merely managed to avoid what every governor has managed to avoid. This isn't some singular triumph of leadership. In fact, it may be that in the history of this clockwork crisis, few governors have handled it as poorly.

And with that little rant, I herald in deadline day -- the day the petitions to recall Scott Walker must be turned in. The heroic Walker won't be there to watch them roll in.

Chicago Tribune:

Supporters of an unprecedented effort to oust Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker from office said they will turn in more than enough signatures Tuesday to force the Republican into a recall election barely a year into his first term.

Walker, however, has no plans to be anywhere near the Capitol when recall organizers turn in the signatures by Tuesday's deadline. The governor is scheduled to be in New York when organizers say they will be unloading the stacks of petitions, weighing a ton, from a truck and hauling them into the state election board's offices.

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For their part, recall organizers say they've collected the roughly 540,000 signatures needed to trigger a recall and exceeded it by 200,000 more. This is going to happen. If I were Scott Walker, I wouldn't want to be around to watch the truck roll in either.

And why is Walker being recalled? Because his approach to the "budget crisis" consisted of unbelievable overreach. He used it as a hammer to ban collective bargaining for public employees -- and it didn't work. The other side wasn't cowed into accepting what was a blatantly false argument and that skepticism was later shown to be right. Walker testified to congress -- under oath -- that doing away with collective bargaining "doesn't save any" money. And the argument that it was a crucial step to solving our routine and scheduled "crisis" died right there.

But that's not the only reason. One factor that got me behind the recall was Walker's bass-ackward economics and his attacks on the working poor to the benefit of the rich.

The Capital Times:

Wisconsin residents with long-term capital gains will enjoy a new break while lower income filers could see less money under changes in 2011 state and federal income tax laws.

The Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance (WISTAX) on Tuesday released its annual income tax guide and has noted a few minor adjustments.

At the state level, the biggest change includes a deferral for certain capital gains reinvested in qualified Wisconsin businesses and an exempting of health savings accounts (HSAs) from state income tax.

Walker's capital gains tax cut means that 30% of all income made from capital gains -- no matter how much that is -- isn't taxable income. Meanwhile, Walker's budget "also eliminates inflation indexing for the Homestead Credit. That program benefits lower-income tax filers." Walker's continuously claimed to address the "budget crisis" without raising taxes -- a claim that is nothing but a flat-out lie. He also cut the Earned Income Tax Credit, raising taxes further on the working poor.

At least the wealthy won't have to struggle to get by though, huh? Walker is literally taking money from the working poor and giving it to the wealthy. And again, this has nothing to do with balancing the budget.

I'm glad today is deadline day, because we can't get rid of this guy soon enough. And the next time you hear about a Wisconsin "budget crisis," go ahead and shrug it off.

-Wisco

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Walker's Legislative Steamroller Not Quite So Formidable Now

2012-01-16T11:14:00.000-06:00

Tomorrow's the big day. After months of signature collection, petitions to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker must be turned in by Tuesday. The call to wrap things up actually came last week, indicating the kind of comfortable buffer petitioners have achieved. There were no urgent pleas to keep signing until the very last second, no big final push, just the message that it was time to fold up shop, to make sure all your petitions are signed and dated, and to turn that paperwork in on time.

Of course, this is the second round of recalls in Wisconsin, sparked by Republican overreach and a union-busting law. The first was toward the end of summer last year, when Democrats took two seats in the state Senate. Republicans, after launching a counter-recall, gained no seats. Democrats had come within one seat of taking the Senate majority, while Republicans had fallen from one seat to three seats from taking a quorum-proof super-majority.

Somehow, this got spun into a win for Republicans. The Democratic goal, after all, had been to take the majority in the Senate. Democrats had gained two seats and lost no ground, Republicans had lost two seats and gained no ground, therefore Republicans had won. "Tonight’s results demonstrate that responsible budgeting measures and job creating policies can prevail over mountains of liberal special interest money from those fighting to maintain the unsustainable status quo," said Chris Jankowski, president of the Republican State Leadership Committee. "This tremendous victory is a significant step toward returning government to the people and protecting the hard-working American family and businessperson. By beating back countless liberal special interest dollars and paid supporters, the strength of responsible Republican ideals is obvious and foreshadows continued Republican victories in 2011, 2012 and beyond."

Only in the bass-ackward mind of a Republican is losing two seats winning. And not just winning, a "tremendous victory." Why, it was a landslide! A few more "victories" like that and there won't be any Republicans in the Senate at all.

And now we see what their "win" has brought them.

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Associated Press:

Republicans who control the Legislature have their sights set on passing just four major bills and little else during the session that begins Tuesday and runs through mid-March.

They insist it's not due to inter-party gridlock, but instead the negative influence of recalls against four Republican senators and the ongoing bitter partisan atmosphere that hinders building coalitions across party lines.

The four bills Republican leaders say they are working to pass would clear the way for an iron ore mine in northern Wisconsin, ease laws related to developing on wetlands and environmental regulation, and create a venture capital fund to assist start-up businesses.

"Republicans last year feared Democrats might take control of the Senate after the recalls and block their proposals. Democrats did pick up two seats, leaving Republicans with a narrow one-vote majority," AP reports. "That slim majority and threat of more recalls leave lawmakers on edge."

"When a legislator is under recall and looking down the barrel of a recall election they're going to be more sensitive," said Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, himself the target of a recall election this time around.

And whether any of this agenda will actually get done is another question entirely. The venture capital fund probably stands the best chance, while the rest may face a rocky road. Of course, the recalls may still turn the Senate over to Democrats, which means that things could change drastically. Even Republicans are acknowledging this.

"Because of the fact that we have four senators under recall and uncertainty that surrounds the Capitol, that will mean that very few bills will pass," state Rep. Robin Vos, the GOP co-chair of the Legislature's budget committee, told the AP.

Previous to the recalls, the GOP was a legislative steamroller, passing bills nearly as quickly as the Governor could sign them. Now, not so much. The steamroller's out of steam. Republicans can't afford any more "wins" like they had last year. If they suffer through another "tremendous victory" like that, they'll be out of business for a while.

-Wisco

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And the Presidential Campaign Goes Straight to Stupid...

2012-01-13T11:58:00.000-06:00

I watched Newt Gingrich's movie on Mitt Romney last night. When Mitt Romney Came to Town may be a stinging indictment of Romney's slash-and-burn style of capitalism, but it's not a very good movie. It's more of an attack ad than a documentary, filled with clichéd negative ad tropes -- slow motion clips, ominous and growly square wave tones, etc. No Oscar buzz here.

Still, the message is pretty clear and pretty accurate; when Romney claims to be a "job creator," he's not being 100% honest. But this is Newt Gingrich, which means there has to be at least one completely insane note in the movie. When I saw that Steve Benen wrote about "oblique xenophobic slights" in the movie, I'd expected to see jobs moving to China or undocumented workers stealing American jobs.

What I saw instead was Mittens speaking French.

And apparently Team Newt thinks that speaking French is a horrible, horrible thing. Because I woke up this morning, turned on the news, and saw this:

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Hating the French seems like a fad of rightwing nutjobbery of a certain vintage -- say, 2001. It doesn't seem to be a big thing today. Newt's hot button issue is a little less hot and a little more dusty than he seems to believe. Still, the ad was cut for South Carolina -- a state with a much larger Tea Party influence than the previous primaries -- so maybe someone, somewhere will be completely outraged at Mittens' francophonic talents.

But really, are we here already? Are we at the point where all the other issues have been completely exhausted and we have to dig up stupid crap to be critical of? The fact that Newt's ad brings up John Kerry's windsurfing forces us to compare it to idiot issues of the past -- and, I hope, makes us all wonder how these idiot issues ever became issues in the first place.

Part of the reason is that the presidential campaign is too long by far. Do we really need an entire year to make up our minds? I don't think so. Idiot issues prove that we run out of reasons to change our votes long before we even get a chance to vote.

I'm going to go ahead and cut Newt some slack, though. The primary in South Carolina is a much shorter campaign than the national one. So, if you want to get your gratuitous, stupid, intolerant, lowest-common-denominator attacks in, you're not going to want to waste a lot of time. Mitt knows how to do something you probably don't -- and that's terrible. For some reason.

And it's not just the candidates who go running to these idiot issues, it's the media as well. I remember John Kerry making a huge campaign "gaffe" by ordering a philly cheeseteak with swiss cheese instead of Cheez Whiz. Why this matters at all is beyond me. It's not like it proved his trade policy wouldn't work -- it was something that just didn't matter at all. Besides, as a Wisconsinite I feel a duty to break the bad news to Philadelphians: Cheez Whiz is a crime. It's awful. Stop doing that or face human rights abuse charges at The Hague.

Can we get some debate of the issues here? Please? Or are we going to more or less instantly go straight to the stupid? Because I'd rather we didn't.

But I know we will.

-Wisco

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The Bain of the GOP's Existence

2012-01-11T12:33:00.000-06:00

The next time someone tells you, "I'm a capitalist," go ahead and answer, "No, you're not." You'd just be playing the odds. A capitalist is defined as "A wealthy person who uses money to invest in trade and industry for profit in accordance with the principles of capitalism." In other words, probably not you or the person you're talking to. "Capitalist" is synonymous with "financier."

Also, notice the term "job creation" isn't anywhere in the definition. People don't invest to create jobs, they invest to make money. In fact, whether any jobs are created by the investment is entirely beside the point. In many cases, jobs are lost. The people Republicans hold up as the high-minded "job creators" not only aren't interested in creating jobs, but they'd really rather not. When you're maximizing profits, you want as few employees as possible. After all, you're in the business of writing your own paycheck, not someone else's.

When it comes to what Republicans call "job creation," they'd rather you didn't see how the sausage is made. Because when you get right down to it, it looks pretty heartless. If hiring someone means you'll make money, you'll hire someone -- and if firing someone means you'll make money, they're out. The "job creators" have been doing one helluva lot more firing than hiring lately, which makes the GOP's favored term for capitalists a lie. After all, one would assume that a "job creator" actually would get around to creating some jobs. Lately, they've been acting as "job destroyers."

Which brings us to a guy named Willard "Mitt" Romney, son of wealth, former vulture capitalist and professional job destroyer. Remember the villain in all those movies -- you know, the ones where there's a hostile takeover and rich corporate-type wants to sell off all the company's assets and fire everyone? Yeah, those movies. That's Mitt Romney, CEO of Bain Capital. He's that guy.

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Even if you're a Republican who worships at the altar of the Free Market, it's hard to look at Romney's past and not see it as a liability. If you're that Republican and you're running against him, it becomes almost impossible not to see a target. And that has his opponents moving to the left of the party. Establishment Republicans are finding themselves at odds with most of their candidates and it's kind of putting them on the spot.

And this in itself is a problem; how do you defend Mitt Romney and Bain Capital without confirming every negative stereotype people have about the GOP and their relationship to the wealthy? If you're conservative spinmeister Frank Luntz, you don't. You change throw up a smokescreen.

Conservatives should not be defending capitalism. They should be defending economic freedom. And there is a difference. The word capitalism was created by Karl Marx to demonize those people who make a profit. We’ve always talked about the free enterprise system or economic freedom. Suddenly, they’re trying to defend something that has only 18 percent support.

The problem here is that "economic freedom" doesn't mean freedom from criticism, any more than freedom of speech means you get to say whatever you want and everyone else gets to shut up about it. And if "economic freedom" means doing what Bain did under Romney, I think the average person would like to see a little less of that particular brand of freedom. After all, you don't become a cookie-cutter movie villain by being widely respected and admired.

My point in all this is a simple one; in order to be more in tune with the average person and criticize Romney and Bain, GOP candidates are running to the left. They can't possibly run to the right with it. The best they'd be able to do is follow Luntz's lead and try to camouflage the issue with pretty words that poll better.

And what does this all prove? That the public is to the left of Republicans on issues of corporate responsibility and business ethics. Most of the candidates know this, that's forcing the GOP establishment to defend Romney, and that in turn putting them in the spotlight. There's a reason why it's mostly private citizens who are rushing to Mitt's defense, not elected Republicans; defending Bain is a Democratic "candidate X is so out of touch" attack ad waiting to happen.

Republican candidates are setting up a narrative that President Obama can carry into the general election. I'm not as convinced of Romney's "inevitability" as everyone else seems to be, but I will agree that the odds are heavily in his favor. What this means is that there will be a continuity of criticism, a bipartisan assault on Romney's past as a movie villain.

Willard has some rough sledding ahead.

-Wisco

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GOP Voters Find Romney as Exciting as a Saltine

2012-01-10T12:09:00.001-06:00

The New Hampshire primaries are today and, if polling is to be believed, Mitt Romney may be looking at a landslide. This is probably fortunate for Team Romney, since it may wipe the taste of a humiliating Iowa squeaker from their mouths. Then again, Mitt's trajectory has been downward in the Granite State in recent days, so it's possible that he may not get his monstrous win. Still, barring a miracle, Romney will win.

While the media have been talking about Romney's "inevitability" as the GOP nominee, the other narrative has been the Republican voters' inability to get behind him. While polls show him winning in New Hampshire, I haven't seen one that has him cracking 50%. If this primary battle is what the media has portrayed it to be -- Romney vs. Not-Romney -- then Not-Romney still has the numbers, if not the candidate. As a result, Mitt Romney's rise seems to be accompanied by a consequence; waning GOP enthusiasm.

Part of the reason for the Iowa squeaker was that evaporating enthusiasm. Where turnout for the caucuses was expected to reach 140,000, 122,000 showed up. Romney won by eight votes, making it the tightest win in caucus history. And the number of registered Iowa Republicans has declined from 21.1 percent in 2008 to 19.9 percent now.

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Nationally, the numbers are no better. A new CBS News poll finds that most GOP voters disapprove of their presidential choices -- and that percentage has increased.

The nominating process may officially be underway, but Republicans have yet to enthusiastically embrace a potential nominee for president - and despite the late date, most would like to see other candidates enter the race, according to a new CBS News poll.

The survey finds that 58 percent of Republican primary voters want more presidential choices, while just 37 percent say they are satisfied with the current field. The percentage of Republican primary voters that wants more choices has increased 12 percentage points since October.

A twelve percent quarterly rise in voter dissatisfaction is nothing to sneeze at. This is not the direction the Republican Party wants to be moving in right now. And it's not just Mitt that's dragging the party's enthusiasm down, it's the clear lack of a Mitt-alternative. This is why voters have been running from candidate to candidate, desperately searching for a Not-Romney who is also a Not-Joke.

They haven't been having a lot of luck. First it was Trump, then Bachmann, then Cain, then Gingrich, now maybe Santorum. As a result, the Not-Romney contingent is scattered and demoralized. How often can candidates let you down before you conclude they're all worthless?

"There is no candidate in the GOP field who more than one third of Republican primary voters say they would enthusiastically support if he were the nominee," CBS reports. "Rick Santorum does best in terms of enthusiasm, with 33 percent saying they would enthusiastically support him. (Roughly one in two say their support for Santorum would either come with reservations or simply result from the fact that he is the GOP nominee.) Santorum is followed by Newt Gingrich, whom 29 percent would enthusiastically support, and Romney, whom 27 percent would enthusiastically support. They're followed by Rick Perry at 17 percent, Ron Paul at 15 percent and Jon Huntsman at 12 percent."

The only bright spot for the GOP in the poll is that it shows Romney beating Obama by two points, mostly the result of Independents swinging Romney's way and within the poll's three-point margin of error. But the caveats here are that it's still very early and that Romney's perceived strong suit -- business and the economy -- is being hammered at by his rivals. Also, that two points means a "whoever wants it more" race -- bad news for a candidate whose voters lack enthusiasm. And Romney voters' enthusiasm is running third, between Newt Gingrich and the miserable, hopeless Rick Perry.

It may be that, in the end, Barack Obama will win reelection by being the final Not-Romney candidate.

-Wisco

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Out of State Money King Scott Walker Complains About Out of State Money in Wisconsin Recall

2012-01-09T12:52:00.001-06:00

The petitioning period for recalling Wisconsin's Governor Scott Walker is winding down. Petitioners have until January 17 to collect over 540,000 signatures and, by all accounts, they'll make it with a few hundred thousand to spare. This is on.

As is so often the case when dealing with a Republican and elections, hypocrisy becomes a problem. They've got a pack full of victim cards and will pounce on any excuse to play one. If it weren't for be constantly offended, outraged, and aggrieved, they wouldn't have anything to talk about. And so it is that Scott Walker has taken to playing a victim card he has no right to hold.

Huffington Post:

As Wisconsin Democrats continued their push to force his recall, Gov. Scott Walker (R) came to Washington on Thursday to raise funds for the election that is all but certain to occur. But while Walker has slammed the influence of out-of-state money in the recall effort, he defended his own fundraising from non-Wisconsinites as fundamentally different from what he called the "excessive amounts" raised by unions and liberal groups.

"The people from around the country who are helping us at the grassroots level are trying to match the amazing levels of money coming in from unions from Washington and throughout the country," said Walker at a question-and-answer event at the American Enterprise Institute on Thursday morning. Walker spoke at AEI before meeting with Republican donors at the Capitol Hill Club later in the day.

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And here comes the hypocrisy: "According to his latest campaign finance report, Walker has raised $5.1 million since the start of the recall effort on November 15th. Nearly half of that amount, $2.4 million, has come from outside of Wisconsin."

"I’ve never seen any candidate — ever — get close to half their money from out of state," said Mike McCabe, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, told the political journalism site Wisconsin Watch. "I used to always be stunned when I saw a candidate for state office with 10 percent coming from out of state."

To be sure, recall supporters are pulling a lot of out of state money too -- also about half of their funding -- but the differences are startling. According to Wisconsin Watch:

The Democrats and United Wisconsin (the two biggest groups in favor of recalling Walker) took in much less money overall than the governor. As a reminder, Walker can take unlimited donations for recall-related expenses, while the Dems need a candidate to start doing that.
Their biggest donors are much smaller than Walker’s biggest donors. That guy in Texas donating $250,000? So far, there’s no Dem equivalent.
They seem to have a much bigger proportion of small donors. It’s hard to say how many, because they’re unitemized (legally) in campaign finance filings.
Anti-Walkerites got a big chunk from out of state, just like Walker. (However, we’d caution that comparing Democratic party contributions to Walker’s receipts isn’t apples-to-apples. [W]e excluded contributions to the party from other political committees — such as county Democratic parties — so we could look at the individual dollars.)

The amount of out-of-state pro-Walker money is staggering. "Five million dollars is more than I’ve ever seen in a single reporting period by a candidate in the history of the state," McCabe said. For their part, state Democrats have raised $3.1 million total, while United Wisconsin -- the main organizer of the recall -- has raised $329,994. Only 10% of United Wisconsin's money is from out of state.

Meanwhile, the big money pours in for Walker.

The largest single contributor to Walker’s campaign was Bob J. Perry, a homebuilder in Houston, Texas, who gave $250,000. Perry is a prominent funder of conservative causes. He gave more than $4 million to Swift Vets and POWs for Truth, a group that helped torpedo 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. In 2010, he gave $7 million to American Crossroads, a Republican campaign fund.

When asked about the out of state money, Walker told the Huffington Post, "[E]ven money that's coming in from outside of Wisconsin in many cases is coming from people giving us 10, 15, 20 dollars, saying, 'We want to help you counter money coming from Washington and elsewhere.'"

Ten, fifteen, twenty, a quarter of a million dollars -- all the same thing really. Just reg'lar folks scraping together what little they can.

If you want to raise buttloads of money from out of state, don't claim you're the victim of buttloads of out of state money -- especially when your buttload is much, much bigger.

Then again, honesty doesn't seem to be a requirement when playing the victim card.

-Wisco

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Scott Walker's Taxpayer-Funded Bailout

2012-01-06T12:56:00.000-06:00

I wouldn't call this a loss for recall supporters, since they aren't really out anything. I'd call this a loss for Wisconsin taxpayers.

Wisconsin State Journal:

A judge ruled Thursday that the state Government Accountability Board needs to take more aggressive action to vet recall signatures that are expected to be submitted in two weeks against Gov. Scott Walker and other Republican office holders.

The ruling by Waukesha County Circuit Judge J. Mac Davis came in a case filed Dec. 15 by Walker's campaign committee and Stephan Thompson, executive director of the state Republican Party, asking Davis to order the accountability board to seek out and eliminate duplicate and fictitious signatures and illegible addresses in recall petitions.

Davis, who refused to enter injunctions in the case, based his decision on his interpretation of state law, more than on equal protection arguments brought up by the Republicans. He also said that the board must take "reasonable" efforts to eliminate such signatures.

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The problem here is that the state now must do the Walker campaign's job for them. GAB director Kevin Kennedy had originally said that it was up to the Walker campaign to challenge signatures, in much the same way it's up to each campaign to challenge votes in a recount. But the Walker campaign whined that they would only have ten days after the petition was signed to check all the signatures and that he'd have to hire temps with the campaign's own money and oh my God it's just a terrible thing...

So now I have to pay for it. So much for saving the taxpayers' money.

"In court, Kennedy testified that entering signatures into a database to look for duplicates could take eight extra weeks for his staff, and could cost $94,000 for software and outside help," the Journal Sentinel reports. At least Walker's finally creating a few jobs.

There's no way that enough signatures will be weeded out to stop the recall. Halfway through the petition process, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin announced that 500,000 signatures had been collected. That was very nearly the 540,208 mark required to trigger a recall and that announcement was made before Christmas. I think the requisite number have probably been collected, but that petitioners will continue to get signatures until the very last day of the period, in order to create a buffer for signatures that are thrown out. If your goal is to collect as many signatures as possible, the last thing you want to do is send out a "We've got enough!" press release. You want to send out the "Almost there! Keep plugging away!" press release the party sent out in December. I'm guessing the December numbers are the last official ones we'll see until the final tally is released.

Long story short, Team Walker knows that the recall is going to happen. And they don't want to spend the campaign's money on challenging signatures. That's just a sort of ritual to stretch out the process and build up a campaign war chest, anyway. These are Republicans and, being Republicans, they're really big on saving the taxpayer's money -- right up until the moment that they're not. $94,000 will now be blown on a timewaster.

And, of course, if Kennedy's right, then it's eight more weeks of fundraising for Walker. We spend money on a doomed effort to save Walker from a recall, so he has more time to rake money in.

Is it any wonder we want to recall this guy?

-Wisco

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Why Won't Santorum be President?

2012-01-05T12:29:00.003-06:00

Shortest post ever: because he's a ridiculous boob.

OK, so maybe not the shortest post ever. That's an accusation that requires a bit of explanation. You see, back in 2006, Rick was in a tough reelection race against Bob Casey. Things weren't going very well -- Santorum would later lose that election in a landslide -- and he needed to pull a rabbit out of his hat. So Santorum teamed up with Rep. Pete Hoekstra to declare that WMD had been found in Iraq.

Fox News:

The United States has found 500 chemical weapons in Iraq since 2003, and more weapons of mass destruction are likely to be uncovered, two Republican lawmakers said Wednesday.

"We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons," Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., said in a quickly called press conference late Wednesday afternoon.

Reading from a declassified portion of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, Santorum said: "Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq's pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist."

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Well there ya go then; George W. Bush was right, those anti-war hippies were wrong, America had saved the world, and Rick Santorum was instrumental in all that. Good thing Rick had the foresight to offer 100%, unquestioning support of the invasion of Iraq, huh?

But there was a problem here -- the word "degraded." Sarin and mustard gas have a shelf life. And, as chemical agents, that shelf life is pretty predictable. In short, the agents couldn't have been fresh when we invaded. Santorum and Hoekstra had nothing.

Here's what stale chemical agents do, again from Fox News, this time from 2004:

A roadside bomb containing sarin nerve agent recently exploded near a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military said Monday.

[...]

Two people were treated for "minor exposure" after the sarin incident but no serious injuries were reported. Soldiers transporting the shell for inspection suffered symptoms consistent with low-level chemical exposure, which is what led to the discovery, a U.S. official told Fox News.

Those symptoms consisted of a headache. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said the shells pre-dated the 1991 Gulf War.

Put Santorum's argument in the proper order here; instead of using this to justify the invasion after the fact, imagine this intelligence being used to justify the invasion itself. We suspect Iraq has a few hundred headache bombs, that means Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and is an "existential threat" to our nation. We absolutely must invade.

Last time I checked, giving a couple of guys a headache and "mass destruction" were two entirely different things.

Not even the Bush administration -- desperate for some justification for a war turned horribly, horribly wrong -- could bring themselves to get behind Santorum and Hoekstra. And no one in the military would back them up either.

Griper Blade:

Santorum got his defeat on home turf -- Fox News. ThinkProgress reports, "Fox News’ Jim Angle contacted the Defense Department who quickly disavowed Santorum and Hoekstra’s claims. A Defense Department official told Angle flatly that the munitions hyped by Santorum and Hoekstra are 'not the WMD’s for which this country went to war.'

Of course, Santorum wouldn't back down. He told Alan Colmes, who'd broke the news that his big revelation was a bunch of horse**it to Santorum, "I’d like to know who that defense dept, spokesperson is. The fact of the matter is, I’ll wait and see what the actual Defense Department formally says or more important what the administration formally says."

As far as I know, the White House never addressed Santorum's claims directly. And Rick dismissed the DoD response that Colmes informed him of. His big "The Iraq War was worth it!" story quickly fizzled, Santorum wound up looking like an even bigger fool than he did before, and went on to lose his reelection bid by over 700,000 votes -- or about 20%. As I said, a landslide.

This is what Santorum looks like when his back is against the wall. Not just a bad liar, but a hopelessly incompetent one. At some point, Rick is going to pull some ridiculous claim out of his pants and remind everyone just how much of a boob he really is.

I'm hoping that happens in the general election, but I doubt he'll make it that far.

-Wisco

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Sweeping Up After Iowa

2012-01-04T12:03:00.000-06:00

I'm tempted to say that the big winner in last night's Iowa caucuses was not-Romney. Newt Gingrich -- the old not-Romney -- got 16,251 votes. Rick Santorum -- the new not-Romney -- pulled in 30,007. Mitt Romney barely won, with 30,015 (we won't include Ron Paul as a not-Romney, because Paul voters were almost certainly voting for Paul, not against Romney). It's probably too simplistic to say that, had there been a single not-Romney, he would've won with by 16,000 or better, but I don't think Mittens would've won. I doubt anyone on Team Romney is feeling extremely triumphant today. The phrase of the day is probably "a win is a win." They're probably right. The Iowa caucuses aren't even representative of Iowa.

A few other observations from around the web:

Michael Li: Wow. Paid media $/vote so far: Santorum $1.65, Bachmann $8, Romney $113.07, Gingrich $139 Paul $227, Perry $817. [Numbers calculated last night with about 80% of the vote in]

Associated Press: Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has won most of the delegates in the Iowa Republican caucuses, edging former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. Romney won a projected 13 delegates and Santorum won 12. Texas Rep. Ron Paul was shut out.

Paul Begala: The Romney-inevitability stories will now be tempered by chin-stroking about the candidate's weakness. He is basically tied with a guy who supports banning contraception and another guy who attacks the 1964 Civil Rights Act. If Mitt Romney can't beat them, he ought to find another party to run in.

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Wonkette headline: "Romney Beats Santorum By Just 0.000002667% of U.S. Population."

Dave Weigel: Four years ago, a depressed GOP went to the precinct caucuses, very well aware that Democrats had all the energy. The total GOP vote: 119,188. This year, Republicans should be psyched about the chance to uproot Barack Obama. There will be something above 122,000 total votes. An improvement, right? Well... in 2008, 86 percent of the people who chose the GOP caucuses were Republicans. This year, 75 percent of the electorate was Republican, with the rest of the vote coming from independents and Democrats. What the hell happened?

John Dickerson: As if to solidify Romney's position as the candidate the base isn't excited about, shortly before the final votes were counted Ben Smith reported that John McCain would endorse Romney. McCain, too, had trouble firing up GOP voters.

Josh Marshall: Going into tonight the idea was that Romney could come in first, second or maybe even third and still ‘win’. There was a decent logic to that. But as I hear the conventional wisdom taking shape, the result in practice (which could still quite likely be a numerical victory for Romney) seems considerably worse for Romney than one might have expected. It feels like a significant setback. In the big picture, still very hard to see how someone else gets the nomination. But a tie for first, which seemed like it would be still pretty good for Romney, doesn’t look so good in the event.

Steve Benen: Time will tell where Bachmann’s remaining supporters go, but it’s unlikely they’ll gravitate towards Mitt Romney. Indeed, the fact that the GOP field is shrinking at all is not what Romney wants to see. As we discussed earlier, because the former governor’s support in his party is so limited, Romney benefits greatly from as large a field as possible — the more the anti-Romney vote is divided among many candidates, the easier it is for him.

Right Wing Watch headline: "Religious Right Leaders to Meet and Plot Strategy on How to Stop Romney."

***
Not sure what to add after all that, other than to say I'm less inclined to think the Iowa caucuses were meaningless than I was before. If there had been a clear winner, I think I'd feel safer in making that assertion. But given that it was basically a tie, I think the least we can take out of it is that the search for a viable not-Romney is still on and the GOP primary is very much in flux.

-Wisco

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Iowa Caucuses Aren't Even Representative of Iowans, Let Alone the Nation

2012-01-03T12:12:00.000-06:00

`What IS a Caucus-race?' said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that SOMEBODY ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.

`Why,' said the Dodo, `the best way to explain it is to do it.' (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)

First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (`the exact shape doesn't matter,' it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no `One, two, three, and away,' but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out `The race is over!' and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, `But who has won?'
-Lewis Carrol, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, "A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale"

Yesterday, a mini-tempest in a micro-teapot came up over something NBC's Andrea Mitchell said in regard to the Iowa caucuses. "The rap on Iowa: It doesn’t represent the rest of the country, too white, too evangelical, too rural," she said. It is, apparently, a terrible thing to make a demographic observation that is true and wingnut bloggers responded to it with their usual "Help, I'm being oppressed!" histrionics.

But the fact of the matter is that the caucuses are barely even representative of Iowans, let alone the rest of the nation.

Politico:

The 2012 Republican presidential caucuses begin at 7:00 p.m. on Jan. 3. Iowa Republicans who wish to participate may locate their caucus site using the Iowa Secretary of State’s poll location tool. Republican caucuses for the state’s 1,774 precincts occur in public buildings, schools and homes, and some precincts share caucus space with other precincts. Every precinct in Adair County, for example, will caucus at Greenfield’s Nodaway Valley High School next Tuesday night.

So, if you can't blow an hour of your night precisely at 7:00, you're out of luck. If you want to vote absentee, you're out of luck. And then things get even dumber:

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Wikipedia:

In the Republican caucuses, each voter officially casts his or her vote by secret ballot. Voters are presented blank sheets of paper with no candidate names on them. After listening to some campaigning for each candidate by caucus participants, they write their choices down and the Republican Party of Iowa tabulates the results at each precinct and transmits them to the media. In 2008, some precincts used a show of hands or preprinted ballots. The non-binding results are tabulated and reported to the state party, which releases the results to the media. Delegates from the precinct caucuses go on to the county conventions, which choose delegates to the district conventions, which in turn selects delegates to the Iowa State Convention. Thus, it is the Republican Iowa State Convention, not the precinct caucuses, which selects the ultimate delegates from Iowa to the Republican National Convention. All delegates are officially unbound from the results of the precinct caucus, although media organizations either estimate delegate numbers by estimating county convention results or simply divide them proportionally.

Is each precinct winner-take-all? You got me. I can't find a direct answer to that anywhere, but it seems to be the case. Not that it matters any -- the delegates aren't bound by the will of the voter. The caucuses are at their heart an arcane, non-binding advisory referendum. Think of the electoral college, only worse.

The idea that this could represent the opinion of the average Iowa Republican is more than a little suspect. Troops overseas or even stationed in a different state are out. Elderly and disabled voters who can't make to the caucus location are out. People who find the hour inconvenient are out. And the voters are few and ideologically skewed.

Ezra Klein:

...The momentum coming out of the caucus can cement Romney as the nominee or vault another contender to the nomination. But let's all take a deep breath and agree that that is completely insane.

In 2008, the Iowa Republican Caucus got record turnout: 120,000 people. That is to say, four percent of all the residents of Iowa. And those 120,000 people represent four hundredths of one percent of the total population of America.

And it's not a representative four hundredths of one percent of the American people. It's not a representative four percent of Iowans. It's not even a representative four percent of Iowa Republicans. The likely caucusgoers are further to the right than the average Iowa Republican.

Whoever comes out on top tonight will likely say that the "Iowan people have spoken." It won't be true.

-Wisco

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Republicans vs. Reality

2011-12-21T12:09:00.000-06:00

A lot is being made of a Wall Street Journal editorial out today that points out the obvious: House Republicans have completely screwed up the payroll tax cut extension. While it's nice to see the WSJ momentarily dip their toes in reality, they can't seem to bring themselves to go for full immersion. The editorial is crawling with half-truths and unfounded assumptions. In other words, it was obviously written by the Wall Street Journal editorial board. Still, when a rightwing propaganda outlet attacks the right wing, it's at least interesting to watch.

But has it set the GOP back on the right course? Not exactly. And by "not exactly," I mean "exactly not."

In a report on the whole fiasco, The Hill shares this tidbit:

House Republicans... think it is Democrats who will be blamed for not working with the GOP on a deal to extend the break for a year. In their talking points Tuesday, they emphasized that a conference committee was the normal process for resolving differences between the two chambers.

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Why do they believe they're winning this? Because they're Republicans, of course; they only believe things that make them comfortable, back up their prejudices, or confirm their ideology. "Damn the facts, full speed ahead," could be the GOP motto. And this time, they've got a full head of steam and a heading in the wrong direction. President Obama's approvals are climbing, while the Republican Party's are falling.

"President Barack Obama's approval rating appears to be fueled by dramatic gains among middle-income Americans," explains CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "The data suggest that the debate over the payroll tax is helping Obama's efforts to portray himself as the defender of the middle class." In CNN's poll, the president's approval has risen five points to 49%, the highest since a bounce after the death of Osama Bin Laden.

Obama's gains have come at the expense of the Republicans in Congress and the GOP in general. By a 50% to 31% margin, people questioned say they have more confidence in the president than in congressional Republicans to handle the major issues facing the country. Obama held a much narrower 44% to 39% margin in March.

And the GOP's overall favorable rating has dropped to six points, to 43%, since June, while the Democrats' positive rating remained steady at 55%.

"The Democrats do particularly well among middle income Americans, while the Republicans win support only from the top end of the income scale," adds Holland.

It may well be that Republican disdain for reality has finally come back to bite them. They're like Charlie Sheen, who was convinced he was "winning" while it was obvious to everyone that this was delusion. While House Republicans see themselves as "Braveheart," everyone else sees them as clowns. Reality has a liberal bias and, in this instance, that bias is harsh.

No wonder outlets like the Wall Street Journal's editorial page use reality only sparingly.

-Wisco

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GOP's Economic Sabotage Backfiring

2011-12-20T12:01:00.000-06:00

I want you to try -- really try -- to see the following statement as rational or logical; "A payroll tax cut extension is too important for stimulating the economy to be allowed to expire after just two months. Therefore, we need to pass a year-long extension or nothing."

OK, if you got that to make any damned sense, let me know how you did it. Because I can't get it to work at all. If an extension of the payroll tax cut is so important that it absolutely must last for a year, in what insane universe does it make sense that no extension at all is preferable to a mere two months? Further, what's preventing you from coming back in two months and demanding an extension for the remaining ten? I take this argument and I turn it over and bend it and twist it and smack it with a hammer and I just can't get it to fit within any system of logic or rationality that I know of.

As a result, I'm forced to conclude that it's stupid. Those are the rules, I don't make them up. An argument that makes no damned sense at all is just a stupid argument.

And this stupid argument is the basis for the latest roadblock thrown up by House Republicans; It's a super-important, must-pass tax cut that they love so damned much that they're willing to kill it unless it's born perfect.

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If you buy that, you're a fool. And it may be that a lot of people aren't fools.

Last month, a poll made some minor press ripples. The survey was of Florida voters and was the first -- and, as far as I know, the last -- to include a very important question; "Do you think the Republicans are intentionally stalling efforts to jumpstart the economy to insure that Barack Obama is not reelected?"

49% said yes and 39% said no. And the only thing dragging the yeses below the 50% mark were Republican voters throwing the curve. Only 24% of GOP voters believed this -- which is still a lot -- compared to 70% of Democrats and 52% of indies. So the non-Republican consensus in Florida was that, yes, the GOP is deliberately throwing the game.

"To be sure, this wasn’t a national poll; it only asked voters in one state," wrote Steven Benen at the time. "But it's a large, diverse swing state that both parties take very seriously."

In that light, the GOP's payroll tax cut extension argument begins to make a little more sense. Not the argument itself, which is still logical hamburger, but the existence of the argument; it's a poorly thought-out, last minute rationalization to explain a move designed to harm the economy. The problem is that, as a poorly thought-out, last minute rationalization, not a lot of people are buying it.

Washington Post (emphasis mine):

Obama’s job-approval rating [in Washington Post-ABC News polling] is now at its highest since March, excluding a temporary bump after the killing of Osama bin Laden: Forty-nine percent approve, and 47 percent disapprove.

Perhaps more important to the battle over the payroll tax cut, Obama has regained an advantage over Republicans in Congress when it comes to “protecting the middle class.” In the new poll, 50 percent say they trust Obama on this issue, compared with 35 percent who choose the GOP -- a major change from last month, when the two sides were more evenly matched on the question.

On taxes, Obama has improved since early October, while public trust of the GOP has slipped. Forty-six percent now side with Obama on the issue, and 41 percent with Republicans in Congress. Independents now side with the president on that front by a 17-point margin, 49 to 32 percent.

In short, the GOP's economic sabotage is beginning to backfire. And in a big way. The GOP has gone from evenly matched to a fifteen-percent deficit in public trust to protect the middle class -- in a month. The phrase you're looking for here is "precipitous decline." A poorly thought-out, last minute rationalization isn't going to cut it. At this point, their economic sabotage is as transparent as glass.

It's time for the GOP to abandon economic sabotage. It's not working as a political strategy, which makes it pointless. It really shouldn't need saying, but the people who love to wrap themselves in the flag don't get to go out of their way to actually harm America -- especially when there's no advantage in it to anyone.

-Wisco

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The Church of the 'Free Market'

2011-12-19T11:54:00.000-06:00

Jeb Bush has released a religious tract. It's disguised as an op-ed on economics in the Wall Street Journal, but it's a religious tract.

Congressman Paul Ryan recently coined a smart phrase to describe the core concept of economic freedom: "The right to rise."

Think about it. We talk about the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to assembly. The right to rise doesn't seem like something we should have to protect.

But we do. We have to make it easier for people to do the things that allow them to rise. We have to let them compete. We need to let people fight for business. We need to let people take risks. We need to let people fail. We need to let people suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And we need to let people enjoy the fruits of good decisions, even good luck.

In what way is this a religious tract? Because the argument is backed up only by the strength of Bush's belief. It's a nearly fact-free piece -- the only number he brings up is the population of the United States. He proves nothing, his conclusions are apparently drawn from thin air, his arguments are tired.

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Bush makes the case for unregulated capitalism or, as it's dishonestly known among conservatives, the "free market." A market that allows for monopolism and strangles competition can't honestly be described as "free," but Jeb -- like the rest of his party -- is bent on confusing market anarchy and freedom.

The problem, as Bush puts it, is that every time there's some problem, government thinks it's their job to fix it. This is apparently a terrible thing.

"Increasingly, we have let our elected officials abridge our own economic freedoms through the annual passage of thousands of laws and their associated regulations," he writes. "We see human tragedy and we demand a regulation to prevent it. We see a criminal fraud and we demand more laws. We see an industry dying and we demand it be saved. Each time, we demand 'Do something . . . anything.'"

Yes, it's a terrible thing for government to work to prevent future "human tragedies." Three Mile Island, Love Canal, and asbestos in schools should've just been bumps in the road. Instead, the government went ahead and tried to prevent similar future incidents, which is a terrible, terrible abridgement of freedom.

Why is it an abridgment of freedom? I have to confess, you've got me there. Because Jeb Bush says so, I guess. As I said, he doesn't actually cite any facts or figures, so we just have to make a leap of faith with him. We need the "freedom to rise," which is somehow protected by a regulatory and tax structure that's responsible for income inequality that's been growing since Reagan started the ball rolling back in the eighties. It's weird, but looking at that chart, I'm seeing the "right to rise" being enjoyed by the top 5%, and 95% of Americans falling -- and only the top 1% actually rising dramatically.

But there I go citing facts. Facts have no place in a religious conversation and Jeb Bush is definitely preaching the Free Market Gospel.

"[W]e can return to the road we once knew and which has served us well," he writes, "a road where individuals acting freely and with little restraint are able to pursue fortune and prosperity as they see fit, a road where the government's role is not to shape the marketplace but to help prepare its citizens to prosper from it."

When was that exactly? Looking back, I see a nation that's always regulated business -- even back to its founding. When was this free market golden age? Then again, I keep forgetting that this is a religious argument. Bush's Golden Era of Unregulated Capitalism is a myth -- a myth that stands at the core of the Republican Party. There's a yearning for a time than never actually existed on the right, when hard work paid off and made you wealthy, instead of trapped within the class you were born into. Sure, there have been a few people who've managed to rise out of humble births and become fabulously wealthy, but they're so few that they're the exceptions that prove the rule. The stories of success are the ones that get told. The millions upon millions upon millions of stories of people spinning their wheels and getting nowhere are almost never told -- the ordinary is uninteresting.

America will be a lot better off if we ignore the fundamentalists ramblings of religious zealots like Jeb Bush. We have separation of church and state, maybe it's time to consider a separation of church and market.

-Wisco

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GOP Candidates Unified in Their Love for Failed Economic Policies

2011-12-15T12:28:00.000-06:00

A National Review editorial is making some news today, mostly because it pleads with GOP voters to not to support Newt Gingrich. The magazine is still seen as representing the intellectual arm of the Republican Party -- despite the fact that it now features dim bulbs like Jonah Goldberg, Kathryn Jean Lopez, and Rich Lowry -- so there's some news value here. But the same now-undeserved reputation for braininess is why most conservatives won't pay any attention to it. After years of attacking "ivory tower intellectuals," they've managed to get the base to stop listening to them. Nice work, guys. Congrats on your success.

But it's not the anti-endorsement of Newt Gingrich that caught my eye. It was the concise description (in the form of praise) of just about everything that's wrong with the Republican candidates and the party in general.

A hard-fought presidential primary campaign is obscuring the uncharacteristic degree of unity within the Republican party. It has reached a conservative consensus on most of the pressing issues of the day. All of the leading candidates, and almost all of the lagging ones, support the right to life. All of them favor the repeal of Obamacare. Most of them support reforms to restrain the growth of entitlement spending. All of them favor reducing the corporate tax rate to levels that will make the U.S. a competitive location for investment. Almost all of them seem to understand the dangers of a precipitate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, and of a defense policy driven by the need to protect social spending rather than the national interest. Conservatives may disagree among themselves about which candidate most deserves support, but all of us should take heart in this development -- and none of us should exaggerate the programmatic differences within the field.

I especially like the part about "a defense policy driven by the need to protect social spending rather than the national interest," as if social needs aren't in the national interest -- at least, not like the buying super-important fighter jets we never use. Blowing people up on the other side of the world -- that's in the national interest. Making sure kids at home have enough to eat? That's waste.

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So, what have all these years of good old, common sense, conservative Reagonomics gotten us? Not anything good.

Associated Press:

Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.

The latest census data depict a middle class that's shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government's safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.

"Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses, they are considered too 'rich' to qualify," said Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.

"The reality is that prospects for the poor and the near poor are dismal," he said. "If Congress and the states make further cuts, we can expect the number of poor and low-income families to rise for the next several years."

Cut this, cut that, cut this thing over here. Pretty soon, you've got middle class taxpayers paying in to Washington and not getting anything in return. Tax credits, tax cuts, subsidies, and other government largesse are reserved solely for the "job creators" -- who are conspicuously absent in the job-creating field. Cut spending, lay off government employees, increase unemployment, and the golden shower of wealth will come trickling down from on high. Decades after Ronald Reagan promised this would all pay off, it hasn't. But just you wait. This time for sure. If the rising tide isn't lifting all boats, you're just not bailing fast enough.

And the most depressing part of all this is that organizations like the National Review thinks this is great. All the Republicans agree that we should keep committing this massive redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the rich -- to the point that half of America is in poverty -- and that's a wonderful thing. They should be congratulated, because the American Dream is about taking food out of kids' mouths and giving it to people who've never missed a damned meal in their lives.

Thanks, National Review, for pointing out that all the Republicans are on board with this robbery. And don't worry, I'll take your advice, I won't vote for Newt Gingrich.

Or any of the other bass-ackward Robin Hoods the GOP has running.

-Wisco

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DNC to Tea Party; 'Please Vote for Newt!'

2011-12-14T12:06:00.001-06:00

After the last GOP debate, the Democratic National Committee released this web ad calling Newt Gingrich "the original Tea Partier." In it, he says a lot of things that would concern liberals, but not much that would bother conservatives. In fact, many in the rightwing blogosphere took the ad as a pathetic attempt to smear Gingrich for being correct. "[T]he fact that anyone would want to limit government spending horrifies democrats," wrote the perpetually-wrong Jim Hoft.

That Gingrich is an awful person is not something lefties need to be convinced of. A Gingrich presidency would make George W. Bush's terms look like a smashing success story, as an imperious egomaniac formed policy based on perceived personal slights and formed positions that respond to petty grievances. He would be a disaster and every liberal and Democrat knows it. The ad is clearly not aimed at the Democratic base.

And it's not aimed at the general electorate, either. For the most part, people do have a poor opinion of the Tea Party. But I don't think it's poor enough to be a handicap at the ballot box.

No, the ad is -- in my opinion -- a thinly disguised pro-Gingrich ad aimed at the 'baggers.

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Washington Post, Nov. 29:

In surging to the top in the race for the Republican nomination, recent polls find Newt Gingrich has built a coalition of three high-turnout groups: older Republicans, tea party supporters and conservatives.

[...]

Tea party supporters swung strongly to Gingrich, from 11 percent in October to 31 percent in November, while Romney held steady at 19 percent. Conservatives show an identical swing, from 10 to 30 percent, in CNN polls from October to November.

"Tea party supporters accounted for two in three Republican voters in the 2010 midterm elections," the report continues. "And while the movement has lost support since then, tea partiers continue to make up a substantial and highly engaged segment of the Republican electorate."

Now, consider an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll out today:

Romney faces a challenge with the Republican primary electorate, trailing Gingrich nationally by 17 percentage points as nearly two-thirds of Republicans view him as either liberal or moderate.

Gingrich, meanwhile, faces a challenge with the general electorate, as half of all voters say they wouldn’t vote for him in November, and as he trails President Barack Obama by more than 10 percentage points in a hypothetical contest -- compared with Romney’s two-point deficit versus the Democratic incumbent.

I think it's important to make the distinction; 50% of voters aren't saying they'd vote for Obama, they're saying they would not vote for Gingrich. As I always say, it's easier to get people to vote against someone than for someone -- and half the electorate is already predisposed to voting against Gingrich.

It's clear that Team Obama would rather face Gingrich than Romney in the general election. He may beat both in every poll, but the difference between the president and Mitt is always around 2% -- way too close for comfort. So what Democrats need to do is encourage conservatives to nominate Gingrich, while avoiding building him up in the eyes of everyone else. In short, a message that all but says, "Hey Tea Partiers, vote for Newt!"

You're looking at it.

-Wisco

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GOP's Own Data Proves Voter ID Laws are About Suppressing the Vote

2011-12-13T12:17:00.000-06:00

For years, the right has argued that the United States is a republic, not a democracy. The argument is deeply flawed, in that it's an "apples exclude oranges" statement. A republic is a structure, democracy is a system. To say that one rules out the other is like saying a grilled cheese sandwich is not grilled, but a sandwich. The United States is a constitutional republic that uses the system of democracy. To say anything else is simply to lie. We vote people into office, who in turn become professional voters. There's democracy all over the damned place.

I'd always assumed that Republicans made this argument as a matter of simple rhetorical dishonesty; Democrat = democracy, Republican = republic. If the United States was founded as a republic only, Republicans -- by virtue of their party's name -- could convince the weak-minded and logic-challenged that Republicans were closer to the founders' original vision. Not the best or most rational argument, but -- let's face it -- the GOP doesn't waste a lot of time on outreach to brainiacs. Think back to the Tea Party protests for examples of the deep thinkers the party attracts.

But there's a darker reason for the argument; Republicans aren't big fans of democracy. Here's the co-founder of the rightwing Heritage Institute and the Moral Majority, the late Paul Weyrich:

Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome -- good government. They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.

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For Republicans, voting is only good when the right people vote -- and if you can discourage the wrong people from voting, that's great. If you can actually prevent the wrong people from voting, that's even better. Is that democracy? No, it's not -- which explains why the GOP is big on this republic argument.

And Republicans are currently waging a War on Democracy, in the form of restrictive voter ID laws. According to their arguments, voter fraud is rampant across the nation and must be dealt with. As a result, laws are passed that -- merely coincidentally, mind you -- make it more difficult for minorities, the poor, seniors, and students to vote. All blocks that tend to vote Democratic or oppose GOP policies.

After getting some pushback from voters and in the media, the Republican Party apparently felt they were in a "put up or shut up" situation. They had to prove that voter fraud was a massive problem, so the Republican National Lawyers Association collected data from 2000-2010 showing election fraud in 46 states (apparently, there were no instances of fraud in four states). The problem; if this was a "put up or shut up" situation, they would've been much better off choosing "shut up."

Debbie Hines, Huffington Post:

Viewing the data for the period 2000-2010, the report by its own account shows there is no link between voter fraud in states and the need for stricter voter ID laws. The data shows that during the entire 10 year period, 21 states had only 1 or 2 convictions for some form of voter irregularity. And some of these 21 states have the strictest form of voter ID laws based on a finding of 2 or less convictions in ten years. Five states had a total of three convictions over a ten year period. Rhode Island had 4 convictions for the same 10 years. Taking a close look at the RNLA data shows 30 states, including the District of Columbia had 3 or less voter fraud convictions for a 10 year period.

Voter ID laws enacted now in over half the states, require voters to present some form of identification as a requirement to vote. Fourteen states require a government issued photo ID when voting in person. At the time of registering to vote, other states like Kansas and Alabama further demand proof of citizenship beyond the federal legal requirement that citizens swear they are citizens. Kansas had one conviction for voter fraud in ten years; Alabama had three convictions in the same time period. During the 2011 legislative session, five states -- Wisconsin, Texas, Tennessee, Alabama and South Carolina -- joined Georgia and Indiana by enacting the strictest form of photo ID requirement for voters, and most of these newest changes will first come into effect for the 2012 elections.

As thin as the data is, it's padded. Included are incidents of election fraud (vote buying and ballot tampering, for example) that voter ID would do nothing to prevent. In trying to provide evidence to bolster their claims of widespread voter fraud, they've only managed to prove just how trivial a problem it actually is. In fact, even if all these instances had happened in the same year, rather than over a decade, there just wouldn't be enough of them to change the outcome of an election. Taken as they are -- ten years of data -- they show numbers so tiny that rounding errors and miscounts would be more consequential. In short, they've proved conclusively that voter fraud is not a problem.

But, then again, voter fraud isn't the problem they're trying to solve. People who aren't likely to vote Republican is the problem they're trying to solve. If you doubt that, show me the election that would've had a different outcome without voter fraud.

Republicans have cured themselves of Weyrich's "goo-goo syndrome." Now they're trying to cure the nation. We may be a republic that uses the system of democracy now, but they're working on fixing that problem.

-Wisco

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Fox Unable to Fathom How GOP Screwed Themselves

2011-12-12T12:13:00.000-06:00

Thursday, a Fox News poll showed that the public believes -- by an extremely wide margin -- that Pres. Barack Obama would probably be reelected. The video above is the reaction from the hosts of Fox's morning lobotomy patient show, Fox & Friends. As you can see, they're not taking it well. You expect Gretchen Carlson to look at the camera and ask, "We've been telling you Obama is pure evil! Haven't you people been listening to us?!?"

To be fair, the results aren't anything approaching reality, numbers-wise. The same poll shows the president winning, but that "Obama edges Romney by only 1 point and Gingrich by 5 points." So not by a comfortable margin by any means. In fact, you could call it a statistical dead heat in the Obama/Romney matchup. Still, in a non-numerical sense, the perception of that 44% who say that Obama will win is accurate within the poll, which does in fact show that Obama would win. Fox and Friends were freaking out that the largest percentage agreed with the findings of their poll.

What we see here again is what I've come to call the "clown show effect." While an endless series of GOP debates has amounted to free advertising for Republican candidates, that advertising hasn't been extremely positive. And, of course, Herman Cain's flameout didn't help any.

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In fact, The Hill reports that the "political winds have shifted to the Democrats’ backs over the last month."

President Obama is in better shape at the prospect of a prolonged GOP primary battle between former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and Mitt Romney. Democrats in the House have been buoyed by a series of court decisions on redistricting and Senate Democrats have recently landed potentially strong recruits in conservative-leaning states.

Democrats on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue have seized on the payroll tax extension, which has divided the GOP.

Voter angst at Washington is extremely high, though it is unclear which party will feel the most of the public’s wrath next November.

"The political atmosphere is clearly volatile," the report continues. "A couple months ago, Republicans were optimistic that they had a good chance of running the White House and both chambers of Congress in January, 2013. But since then, that optimism has waned."

Another part of the problem for the GOP is their commitment to continuing to be politically tone deaf. Despite the fact that Rep. Paul Ryan's Medicare-slaying plan was extremely unpopular with voters, Republicans keep going back to it as if it were the most popular idea in history. In trying to out-conservative Newt Gingrich for example, Mitt Romney's taken to waving the Ryan plan around like a flag. And the entire party is opposed to the wealthy paying their fair share in taxes, which voters poll after poll say they want.

The problem for Republicans is that they looked at Obama's poll numbers and assumed they had a gimme. No matter what they did, they reasoned, Obama was going to lose. So they might as well do whatever they wanted. Sensing easy prey, nutjobs like Cain and Bachmann and Santorum and Perry crawled out of the woodwork, figuring this was their big chance -- the election where a Republican couldn't possibly lose -- and proceeded to pollute the debate with idiocy, hate, and flim-flammery. The feeding frenzy quickly devolved into a three-ring circus, with a clown act in every ring.

And, of course, this all forced the candidates to try to outcrazy each other. The GOP base, finally tired of the original model, is looking for their next Sarah Palin. So each candidate is trying to fill that void by being as divorced from reality as they can possibly be. Pandering to the Tea Party doesn't help with general election voters, either.

Looking back, it all seems a little predictable, like this was what had to happen, given the circumstances. The only thing I find surprising about all this is the shock displayed at rightwing sideshows like Fox and Friends.

-Wisco

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GOP Flateartherism Strikes Again

2011-12-09T12:49:00.000-06:00

At this point, I have to ask, what do Republicans have against demand? I get that they like this pie-in-the-sky supply-side stuff, but it's "supply and demand," not "supply or demand." At every turn, Republican economic policies have consumers reducing spending, as if a stagnant economy and slow to non-existent growth is the best thing ever.

Case in point:

The Hill:

GOP leaders hope to build momentum for an end-of-year tax package with sweeping reforms to federal unemployment benefits.

The Republican proposal is expected to reduce the total number of weeks unemployed workers are eligible for aid by as much as 40 weeks and tighten rules for eligibility.

Such a reduction would significantly reduce the cost of extending federal unemployment benefits, making it easier to secure GOP support for a measure that will also include an extension of a payroll tax cut many conservative Republicans dislike.

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Can I just go ahead and say that this is stupid beyond words? Employment benefits are an economic stimulus that not only kicks in automatically, but automatically ramps up when the economy is bad and dials back when the economy improves. I don't know what it is about "the economy is people spending money" that Republicans don't get. Unemployed people spend money. Why? Because they have to. As much as the GOP likes to pretend that unemployment benefits are a lavish free ride, they represent as significant reduction in income. People collecting benefits aren't wasting that money on frivolous stuff, they're trying to figure out how to get it to cover their expenses. As a result, they spend all of it.

And with long-term unemployment a major problem, Republicans want to reduce the number of weeks a person can collect benefits? Are you kidding me? As I said before, this is stupid beyond words. What Republicans are proposing is crippling the economy in one place to pay for fixing it in another -- i.e., a sort of shifting status quo, where the problems of one sector are sloughed off on another, resulting in no net improvement. Want a payroll tax cut extension to boost consumer spending? Fine, then we have to cut unemployment benefits and reduce consumer spending there.

It's like they don't even understand the basic problem at all. The Republican War on Math marches forward.

Of course, the GOP had earlier defeated a measure that would've set up a "millionaires surtax" to pay for the extension. But we've got to protect the wealthy, because they're saving and not spending. Yeah, it doesn't make any damned sense, but really, do you even expect it to at this point?

And how do millionaires feel about the surtax?

National Public Radio:

[W]e put a query on Facebook. And several business owners who said they would be affected by the "millionaires surtax" responded.

"It's not in the top 20 things that we think about when we're making a business hire," said Ian Yankwitt, who owns Tortoise Investment Management.

[...]

He says his ultimate marginal tax rate "didn't even make it on the agenda."

And that was the consensus; a surtax wouldn't make any difference to the respondents.

See -- and I know this is hard for Republicans to get their heads around -- people go into business to make money. And here's the tricky part; if no one's spending money, they don't make money. You can give them the biggest tax cut in the world, but if their income is down, they'll make less money. It's weird, I know. But that's math for you. It just hates GOP economics.

Worse, people don't hire people just for the hell of it and because they can afford it. They hire people because they need them. No tax cut is going to make someone need an employee -- consumer demand will. And the reverse is true; if they can't afford a worker anymore, they'll lay them off. Why wouldn't they be able to afford to keep the job open? I don't know, maybe because some boneheaded Republicans cut unemployment benefits and now a whole bunch of people aren't spending money anymore. Things like that. As I said, math hates Republicans.

The Earth is not flat and the laws of supply and demand have not been repealed. I know that may be hard for Republicans to accept, but that's just the way things are.

-Wisco

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GOP Enthusiasm and The Clown Show Effect

2011-12-08T12:26:00.000-06:00

When I look at polling, I tend to use myself as a model. I look at the question and think about how I'd answer it. Maybe that's not the best way to go about it. I suppose I'm not always the average voter.

For example, take voter enthusiasm polls. For myself, enthusiasm is pretty much irrelevant. I go out and vote regardless of how stoked I am about it in any particular cycle. Using myself as a model, voter enthusiasm would be a meaningless stat. But other people apparently react differently to their own enthusiasm. The polls really do seem to reflect the final turnout.

Which is why a new Gallup poll must have Republicans feeling a little uneasy. When respondents were asked, "Thinking ahead to the election for president next year, compared to previous elections, are you more enthusiastic than usual, or less enthusiastic?" 49% of "Republicans and independents who lean Republican" reported being more enthusiastic. This compares well with the 44% of Democrats and dem leaners who say the same.

And it's at this point that the good news ends for the GOP. Their enthusiasm has dropped nearly 10% from September, when it was at 58%. Call it the "clown show effect."

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Gallup:

Republicans' enthusiasm about voting has dropped and, as a result, the enthusiasm gap between Republicans and Democrats has narrowed significantly. This marks a change from the decided enthusiasm advantage Republicans enjoyed just two months ago and in last year's midterm elections.

The decrease in Republicans' enthusiasm could reflect the intensive and bruising battle for the GOP nomination going on within the party, and the rapid rise and fall of various candidates in the esteem of rank-and-file Republicans nationwide. Once the Republican nominee is determined next year, Republicans' voting enthusiasm may steady, but whether this is at a high, medium, or low level remains to be seen.

So this may be the low point, after which it rises again. But if Gallup is right and this is the result of candidate skirmishing and the embarrassing spectacle of candidates like Herman Cain, then that seems unlikely.

Gingrich is a disaster waiting to happen. So far, the press has gone relatively easy on his past and Newt's benefited from that. But once people start doing oppo-research, they won't have a lot of trouble digging up dirt. In fact, "digging" is probably the wrong word -- it's all so public that "fetching" is probably better. Want the juicy details? Just go to Wikipedia.

And then there's Mitt Romney. Romney may not be the ethics nightmare that Gingrich embodies, but it's pretty clear that he's Republican voters' Plan B. They intensely dislike his finger-in-the-wind approach to politics and policy and don't trust him -- perhaps rightly -- to remain as conservative as he pretends to be. Romney's like that weird, space-saving spare tire -- not a good fit, unreliable, but when you need it you'll use it. It'll get you were you need to go, but you don't want to ride on it forever. If he gets to the White House, Republicans will wind up riding on that tire for four years until they get a chance to replace it.

These are most likely the two biggest contenders for nominee -- a train wreck and a flip-flopper. Who's left in the not-Romney category who hasn't already been cycled out? Rick Santorum, who's just plain mean, and Jon Huntsman, who's the sort of politician that Republicans fear Romney secretly to be. Ron Paul? I just don't see it. Legalizing drugs and prostitution alone counts him out, as does cutting aid to Israel.

The impression that Republicans have a weak field this cycle is entirely accurate. There's no one to get excited about here. Republican voters seem to have spent a lot of enthusiasm energy on Herman Cain, who was a doomed candidate even before we found out he was a serial sexual harasser and an adulterer. He was obviously unprepared and unserious.

Frankly, I don't see GOP enthusiasm improving much as time goes on. I could be wrong -- predictions have a bad habit of coming back and biting you from behind. But right now, things look pretty downward-oriented for the GOP. Meanwhile, Democrats have a chance to get economic populism behind them -- and they're taking it. They seem to be taking GOP talking points by the horns, giving Democratic voters something to fight. Want to get voters to the polls? Give them something to be against. Some voters will always hold their noses and vote for more of the same, but more will vote against something with relish.

We'll see how things pan out in the long run, but at the moment, things seem to be turning Democrats' way.

-Wisco

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