Crooks and Liars

Open Thread

Bluegal aka Fran — Fri, 25 May 2012 03:30:00 +0000

Don't take the Bible too literally, except when it comes to teh geyz? Those Christianists don't speak for me.

Open thread below....

C&L's Late Night Music Club With Bob Dylan & George Harrison

Jared Shade Reynolds — Fri, 25 May 2012 03:00:12 +0000

Title: If Not For You

Artist: Bob Dylan & George Harrison

Happy birthday Bob Dylan!

If Not For You
	Price: $0.99 (As of 05/24/12 06:41 pm details)

Myth McConnell

Jon Perr — Fri, 25 May 2012 02:01:26 +0000

In the wake of the debt-ceiling crisis he helped manufacture last summer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell boasted it was "a hostage that's worth ransoming" which "also is a new template" for the future. As it turns out, those threats were among the few true words McConnell has uttered. Because while he's promising once again to blackmail the White House over the debt ceiling, the Kentucky Republican claimed it's because "we'd like to do something about the nation's biggest problem, spending and debt, which of course is the reason for this economic malaise." Of course, as the data show, it's the very austerity policies here and in Europe which are costing jobs and hurting growth.

But Mitch McConnell's myth-making hardly ends there. On the economy, taxes, deficits, health care and so much else, virtually all of McConnell's talking points are tried - and untrue.

(Click a link to jump to the details for each below):

"Obama Made the Economy Worse"
"No Evidence Whatsoever That the Bush Tax Cuts Actually Diminished Revenue"
"Punishing Job Creators"
"We Look a Lot Like Greece Already"
Public Sector Layoffs Are a "Local" Problem
47 Million Uninsured Americans "Don't Go Without Health Care"
The Public Option "May Cost You Your Life"
Democrats Are "Sticking It to Seniors with Cuts to Medicare"

"Obama Made the Economy Worse"

For months, Mitch McConnell (for example, here, here and here) regurgitated the GOP talking point that President Obama "made the economy worse." Sadly for the trickle-down mythmakers of the Republican Party, the facts and the overwhelming consensus of economists - including John McCain's 2008 brain trust - prove otherwise. President Obama not only did not make the American economy worse; no thanks to obstructionist Republicans in Congress he saved the United States from "Great Depression 2.0" and put the nation on the path to recovery.

Start, for example, with the conclusions of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Despite Republican mythmaking that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) "created zero jobs," in November the CBO reported that the stimulus added up to 2.4 million jobs and boosted GDP by as much as 1.9 points in the previous quarter. As The Hill explained, the CBO has found that "President Obama's 2009 stimulus package continues to benefit the struggling economy":

The agency said the measure raised gross domestic product by between 0.3 and 1.9 percent in the third quarter of 2011, which ended Sept. 30. The Commerce Department said Tuesday that GDP in that quarter was only 2 percent total...

By CBO's numbers, the $800 billion stimulus added up to 0.9 million jobs in 2009, 3.3 million jobs in 2010 and 2.6 million jobs in 2011.

Mark Zandi, an adviser to John McCain in 2008, was adamant on positive role of the stimulus. Federal intervention, he and Princeton economist Alan Blinder argued in August 2010, literally saved the United States from a second Great Depression. In "How the Great Recession Was Brought to an End," Blinder and Zandi's models confirmed the impact of the Obama recovery program and other federal interventions dating back to 2008, concluding that "laissez faire was not an option":

We find that its effects on real GDP, jobs, and inflation are huge, and probably averted what could have been called Great Depression 2.0. For example, we estimate that, without the government's response, GDP in 2010 would be about 11.5% lower, payroll employment would be less by some 8½ million jobs, and the nation would now be experiencing deflation.

"No Evidence Whatsoever That the Bush Tax Cuts Actually Diminished Revenue"

In his version of the Republican myth that "tax cuts pay for themselves," President Bush confidently proclaimed, "You cut taxes and the tax revenues increase." As it turned out, not so much.

After Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt with his supply-side tax cuts, George W. Bush doubled it again with his own. (Reagan's performance would have been much worse, had he not raised taxes 11 times to help make up the shocking shortfall.) As a share of American GDP, tax revenues peaked in 2000; that is, before the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded, the Bush tax cuts accounted for half of the deficits during his tenure, and if made permanent, over the next decade would cost the U.S. Treasury more than Iraq, Afghanistan, the recession, TARP and the stimulus - combined.

Nevertheless, as the Republican Party waged its all-out attack in 2010 to preserve the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, the GOP's number two man in the Senate provided the talking point to help sell the $70 billion annual giveaway to America's rich. "You should never," Arizona's Jon Kyl declared, "have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans." For his part, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell rushed to defend Kyl's fuzzy math:

"There's no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy. So I think what Senator Kyl was expressing was the view of virtually every Republican on that subject."

That may have been a view universally shared by virtually every Republican, but it happens to be wrong.

"Punishing Job Creators"

For years, Senator McConnell has been among the legions of Republicans wrongly arguing that even the slightest increase in taxes for the wealthiest Americans is tantamount to "punishing job creators." As his colleague John Boehner put it:

"The top one percent of wage earners in the United States...pay forty percent of the income taxes...The people he's [President Obama] is talking about taxing are the very people that we expect to reinvest in our economy."

If so, those expectations were sadly unmet under George W. Bush. After all, the last time the top tax rate was 39.6 percent during the Clinton administration, the United States enjoyed rising incomes, 23 million new jobs and budget surpluses. Under Bush? Not so much.

On January 9, 2009, the Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal summed it up with an article titled simply, "Bush on Jobs: the Worst Track Record on Record." (The Journal's interactive table quantifies his staggering failure relative to every post-World War II president.) The meager one million jobs created under President Bush didn't merely pale in comparison to the 23 million produced during Bill Clinton's tenure. In September 2009, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee charted Bush's job creation disaster, the worst since Hoover.

That dismal performance prompted David Leonhardt of the New York Times to ask last fall, "Why should we believe that extending the Bush tax cuts will provide a big lift to growth?" His answer was unambiguous:

Those tax cuts passed in 2001 amid big promises about what they would do for the economy. What followed? The decade with the slowest average annual growth since World War II. Amazingly, that statement is true even if you forget about the Great Recession and simply look at 2001-7...

Is there good evidence the tax cuts persuaded more people to join the work force (because they would be able to keep more of their income)? Not really. The labor-force participation rate fell in the years after 2001 and has never again approached its record in the year 2000.

Is there evidence that the tax cuts led to a lot of entrepreneurship and innovation? Again, no. The rate at which start-up businesses created jobs fell during the past decade.

The data are clear: lower taxes for America's so called job-creators don't mean either faster economic growth or more jobs for Americans.

As Jared Bernstein aptly put it earlier this month:

"Tax cuts and job growth? They're just not that into each other."

"We Look a Lot Like Greece Already"

As their last round of hostage-taking of the debt heated up last summer, Republicans including Mitch McConnell warned, "We look a lot like Greece."

hile FactCheck.org was quick to conclude that "whatever it 'looks like' through Sen. McConnell's eyes -- the fact is that the U.S. is not yet a fiscal wreck of Greek proportions," its analysis hardly does justice to the scale of the Republican myth-making. The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen summed it up quite succinctly:

New rule: every time a confused Republican lawmakers compare the United States' fiscal conditions to that of Greece, an angel loses its wings.

Look, the very idea is just crazy. The U.S. has extremely low interest rates and foreign investor are happy to loan us money; Greece has extremely high interest rates and no one is eager to loan the country money. The U.S. has our own currency; Greece has the Euro. We have a great credit rating (for now); Greece has an awful credit rating. We have a manageable debt; Greece has a debt crisis. We're a large country with an enormous economy; Greece is a small country with a small economy. We have one of the world's most stable systems of government (at least until six months ago); Greece's government structure is a little shaky.

For his part, Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has been decrying the "Hellenization of economic discourse" for months. "Greece -- with a long history of fiscal irresponsibility, very high public debt, and a country without a currency -- doesn't bear much resemblance even to the other peripheral Europeans, let alone the United States."

Here's debt levels (if you ask me the IMF projections for Greece are too optimistic).

Plus there's the having your own currency thing, and the fact that the interest rate on US 10-year bonds is 3.11 percent, on Greek bonds 16.82 percent.

Otherwise we're exactly the same.

Public Sector Layoffs a "Local" Problem

Last fall, Minority Leader McConnell led the GOP opposition to President Obama's proposed $400 billion American Jobs Act. The loss of hundreds of thousands of police, firefighter, teacher and other public sector jobs, he insisted, was a "local" problem.

As it turns out, the 600,000 state and local government jobs already lost since December 2008 is very much a national issue. That "anti-stimulus," it turns out, has added a full point to America's unemployment rate.

Last month, the Economic Policy Institute noted that the private sector had gained 2.8 million jobs while federal, state and local governments shed 584,000 just since June 2009. EPI concluded that the public sector job losses constituted "an unprecedented drag on the recovery":

"The current recovery is the only one that has seen public-sector losses over its first 31 months."

Back in March, Paul Krugman expressed the same point, but with some inconvenient historical context for the Party of Reagan. "In fact, if it weren't for this destructive fiscal austerity," Krugman explained, "Our unemployment rate would almost certainly be lower now than it was at a comparable stage of the 'Morning in America' recovery during the Reagan era."

We're talking big numbers here. If government employment under Mr. Obama had grown at Reagan-era rates, 1.3 million more Americans would be working as schoolteachers, firefighters, police officers, etc., than are currently employed in such jobs.

And once you take the effects of public spending on private employment into account, a rough estimate is that the unemployment rate would be 1.5 percentage points lower than it is, or below 7 percent -- significantly better than the Reagan economy at this stage.

47 Million Uninsured Americans "Don't Go Without Health Care"

McConnell the "strict obstructionist" was naturally in the forefront of the all-out Republican effort to block health care reform at any cost. As he repeatedly put it in June 2009, "all of us want reform, but not reform that denies, delays, or rations health care." To prove his point, McConnell didn't merely trot out a Canadian patient who came to the U.S. for special treatment, but insisted to NBC's David Gregory that no American does without health care now.

GREGORY: Do you think it's a moral issue that 47 million Americans go without health insurance?

McCONNELL: Well, they don't go without health care. It's not the most efficient way to provide it. As we know, the doctors in the hospitals are sworn to provide health care. We all agree it is not the most efficient way to provide health care to find somebody only in the emergency room and then pass those costs on to those who are paying for insurance. So it is important, I think, to reduce the number of uninsured. The question is, what is the best way to do that?

That President George W. Bush, Tom Delay and Paul Broun among other Republicans also claimed "people have access to health care in America...after all, you just go to an emergency room" doesn't make it any more true. As the numbers show -- 50 million uninsured, another 25 million uninsured, 45,000 unnecessary deaths, one in five Americans "self-rationing" care and 62 percent of all personal bankruptcies being related to medical bills -- the crisis is far worse than the one Mitch McConnell pretends doesn't exist.

The Public Option "May Cost You Your Life"

While Mitch McConnell insisted that the lack of insurance doesn't prevent anyone from getting health care, in 2009 he suggested having coverage could prove fatal. Months before the passage of the Affordable Care Act without the so-called "public option," Minority Leader McConnell said it would be deadly.

That irresponsible fear-mongering came during an appearance on Dennis Miller's radio show in October 2009. Blasting the "opt-out" version of the public option then being considered in the Senate bill, the Senator from the state ranked 45th in health care performance insisted access to coverage could kill you:

MCCONNELL: Well, it doesn't make any difference frankly whether you opt-in or you opt-out, it's still a government plan. You know, Medicaid, the program for the poor now, states can opt-out of that, but none of them have. I think if you have any kind of government insurance program, you're going to be stuck with it and it will lead us in the direction of the European style, you know, sort of British-style, single payer, government run system. And those systems are known for delays, denial of care and, you know, if your particular malady doesn't fit the government regulation, you don't get the medication.

MILLER: Right.

MCCONNELL: And it may cost you your life. I mean, we don't want to go down that path.

As a Harvard Medical School study found, each year the path of no health insurance leads 45,000 Americans to the grave.

Democrats Are "Sticking It to Seniors with Cuts to Medicare"

For two years running, Mitch McConnell has been among the 40 GOP Senator voting for Paul Ryan's House budget plan to privatize and inevitably ration Medicare now used by 46 million American seniors. In the late 1990's, McConnell joined in Newt Gingrich's effort to slash almost 15 percent from the Medicare budget so that the program would "wither on the vine." But when the Affordable Care Act called for savings from the private Medicare Advantage program used by only 15 percent of elderly beneficiaries, it was Mitch McConnell who warned seniors about the mythical danger.

In July 2009, McConnell tried to scare America's 46 million Medicare beneficiaries by declaring, "The administration plans to use Medicare cuts to fund yet another new government program." Hoping to build on the momentum of the GOP's disgusting and demonstrably false "euthanasia" talking point, McConnell cautioned:

"Some in Congress seem to be in such a rush to pass just any reform, rather than the right reform, that they're looking everywhere for the money to pay for it -- even if it means sticking it to seniors with cuts to Medicare."

That salvo comes just two weeks after McConnell promised to defeat health care reform in the Senate, warning America's highest turnout voting block:

"They are going to pay for this plan by cutting Medicare, that is cutting seniors."

Those claims, the New York Times pointed out the day after the Republicans' overwhelming triumph in the 2010 midterms elections were misleading at best and false at worst. But, sadly, they worked.

And so it goes.

As Joshua Green documented last year in the Atlantic, "Mitch McConnell is a master manipulator and strategist" whose "relentless tactics have made his party victorious." But that doesn't make him a truth-teller, except on those rare occasions when he reveals his true motivations. During the debt ceiling stand-off last summer, McConnell briefly got weak in the knees at the prospect of U.S. sovereign default not because it would be a disaster for the nation, but because it could damage his Republican Party:

"I refuse to help Barack Obama get re-elected by marching Republicans into a position where we have co-ownership of a bad economy. ... If we go into default, he will say that Republicans are making the economy worse and try to convince the public -- maybe with some merit, if people stop getting their Social Security checks and military families start getting letters saying service people overseas don't get paid. It's an argument he could have a good chance of winning, and all of the sudden we have co-ownership of a bad economy," he said. "That is very bad positioning going into an election."

Especially an election which marks the culmination of Mitch McConnell's work over the past three and a half years:

"The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."

(This piece also appears at Perrspectives.)

Absurdity Today: We Found the Money JP Morgan Lost! Guess Where?

Julianna Forlano — Fri, 25 May 2012 01:00:23 +0000

This week's Absurdity Today! takes on the Republican Wars, climate change, Roku and getting fired from a Christian school for being pregnant, or maybe it was...something else? Laugh here.

Inside the Amazon Shareholders' Meeting -- ALEC, Mic Check and More

karoli — Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:30 +0000

As the time for new business at the Amazon shareholder meeting Thursday morning arrived, the audience grew restless. For those of us holding legal proxies or actual shares, a confrontation was coming on issues around political disclosure, climate change, ALEC funding, workplace conditions and Amazon's corporate taxes.

Two shareholder initiatives had qualified for the official ballot: Climate change transparency and accountability and transparency about corporate political contributions to candidates and organizations.

In addition to Jeffrey Bezos, Amazon's board of directors consists of venture capitalists and corporate CEOs, which is fairly typical for a public company. That group, for whatever reason, decided to recommend against political transparency and a climate change disclosure and transparency policy.

Amazon and Political Transparency

Bruce Herbert is founder and CEO of Newground Social Investment, and he was the author and filer of the political disclosure resolution, which he read aloud at the meeting. The resolution called for disclosure and review of all corporate political contributions, who they were paid to, identification of the Amazon official authorizing the disclosure with a statement of their purpose in authorizing it, and for all information on these expenditures to be posted on the Company website.

The board of directors declined to recommend its passage, just as they declined Calvert Social Investing's resolution to disclose Amazon's carbon footprint and plan for minimizing it.

When asked why they would decline these resolutions, Amazon officials would only say the company was considering climate change initiatives. The question of political disclosure was dodged completely. There was utter silence from the company and unfortunately, the shareholders did not follow up on that question as clearly as they should have.

Amazon and ALEC

While the more general political disclosure question went unanswered, there was pointed questioning about Amazon's involvement and funding of ALEC. ThinkProgress reported on Amazon's $10,000 contribution to ALEC's 2011 annual meeting, and it was definitely the subject of shareholder scrutiny. In response, Amazon declared that they review contributions to non-profit and trade associations on an annual basis and had opted not to renew their ALEC membership this year.

Does this mean they won't renew it in 2013? Great question. Twice they stated that they had elected not to fund ALEC, but both times it came with the words "this year," leaving the door open for re-entry when scrutiny isn't quite so sharp.

After they answered that question, they announced the results of the voting on these initiatives, at the very same time that ballots were being collected. In corporate-land, shareholders' votes are only as powerful as the number of shares they hold (and wealth associated with those shares), and so the political disclosure votes, before anyone counted the votes in the room, evidently, were 59 million for, 237 million against, with 44 million abstentions. The climate change resolution fared slightly better but still went down in flames with 69 million for, 227 million against, and 46.6 million abstentions.

Also, it's now on the record that Amazon and its directors and officers oppose having to disclose corporate political contributions to organizations and candidates. Based on their ALEC funding, I'm not optimistic about why they don't want to make these disclosures.

Lest you think the entire room was full of protesters holding proxies, I can testify that at least one man in the room was different. With one question left in the question and answer session, a middle-aged man rose and stepped to the aisle. In a strong voice, he chided the board and officers for their withdrawal from ALEC, saying he was "disappointed [Amazon] gave into political pressure and resigned from ALEC, an organization that has done so much good for people."

As you might imagine, that did not play well with the rest of the audience.

Amazon's workplace conditions

During the part of the meeting where Jeffrey Bezos gave his presentation, we heard that Amazon was going to spend $52 million to install air conditioning in some of their fulfillment centers. This presentation, given with a bit of a defensive edge, was the answer to criticism about Amazon's horrendous workplace conditions, first reported in 2011 after workers in Pennsylvania were subjected to incredibly hot and debilitating working conditions.

We even got to see video of the helicopter flying in the air conditioning units, and heard Bezos remind us not once, but twice, that it was very, very, very expensive to put air conditioning units into existing fulfillment centers. I wanted to remind Bezos that it's also very, very deadly for employees to work in closed warehouses with over 100-degree temperatures in the summer, and having ambulances stationed outside the workplace is hardly an adequate response.

Amazon and Corporate Taxes

Because it keeps expanding its business and making capital expenditures along the way, Amazon's corporate tax rate has been around 3.5%. As they were quick to point out, they have also hired 45,000 people since September, 2008 in the US. Of course, they also tried to pass off payroll taxes as their fair share, which didn't play well with many shareholders. One irate shareholder stood up and called them "sociopaths" for failing to fund the education structure which will (and has) benefitted them up to this point. It was one of the more tense moments, but company officials were ready for the question, and said that as expansion stabilizes, they will be paying more in corporate taxes.

Let me translate: As soon as they've availed themselves of all existing corporate tax loopholes, they'll go ahead and pay some more in taxes right after they've finished making opaque contributions to organizations that can work on their behalf to keep taxes low. It was an answer worthy of an auditor, and indeed, it was the corporate CPA that answered the question.

The many outsiders...

For every person who was seated in the 300-seat auditorium inside the Seattle Art Museum, there was one representing the 99 percent outside the Seattle Art Museum. At the end of the meeting inside, several people stood and mic-checked the board, calling on them to be compassionate, to consider their workers, to consider the environment, and to be honest about how shareholders' funds are spent with regard to political associations. As each stood to be heard, three police officers walked down and escorted them outside in a firm and not necessarily polite fashion.

It's almost de rigueur these days, you know. I imagine there are meetings of these directors at parties where they ask whether or not the cops have had to eject anyone from a shareholders' meeting. But stop for a minute and think about that. In a meeting where each person had to prove their legal right to be present in the room, they were forcibly ejected by police for...what? Disagreeing? Calling for a corporation to be a better citizen? Speaking their minds?

They had a right to speak. Each and every one of them. They had proven that by going through the rigorous review and security checks that got them in that room. Yet they were silenced by the police for simply speaking words those directors did not want to hear. Words their public relations department would have to spin later. Why is a company built on words and books afraid to hear words?

The truth is powerful and convicting. If one doesn't want to hear it, all they have to do is make sure they've got the police with them. Those insiders joined the outsiders and they all raised their voices loud enough to be heard by the waiting television and newspaper cameras outside. They made themselves heard from the inside of the auditorium to the foyer to the outside and hopefully to the outside world, as they chanted over and over...

We are the ninety-nine percent.

Indeed, we are. I am. You are. So we take the small victory of at least one more corporation backing away from ALEC for one year at least, and press on to the next.

Stupid Right-Wing Tweets: Laura Ingraham Edition

Blue Texan — Thu, 24 May 2012 23:00:24 +0000

enlarge

Let's face it. Obama's big gubmint entitlement society and out-of-control spending has spread like a cancer on America's households. The whole country is going the way of Greece!

Why, oh why can't we go back to the frugality and personal responsibility of the Bush/Cheney years, when honest, hard-working people lived within their means?

Oh wait.

enlarge

Give them time. By the time we reach November, everything from 9/11 to Justin Beiber will be Obama's fault.

More Republicans Rejecting Grover Norquist's 'No Tax Increases Ever' Pledge

Blue Texan — Thu, 24 May 2012 22:00:59 +0000

Grover still rules the GOP with an iron fist, but there are signs that his grip might be slipping.

A small but increasingly vocal group of freshman Republicans are publicly rejecting the idea they are beholden to Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform pledge for their entire congressional careers.

One such member, Scott Rigell of Virginia, has openly rejected the pledge, explaining on his website that it would prevent Congress in some cases from eliminating corporate loopholes or government subsidies because those changes would have to be revenue-neutral. The math, he said, just doesn’t make sense.

Of course, it's not about "math" because Grover's pledge isn't about deficits or the debt. It's about keeping taxes low for rich people and "starving the beast."

Freshman Reps. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.), Richard Hanna (R-N.Y.) and Rob Woodall (R-Ga.) never signed the pledge to begin with, making up half of the six House Republicans who refused to sign on.

Woodall argued the pledge was too restrictive because it promises that lawmakers must “oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.”

Make no mistake -- Grover still runs the place. But for the first time, there are a few cracks in the dam.

Trump: I Would Be the 'Best Choice of All' for Romney's VP

David — Thu, 24 May 2012 21:00:57 +0000

Click here to view this media

Billionaire mogul Donald Trump says he has found the "best choice of all" to be presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's vice presidential running mate: Donald Trump.

"You have a lot of really good candidates," the reality star told Newsmax columnist John LeBoutillier on Wednesday. "Chris Christie’s a great guy. He’s a friend of mine. You really have someone really good there. Rob Portman, who I don’t know, but I hear fantastic things about. Certainly he’s been very well vetted over the years. He’s a professional who’s been there a long time. He’s been through it. He knows the game and he’s a very, very solid citizen."

"On a younger side, you could look at Sen. Rubio, who I think could help with Hispanics. But he is young, and I think he sort of doesn’t want to go through it and doesn’t want to do it."

"Probably the best choice of all would be Donald Trump," the billionaire concluded.

(h/t: The Hill)

Quebec Government Seeks to Trample Rights In Assault on Students and Unions

Kenneth Quinnell — Thu, 24 May 2012 20:00:42 +0000

In response to recent student protests over proposed massive tuition increases, Quebec's Premier Jean Charest is pursuing a law that would shred the civil rights of the citizens of the province, particularly students and unions. Quebec's government proposed to increase tuition by 75 percent and students have responded with a massive strike that has lasted for months. While tuition in Quebec is relatively low, the massive spike would be a shock to many students and would decrease college accessibility and force many more students to go into debt.

Charest, who leads the most conservative government in the province in decades, has responded to the protests by proposing a draconian law that would take away the rights to freedom of speech, assembly and association in an effort to stifle the protests. Charest has done little to invite public input on the proposed law, sparking more anger from opponents.

The bill threatens to impose steep fines of 25,000 to 125,000 Canadian dollars against student associations and unions — which derive their financing from tuition fees — in a direct move to break the movement. For example, student associations will be found guilty if they do not stop their members from protesting within university and college grounds.

During a street demonstration, the organization that plans the protest will be penalized if individual protesters stray from the police-approved route or exceed the time limit imposed by authorities. Student associations and unions are also liable for any damage caused by a third party during a demonstration.

These absurd regulations mean that student organizations and unions will be held responsible for behavior they cannot possibly control. They do not bear civil responsibility for their members as parents do for their children.

Freedom of speech is also under attack because of an ambiguous — and Orwellian — article in Bill 78 that says, “Anyone who helps or induces a person to commit an offense under this Act is guilty of the same offense.” Is a student leader, or an ordinary citizen, who sends a Twitter message about civil disobedience therefore guilty? Quebec’s education minister says it depends on the context. The legislation is purposefully vague and leaves the door open to arbitrary decisions.

...

The law will remain in force only until July 1, 2013. The short duration says it all. It amounts to a temporary suspension of certain liberties and allows the government to avoid serious negotiations with student leaders. And it grants the authorities carte blanche for the abuse of power; just hours after it passed, police officers in Montreal began to increase the use of force against protesters.

If Charest has success with these tactics, how long will it be until conservatives in the U.S. follow in his footsteps?

Stockman: Romney Can't Say He Learned How to Create Jobs in the Leveraged Buyout Business

Heather — Thu, 24 May 2012 19:00:51 +0000

Click here to view this media

While discussing President Obama's remarks on Romney's experience at Bain Capital, former Reagan Office of Management and Budget Director David Stockman stepped all over Romney's claims that his experience in the leveraged buyout business taught him anything at all about "job creation."

Here's what President Obama said earlier this week, which they opened up with in the segment from Fox Business Channel's After the Bell in the clip above: Obama On Romney’s Bain Experience: The President’s Job ‘Is Not Simply To Maximize Profits’:

During a press conference Monday afternoon, President Obama hit back against critics — including surrogate and Newark Mayor Cory Booker — who have expressed disappointment over his campaign’s effort to attack Mitt Romney’s record of job creation at Bain Capital, a leveraged buyout firm the former Massachusetts governor headed from 1984 to 1999.

“The reason this is relevant to the campaign is because my opponent, Governor Romney, his main calling card for why he thinks he should be president, is his business experience,” Obama said. “He is not going out there touting his experience in Massachusetts. He’s saying, ‘I’m a business guy, I know how to fix it.’” Obama explained that while private equity is “set up to maximize profits” for shareholders, the president is responsible for the health of the economy as a whole and fostering job creation.

Much to the chagrin of the two anchors on Fox Business, Stockman went off message when he responded to Asman's question about whose economic model the public is going to support:

ASMAN: So you have these two economic models. You have one exemplified by Bain Capital, which fails sometimes, but I think it has a success rate of about 70 percent and you have one of the federal government involvement in the economy. Which one do you think the American public is going to support?

STOCKMAN: Well, I don't know. I think the current federal model is a disaster. We know where we are on the debt. We're going to have a debt ceiling that expires in December and I don't know where the votes are going to come to increase it. But if they don't, then we'll have this huge sequester and we'll have all these tax cuts expiring. It is going to be really a thundering mess. So clearly what we're doing with fiscal policy and monetary policy at present, isn't working.

On the other hand, I don’t think Mitt Romney can legitimately say that he learned anything about how to create jobs in the LBO business. The LBO business is about how to strip cash out of old, long-in-the-tooth companies and how to make short-term profits.

Cue David Asman and his co-host Melissa Francis heads simultaneously exploding at the same time.

ASMAN: But hold on David, he had so many new jobs created for all the jobs that were lost, it was a net gain, no?

STOCKMAN: I don’t think so. All the jobs that he talks about came from Staples. That was a very early venture stage deal that, you know, they got out of long before it got to its current size. You know, the LBO business is legitimate, free enterprise business, just like, you know, running a brothel if that's what you want to do, or a house of gambling.

FRANCIS: Nooooo...

STOCKMAN: But it's not a good model for how we rebuild an economy or grow jobs. It's irrelevant.

h/t Taegan Goddard's Political Wire