IRS, Benghazi Scandals Officially Declared Over By Peggy Noonan

No, she didn’t actually say that. In fact, she said exactly the opposite:

We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate.

So why do I say the IRS and Benghazi scandals are officially over? Because once the GOP trot out La Nooners and her obsidian ball, it’s a safe bet that the reverse of anything she proclaims is almost certainly true. Remember this gem, written before last fall’s election (zackpunk at DailyKos had some fun with it here)?

Is it possible this whole thing is playing out before our eyes and we’re not really noticing because we’re too busy looking at data on paper instead of what’s in front of us? Maybe that’s the real distortion of the polls this year: They left us discounting the world around us.

Umm…yeah.

That’s why when Noonan says this:

The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they’re seeing. (emphasis added)

…and yet the actual news media come up with some more of that icky “data on paper” stuff that so confounded Noonan in her pre-election Romney column, one might as well declare the scandals officially dead.

After the initial shock of three different, potentially-damaging scandals emerging virtually simultaneously (although in fairness, the GOP have been beating the Benghazi drum since last October), this come-down (for the GOP) has been in the mail for a while, as the media got a handle on what was really going on in each case. But it’s not just the disgraceful-yet-hilarious, Keystone Kops-like attempts of the GOP proper to smear and shiv (in the IRS case), and it’s not the now-certain knowledge that the GOP falsified Benghazi emails to make the administration look bad. Those things are indicators that the GOP only wishes there were more there than there is. But by themselves, they are not dispositive.

But folks, when Peggy Noonan declares you a sure thing, it means you are D-O-N-E.

Just ask this guy:

Uh, Peggy? I thought you said…

UPDATE: via bluegal, we learn that this Sunday’s guests on Meet the GOP Press will include…Peggy Noonan. Also, Don Rumsfeld, Mitch McConnell, and Bob Woodward. Yup, it’s over. Even David Gregory knows it, which is why he’s trying to give the GOP every chance they can to milk as much political juice out of these “scandals” as they can, before they dry up and blow away. Funny, because during Iraq, MTP’s guest list was…McCain, Noonan, Rumsfeld, Cheney. It’s almost as if…

Talking With The Congressman About Poetry — Er, Tax Reform

Ever since I moved in 2003 from Barbara Lee’s district in Oakland, CA to Tom Price’s district in suburban Atlanta (Newt Gingrich’s old district), I’ve sort of felt a stepped-up need to interface with my congressperson. In Oakland, I could pretty much rest easy in the knowledge that my congressperson would propose or vote for issues that I myself would support, were I in congress. No politician matches one’s own preferences 100% of the time, but when you’ve got a congressperson as good as Barbara Lee, it’s easy to just sort of let her do the work, since it’s what you’d do anyway.

Not so since moving to the land of God, guns and Gingrich. These days, I tend to bedevil Tom Price on Twitter, and when I see tweets like this one, I feel compelled to act upon them:

So ya want my thoughts on tax reform, eh, Tom? Done…though I’m pretty sure my recommendations aren’t going to be what you were hoping for, given that the responses on Twitter to your solicitation were for idiotic things like the FairTax or banning state taxes altogether and making the corporate rate 2%. So, you’re welcome.

Here Are The ‘Six Studies’ Romney Says Refute Tax Policy Center Study Of His Tax Plan

*** 10/16 – SEE UPDATE BELOW; ROMNEY FINALLY RELEASES DETAILS OF TAX PLAN***

Did I say STUDIES? I meant blog posts.

Back at the beginning of August, the non-partisan Tax Policy Center issued a much-discussed study that was the first to try to run the numbers on Mitt Romney’s tax plan. Specifically, they wanted to see whether Romney’s claim to be able to leave the Bush tax cuts in place and then cut taxes by an additional 20% across the board would work, in light of Romney’s promise that he would make up for the revenue lost by such a tax cut without having to raise taxes on the middle class. Unsurprisingly, the TPC was therefore also the first to come to the conclusion – also much discussed since their study in late August – that the math on Romney’s promises simply didn’t add up.

Part of this guesswork and extrapolation has come from the fact that the Romney campaign steadfastly refuses to get specific about exactly HOW they will make up the lost revenue without either adding to the deficit or soaking the middle class (or poor). In the absence of genuine specifics from the Romney campaign, the TPC had to make some assumptions, based upon likely economic conditions, as well as on the things Romney HAS definitely said. So they did. And then they re-jiggered those assumptions to be as favorable and generous to Romney as they could be without departing from reality.

Even then, they still found that Romney’s promises, taken together, are simply not mathematically possible.

In an election season, them’s fighting words. Having a difference of opinion about various policies is the stuff electoral politics is made of. But saying a candidate’s plans are mathematically impossible is of another order: pundits and the press take notice, and the public pays more attention, too, since such a statement carries with it the implicit accusation that the candidate is intentionally lying.

In the intervening time, a great deal of ink on the right side of the political aisle has been spilled attempting to debunk the TPC study. One of the parties most interested in debunking the study is, unsurprisingly, the Romney campaign itself. Within days, the campaign began claiming to have “six other studies” that said Romney’s policies WOULD work without raising the deficit or raising taxes on the middle class or the poor. Throughout most of September and right up through the first Presidential debate and the VP debate, the Romney team stayed remarkably on-message about this: they have one study, we have SIX that say the opposite.

What WERE these studies? The Romney campaign didn’t say, initially. Journalists were able to conclude what the campaign likely was referring to, based on what the campaign did refer to when discussing tax policy, but Romney and his team were never explicit about where these “six studies” came from, or who did them.

Until now.

Josh Barro, who did some of the original press-work about the original TPC study and the subsequent back-and-forth with the Romney campaign, finally got them to go on-record about where he could find these “six studies” which all show the TPC study of August to be false, and Mitt Romney’s tax plan to be viable without ballooning the deficit or hurting the non-rich with additional taxes. Are you ready? The studies, according to Romney via Barro, are “…perhaps more accurately described as ‘analyses’, since four of them are blog posts or op-eds. I’m not hating — I blog for a living — but I don’t generally describe my posts as ‘studies’.” More interestingly, “[n]one of the analyses do what Romney’s campaign says: show that his tax plan is sound.”

You don’t say.

The sources (“studies”, if you believe the Romney campaign) are these: a blog post by Alex Brill at AEI (a conservative think-tank), a second blog post from AEI (this one by Matt Jensen), two pieces by Martin Feldstein (one an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal and the other a blog post), and two papers, one by Curtis Dubay of the Heritage Foundation, and the other by Princeton professor Harvey Rosen. Barro goes through these sources one-by-one, explaining why each does not show what Romney claims it does, in detail. It’s illuminating reading, I would guess especially if you’re someone who’s not already familiar with Mitt Romney’s casual relationship with the facts/truth. If you’re not familiar, the mere fact that, of Romney’s “six studies,” only two are even anything approaching an actual study, ought to give you a pretty good indication.

I won’t post Barro’s analysis here, because that’s what his piece is for. If you read it, though, you won’t be in any further doubt about whether the Tax Policy Center’s study was correct in its conclusions. It was.

---

***UPDATE*** – Hold, I say HOLD, those presses! Mitt Romney’s campaign, under relentless pressure has finally made the calculated decision to release the full details of how his tax plan will be achieved without either ballooning the debt or taxing the middle class and poor. Read the details at Romney Tax Plan.

IMF (Politely) Confirms: Austerity Doesn’t Work

Wow, it just doesn’t get much more stark than this. Via Paul Krugman:

‘Contractionary Fiscal Policy Is Contractionary’

On Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund came out with a new report which states, albeit in dry, fact-based bureaucratese, that the world’s governments (particularly though not exclusively those in the Eurozone) ought not continue down the path of fiscal consolidation (debt-reduction), lest they risk slowing the world’s economy even further. The importance of this study can hardly be overstated, since it comes from a supra-national NGO like the IMF and not some politically-interested party within a specific country.

What you are looking at in the above graph is a plotting of the change in GDP of various Eurozone countries against those same countries’ fiscal consolidation. In other words: for each country, how did their attempts (if any) at debt reduction fare in terms of their GDP? The results aren’t pretty (if you’re an Austrian/Austerian debt-scold: virtually every country on the list attempted some form of debt reduction recently. Some had it forced upon them by necessity and/or other countries within the Eurozone (see: Greece, Spain) while others undertook debt reduction on their own initiative based upon political leaders’ belief they were doing the economically prudent thing (read: Britain). But in every case, the larger the fiscal consolidation, the greater the loss of GDP.

This suggests that not only are Keynesian contractionary effects real, but their multipliers and effects may be even greater than previously supposed. And it also suggests the converse, as professor Krugman points out:

So one thing I haven’t seen pointed out is that this directly contradicts current GOP doctrine. To the extent that the GOP has a theory of recession-fighting…it was embodied in the Joint Economic Committee manifesto “Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy,” which declared that

In the short term, fiscal consolidation programs that rely predominately or entirely on spending reductions have expansionary “non-Keynesian” effects that may offset the contractionary Keynesian reduction in aggregate demand.

In some cases, “non-Keynesian” effects may be strong enough to make fiscal consolidation programs expansionary in the short term.

As Krugman concludes after plotting the above graph: “tell that to the Greeks.” Yet another dose of deficit-cutting fiscal austerity is nevertheless exactly what Republicans in America like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney would have us do here, despite the fact that, as Krugman and the IMF show conclusively, it’s the fiscal equivalent of prescribing leeches for illness.

1989 Called With Breaking News That Anderson Cooper Is Gay

So, in a move that will surprise no one at all, CNN’s Anderson Cooper informed the world, via a letter to the Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan, that he is gay.

Yay!…sort of.

I find myself feeling about Cooper’s revelation the way I did about Ellen DeGeneres’ similar revelation years ago, namely: each of these people waited until they were a) household names and b) millionaires many times over before making public comings-out. On balance, I can’t say that either DeGeneres’ or Cooper’s statements aren’t a good thing, for the same reason it’s worthwhile to put a political bumper sticker on your car during election season. The reason one does such a thing is not to be a bandwagon-jumper or a fanboy, but (especially if the candidate one supports is an underdog in one’s community) to send up a flare to other supporters of that candidate, letting them know they’re not alone. The public coming out of a major media figure like DeGeneres or Cooper has value, ultimately, for the same reason – because it shows young (or even older) gay people who may be struggling with the decision to come out that there are more of “their team” out there in the public than perhaps it might appear.

But it’s this same reason that makes such a declaration by these public figures (only after they’re already well-established) a good thing only on balance in the long view. Because, while it’s unquestionably positive having having Anderson Cooper or Ellen DeGeneres available as signposts for young gay people who often desperately need positive role models or even just a sense of belonging, it’s equally undeniable that there were also gay youths in 1995 or 1989 who would’ve benefitted from knowing the same thing about these two particular people.

I hate to be the bad stink at a party here, but even as a straight man with no personal experience with coming out, I just don’t find it particularly brave of very successful public figures like Cooper or DeGeneres who both have said they’ve known their whole lives (essentially) that they were gay, waiting until they were more secure, financially and socially, than most people – gay OR straight – will ever be in their lives, before coming out publicly. Like I said: on balance, a good thing…but zero points for heroism, example-setting or risk-taking for the cause.

Bill Moyers, Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith On Financial Fraudsters

The utterly indispensable Bill Moyers spends a lengthy segment on his excellent show talking to two of the sharpest minds who’ve been following the financial crisis since 2008 and before, Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism:

Alabamian Workers UnFIT To Pick Produce

Tougher than you, dude.

WOW:

Jerry Spencer had an idea after Alabama’s tough new law against illegal immigration scared Hispanic workers out of the tomato fields northeast of Birmingham: Recruit unemployed U.S. citizens to do the work, give them free transportation and pay them to pick the fruit and clean the fields.

After two weeks, Spencer said Monday, the experiment is a failure. Jobless resident Americans lack the physical stamina and the mental toughness to see the job through, he said, and there’s not much of a chance a new state program to fill the jobs will fare better.

Remember when the discussion centered around the idea that American workers wouldn’t work for such low wages (or the corollary, that if we paid Americans what is considered a decent wage in America to pick produce, consumers simply wouldn’t pay the increased costs of fresh produce)? That may or may not be true, but apparently, most Americans – or at least Alabamians – are too physically and mentally unfit to handle the rigors of actual manual labor.

I can’t say I’m surprised. Anyone who’s spent an afternoon picking weeds in a garden knows it’s hard physical labor. You’re stooped over virtually the entire time, which can be hell on even a healthy back, and it’s often (during growing and harvest season) quite hot and sunny. And that’s just casual Sunday puttering in the garden, which is not even close to the same as picking fruit or vegetables for a commercial enterprise where someone else is the boss and they’ve got a per-hour (or per-day) quota to fill. You want to talk HARD work? There aren’t many harder jobs, frankly.

Somewhere tonight, Cesar Chavez is chuckling.

 

Both Sides Do NOT Do It…

…at least, not nearly to the same degree.

Michael Tomasky over at The Daily Beast decided to, you know, actually check whether the oft-repeated (because it sounds both ‘sage’ and ‘balanced’, yet requires no research) claim that “both sides do it” was true with respect to partisan obstructionism and refusal to support the signature initiatives of a President from the opposite party. Here’s what he found (unsurprisingly):

I’ve settled on four signal legislative achievements of each president and studied the roll call votes in each house on those eight measures to see what the numbers tell us.

The four Bush bills I chose: the first tax cut; No Child Left Behind; the Iraq War vote; and the 2003 Medicare prescription-drug bill. The four Obama bills: the stimulus; the health-care vote; the Dodd-Frank financial reform; and the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal. Other people might have selected others, but these just seemed to me commonsense answers to the question, “What were each president’s top legislative accomplishments?” As a country we spent a heck of a lot of time on these eight issues, so my findings must tell us something. And here’s what they tell us: levels of partisanship are not even remotely close.

[...]

Here’s how it all adds up:

Average Democratic Senate support for Bush: 45.5 percent.

Average Democratic House support for Bush: 36.8 percent.

Average combined Democratic support for Bush: 41.1 percent.

Average Republican Senate support for Obama: 8.8 percent.

Average Republican House support for Obama: 2.7 percent.

Average combined Republican support for Obama: 5.75 percent.

Well now. You see, both sides do do it. It just so happens that one side opposes the major proposals of the president from the other party seven times more intensely than the other side does it.

(emphasis added)

Exactly. What many of us have been saying for literally nearly a decade. Perhaps someone should ping Sam Waterston and the rest of those idiots over at Third Way. This might be some new information for them.

Another Day, Another Diebold Hack

Courtesy of some excellent work by VelvetRevolution and Brad Friedman at the BradBlog, comes this:

Read My Lips: No New Texans!

"Yeeee-hawwww IS TOO a foreign policy, suckers! A domestic policy, too!"

I don’t have a whole lot to add to what’s already been said about Rick Perry’s (official) entrance into the 2012 GOP primary field. Lots of people have already weighed in on it, and the general consensus strikes me as pretty much correct: Perry is yet another loud, brash, tough talking intellectual lightweight with a folksy accent and manner who will likely suffer somewhat by comparison with the other recent Texas governor who (still) doesn’t have the best public image.

Just a few quick thoughts strike me about Perry’s appeal and his chances, though, after the fold: