Tag: Rick Perry

Conservatives make a deal with the devil

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Source: WashPo

Author: Michael  Gerson

Emphasis Mine

In the category of credit where credit is due, Donald Trump has been exactly right in one important respect. He attacked the Republican establishment as low-energy, cowering weaklings. Now Republican leaders are lining up to surrender to him — like low-energy, cowering weaklings. The capitulation has justified the accusation.

It would be impolite to name names. So I should not mention that former Texas governor Rick Perry, who now angles for Trump’s vice presidential nod, once said: “He offers a barking carnival act that can be best described as Trumpism: a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued. Let no one be mistaken — Donald Trump’s candidacy is a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised and discarded.” I should resist the temptation to recall how Rep. Peter King (N.Y.), who now (reluctantly) backs Trump, once asserted he is “not fit to be president, morally or intellectually.”

Singling out individuals is unfair in so great a company. One by one, Republican senators have made their peace with a Trump nomination. Many in the House GOP leadership and caucus have urged Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) to get it over with and endorse the presumptive Republican nominee. It is humorous — in a sad, bitter, tragic sort of way — to see Republican leaders, and some conservative commentators, try to forget or minimize Trump’s history of odious proposals and statements. The argument seems to be: “I say tomato. You say Mexican immigrants are rapists. What’s the big difference?”

And all this has taken place without (apparently) securing any concessions or guarantees from Trump himself. He now knows that he can violate any Republican or conservative principle and still get a round of crisp salutes, even from his strongest opponents. This is the white flag of ideological surrender.

I understand the short-term political calculation. Better to have Trump, who is ideologically unpredictable, make Supreme Court nominations than Hillary Clinton, who is reliably liberal. Better to have Trump rather than Clinton make all those plum executive-branch appointments. Besides, if Trump is a liar, Clinton is a worse one. If Trump is a misogynist, well, consider Clinton’s husband. This justification has a few flaws. The first is reductio ad Trumpism. If Clinton is the ultimate evil, would anyone be better than she is? How about Trump’s ex-butler, who threatened President Obama on Facebook? How about Trump supporter Phil Robertson of “Duck Dynasty”? Of course not, a Republican would angrily respond. A prospective president needs to be morally and intellectually fit for the office. He or she can’t be guilty of demagoguery or mean-spiritedness, or talk nonsense all the time.

But this is exactly the issue. Were Perry and King correct in their initial diagnoses of Trump? If so, we are not dealing with the normal give-and-take of policy and politics. We have left the realm of half-a-loaf and you-scratch-my-back. We are dealing with a question of fitness for the highest office in the land. It is not enough for GOP partisans to assert Trump’s superiority to Clinton on this issue or that. They must justify that Trump has the experience, knowledge, temperament, judgment and character to be president of the United States. That is a more difficult task.

This leads to a second objection. Pursuing the short-term interests of the GOP, gained by unity, may damage or destroy the party in the longer term by confirming a series of destructive stereotypes. Republicans stand accused of disdaining immigrants; their nominee proposes to round up and deport 11 million people. Republicans are accused of religious bigotry; their nominee proposes to stop all Muslims at the border. Republicans are accused of a war on women; the Republican nominee, if a recent New York Times exposé is accurate, Trump is the cave-man candidate.

All this is a particular blow to conservatives, among whom I count myself. Conservatives latched on to the GOP as an instrument to express their ideals. Now loyalty to party is causing many to abandon their ideals. Conservatism is not misogyny. Conservatism is not nativism and protectionism. Conservatism is not religious bigotry and conspiracy theories. Conservatism is not anti-intellectual and anti-science. For the sake of partisanship — for a mess of pottage — some conservatives are surrendering their identity. It is a very bad deal.

See:https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/conservatives-cave-to-the-cave-man/2016/05/16/314bbf6e-1b89-11e6-9c81-4be1c14fb8c8_story.html?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_opinions

American health care is remarkably diverse.

In fact, it’s hard to avoid the sense that Republicans are especially eager to dismantle government programs that act as living demonstrations that their ideology is wrong. Bloated military budgets don’t bother them much —

chasdarwin1 Comment

From: NY Times, via Truthout

N.B.: Republicans continue to lie, while people continue to die, and before I die, I hope the word ‘socialism’ is no longer pejorative, along with ‘atheism’, and ‘humanism’, in our country.

By: Dr. Paul Krugman

“In terms of how care is paid for and delivered, many of us effectively live in Canada, some live in Switzerland, some live in Britain, and some live in the unregulated market of conservative dreams. One result of this diversity is that we have plenty of home-grown evidence about what works and what doesn’t.  

Naturally, then, politicians — Republicans in particular — are determined to scrap what works and promote what doesn’t. And that brings me to Mitt Romney’s latest really bad idea, unveiled on Veterans Day: to partially privatize the Veterans Health Administration (V.H.A.).

What Mr. Romney and everyone else should know is that the V.H.A. is a huge policy success story, which offers important lessons for future health reform.

Many people still have an image of veterans’ health care based on the terrible state of the system two decades ago. Under the Clinton administration, however, the V.H.A. was overhauled, and achieved a remarkable combination of rising quality and successful cost control. Multiple surveys have found the V.H.A. providing better care than most Americans receive, even as the agency has held cost increases well below those facing Medicare and private insurers. Furthermore, the V.H.A. has led the way in cost-saving innovation, especially the use of electronic medical records.

What’s behind this success? Crucially, the V.H.A. is an integrated system, which provides health care as well as paying for it. So it’s free from the perverse incentives created when doctors and hospitals profit from expensive tests and procedures, whether or not those procedures actually make medical sense. And because V.H.A. patients are in it for the long term, the agency has a stronger incentive to invest in prevention than private insurers, many of whose customers move on after a few years.

And yes, this is “socialized medicine” — although some private systems, like Kaiser Permanente, share many of the V.H.A.’s virtues. But it works — and suggests what it will take to solve the troubles of U.S. health care more broadly.

Yet Mr. Romney believes that giving veterans vouchers to spend on private insurance would somehow yield better results. Why?

Well, Republicans have a thing about vouchers. Earlier this year Representative Paul Ryan famously introduced a plan to convert Medicare into a voucher system; Mr. Romney’s Medicare proposal follows similar lines. The claim, always, is the one Mr. Romney made last week, that “private sector competition” would lower costs.

But we have a lot of evidence about how private-sector competition in health insurance works, and it’s not favorable. The individual insurance market, which comes closest to the conservative ideal of free competition, has huge administrative costs and has no demonstrated ability to reduce other costs. Medicare Advantage, which allows Medicare beneficiaries to buy private insurance instead of having Medicare pay bills directly, has consistently had higher costs than the traditional program.

And the international evidence accords with U.S. experience. The most efficient health care systems are integrated systems like the V.H.A.; next best are single-payer systems like Medicare; the more privatized the system, the worse it performs.

To be fair to Mr. Romney, he takes a somewhat softer line than others in his party, suggesting that the existing V.H.A. system would remain available and that traditional Medicare would remain an option. In practice, however, partial privatization would almost surely undermine the public side of these programs. For example, one problem with the V.H.A. is that its hospitals are spread too thinly across the nation; this problem would become worse if a substantial number of veterans were encouraged to opt out of the system.

So what lies behind the Republican obsession with privatization and voucherization? Ideology, of course. It’s literally a fundamental article of faith in the G.O.P. that the private sector is always better than the government, and no amount of evidence can shake that credo.

In fact, it’s hard to avoid the sense that Republicans are especially eager to dismantle government programs that act as living demonstrations that their ideology is wrong. Bloated military budgets don’t bother them much — Mr. Romney has pledged to reverse President Obama’s defense cuts, despite the fact that no such cuts have actually taken place. But successful programs like veterans’ health, Social Security and Medicare are in the crosshairs.

Which brings me to a final thought: maybe all this amounts to a case for Rick Perry. Any Republican would, if elected president, set out to undermine precisely those government programs that work best. But Mr. Perry might not remember which programs he was supposed to destroy.

Emphasis Mine

see:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/opinion/krugman-vouchers-for-veterans-and-other-bad-ideas.html?_r=2

Noah Chomsky on why the right hates social security.

It’s a very successful program. A large number people rely on it. It doesn’t pay munificently, but it at least keeps people alive, not just retired people, people with disabilities and others. Very low administrative costs, extremely efficient, and no burden on the deficit, doesn’t add to the deficit. The effort to try to present the Social Security program as if it’s a major problem, that’s just a hidden way of trying to undermine and destroy it.

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From an interview on Democracy Now, see link below.

(N.B.:  While little is new,  it is presented very well.)

“AARON MATÉ: Noam, you mentioned entitlements, and obviously this is an issue that’s come up a lot in the deficit debate. Governor Rick Perry, the Republican presidential hopeful, has called it a Ponzi scheme. But even Democrats seem to buy into this narrative that it’s in crisis. Can you address that?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Social Security is not in any crisis. I mean, the trust fund alone will fully pay benefits for, I think, another 30 years or so. And after that, taxes will give almost the same benefits. To worry about a possible problem 30 years from now, which can incidentally be fixed with little—a little bit of tampering here and there, as was done in 1983—to worry about that just makes absolutely no sense, unless you’re trying to destroy the program. It’s a very successful program. A large number people rely on it. It doesn’t pay munificently, but it at least keeps people alive, not just retired people, people with disabilities and others. Very low administrative costs, extremely efficient, and no burden on the deficit, doesn’t add to the deficit. The effort to try to present the Social Security program as if it’s a major problem, that’s just a hidden way of trying to undermine and destroy it.

Now, there has been a lot of opposition to it since—you know, since the 1930s, on the part of sectors of extreme wealth and privilege, especially financial capital. They don’t like it, for several reasons. One is the rich don’t barely—for them, it’s meaningless. Anyone with—you know, who’s had a fairly decent income, it’s a tiny addition to your retirement but doesn’t mean much. Another is, if the financial institutions and the insurance companies can get their hands on this huge financial resource—for example, if it’s privatized in some way or vouchers—I mean, that’s a huge bonanza. They’ll have trillions of dollars to play with, the banks, the investment firms and so on.

But I think, myself, that there’s a more subtle reason why they’re opposed to it, and I think it’s rather similar to the reason for the effort to pretty much dismantle the public education system. Social Security is based on a principle. It’s based on the principle that you care about other people. You care whether the widow across town, a disabled widow, is going to be able to have food to eat. And that’s a notion you have to drive out of people’s heads. The idea of solidarity, sympathy, mutual support, that’s doctrinally dangerous. The preferred doctrines are just care about yourself, don’t care about anyone else. That’s a very good way to trap and control people. And the very idea that we’re in it together, that we care about each other, that we have responsibility for one another, that’s sort of frightening to those who want a society which is dominated by power, authority, wealth, in which people are passive and obedient. And I suspect—I don’t know how to measure it exactly, but I think that that’s a considerable part of the drive on the part of small, privileged sectors to undermine a very efficient, very effective system on which a large part of the population relies, actually relies more than ever, because wealth, personal wealth, was very much tied up in the housing market. That was people’s personal wealth. Well, OK, that, quite predictably, totally collapsed. People aren’t destitute by the standards of, say, slums in India or southern Africa, but very—suffering severely. And they have nothing else to rely on, but what they—the, really, pittance that they’re getting from Social Security. To take that away would be just disastrous.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Noam Chomsky. He has a new book out, 10 years after his book 9-11. This is called 9-11: Was There an Alternative? We’ll come back to this conversation in a minute. And if you’d like to get a copy of the full show, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. Stay with us.”

Emphasis Mine.

see:http://www.readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/72-72/7440-noam-chomsky-on-why-the-right-hates-social-security

The 10 Worst Weather Disasters This Year and Why They Are Happening

We’ve already had 10 disasters topping $1 billion each and it’s only September — what gives?…is hoping that people may begin to better understand how global warming can affect us by stepping back and seeing these disasters as part of a bigger picture.

chasdarwin1 Comment

From Alternet, by Tara Lohan

N.B.: The article contained the ambiguous, misleading word ‘midwest’.  I replaced it with one more accurate.

“Floodwaters remain threatening in parts of the Northeast. Acresting Susquehanna River caused evacuations late last week in Pennsylvania — the culprit that time was tropical storm Lee, which came on the heels of Hurricane Irene. These days extreme weather is beginning to seem like the new normal in a year marked by disastrous events — deadly tornadoes, raging floods, crippling drought and wildfire, massive hurricanes, and don’t forget the great white-out of “snowpocalpyse.”

All these events have taken their toll on the country, both in terms of human lives lost and the amount of damages incurred. FEMA’s disaster fund has dipped so low it is having to divert funds from Joplin, Missouri, site of the heartbreaking May tornado, to areas clobbered by Irene. The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reports that we’ve already set a record of 10 disasters over $1 billion each this year— and it’s only September.

So how bad have things been, and what’s to blame? Let’s take a look at the NCDC’s list of wreckage of the last nine months.

1. Ground Hog Day Blizzard, Jan 29-Feb 3

It may be hard to think back to the frigid days of winter, but the massive storm that blanketed central and eastern states was a killer. It put Chicago under several feet of snow, claimed 36 lives and caused losses over $2 billion. The storm stymied travel, exhausted plowing budgets, and brought major cities to a standstill. For New York, the storm capped a month of snowfall that hit 36 inches.

2.Central/Southeast Tornadoes, April 4-5

Next came the beginning of a horrifying tornado season, which included five events topping $1 billion. The first, on April 4-5 hit 10 southern and central states with 46 tornadoes, losses over $2.3 billion and nine people killed.

3. Southeast/Great Lakes Tornadoes, April 8-11

Then came another 59 tornadoes that battered the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa and Wisconsin. Total losses topped $2.2 billion but no casualties were reported.

4. Mid Atlantic/Southeast Tornadoes, April 14-16

This round of 160 tornadoes rocked Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia and Pennsylvania. North Carolina received the brunt with tornadoes killing 22 people out of the storms’ total of 38 casualties. More than $2 billion in losses were reported.

5. Southeast/Ohio Valley/Miss. Valley Tornadoes, April 25-30

And still the tornadoes kept coming — this time 305 tornadoes and 327 people dead, 240 of them killed in Alabama. The twisters hit more populated areas like Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, Huntsville and Chattanooga, bringing the tab to over $9 billion.

6. Central/Southeast Tornadoes, May 22-27

Then came 180 tornadoes that terrorized central and southern states, claiming 177 lives and costing over $7 billion. The town of Joplin, Missouri lost 141 people and received the unfortunate honor of being the site of the country’s deadliest tornado strike. Before and after photos of Joplin showed obliterated neighborhoods, roads, schools, churches and hospitals, and the media was filled with heartbreaking stories of people searching for loved ones.

7. Southern Plains/Southwest Drought, Heatwave and Wildfires, Spring-Summer

Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, southern Kansas, western Arkansas and Louisiana have been massively hot and dry. This has resulted in mammoth wildfires, lost crops and livestock, charred homes, and dwindling water supplies. Texans have now experienced the hottest three months (June through August) ever recorded in the U.S. Climate-denying Texas governor Rick Perry has been praying for rain, but his prayers have done nothing to help the 3.6 million acres torched in his state. (It also hasn’t helped that he cut the volunteer fire department budgets from $30 million to $7 million — a really bad decision considering that most Texans’ first line of defense is from the volunteer corps.) Across the Southwest and southern plains states, firefighting costs have reached $1 million a day. The total economic damages are still being tallied as this summer of hell is far from over, but losses to agriculture, cattle and buildings are more than $5 billion.

8. Mississippi River Flooding, Spring-Summer

The combination of massive rainfall and melting snow made for an epic flood event this year along the Mississippi and its tributaries, with losses creeping toward $4 billion and several lives lost. Homes and fields were submerged and towns evacuated. Photos showed water reaching the top of street signs, barns floating away and roadways disappearing into the floodwaters.

9. North Central Flooding, Summer

That wasn’t the only big flood event of the year either. The same disastrous combo of snow melt and hefty precipitation set the Missouri and Souris rivers on a wild ride. Minot, North Dakota‘s 11,000 folks were sent packing as the water claimed 4,000 area homes. In all Montana, the Dakotas, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri lost homes, businesses and farms with damage estimates at over $2 billion and five deaths reported.

10. Hurricane Irene, August 20-29

And that brings us back to Irene’s recent course through Eastern states. The final tab is still a guess, especially in a stunned and soggy Vermont. According to Circle of Blue, “Standard & Poor reported that total economic losses from the disaster could reach $US 20 billion, according to Reuters. Meanwhile, catastrophe modeler AIR Worldwide has insured-loss estimates between $US 3 to 6 billion, and risk-management firm Kinetic Analysis Corporation has estimated the total damage from Hurricane Irene at $US 7 billion.” The death toll has now reached 45.

Why All the Weather Disasters?

After tallying the lives lost and property damaged, has all this weather taken a toll on our consciousness yet? Are people beginning to wonder if it’s just a crappy, unlucky year — or is there something else going on? Bill McKibben, the environmental author and activist, is hoping that people may begin to better understand how global warming can affect us by stepping back and seeing these disasters as part of a bigger picture. As McKibben told Amy Goodman this week on Democracy Now!:

We’re in unprecedented, off-the-charts territory. It’s not that there haven’t been disasters before. There have always been disasters. Nature is relatively random in that sense. But now we’re seeing two things. One, disasters that go beyond the bounds of what we’ve ever seen before. Because there’s more water in the atmosphere, it’s possible to have bigger floods, record snowfalls when it’s cold, record rainstorms. And we’re seeing more of them in conjunction. Think about what’s been going on just on this continent this year. We’re about one-and-a-half percent of the surface area of the globe in the continental U.S., and we’ve had not only this extraordinary flooding, but on the same day that Hurricane Irene was coming down, Houston set its all-time temperature record, 109 degrees. We’re in the middle of the worst drought ever recorded in Texas. And, you know, Governor Perry’s prayers for rain have so far been unanswered, maybe because he’s done so little to ameliorate the flow of carbon into the atmosphere. We’re in a new situation.

It doesn’t mean that everything that happens is caused by global warming. Hurricanes aren’t caused by global warming. They’re caused by tropical waves drifting off the coast of Africa and encountering the earth’s spin that can begin to set them into rotation. But they are made more powerful. As this hurricane rode up the coast, one of the reasons it was able to pick up so much water, that it’s now dumping on Vermont and Quebec, is that sea surface temperatures were at an all-time record high off New York and New Jersey. Never–the last two years have seen the highest temperatures ever recorded in those waters. When you amp up a system–and so far we’ve added about three-quarters of a watt per square meter of the earth’s surface extra solar energy to the planet by burning coal and gas and oil--when you do that, you can expect more dynamic, more amped-up, more violent weather. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing.

So, to recap — it’s not that any one of our weather events was caused by global warming; it’s that global warming can make them worse. There is an increase in the frequency and the severity of storms — wet storms get even wetter, heat waves get hotter and droughts get even drier. As Seth Borenstein writes for the AP, “This year, there’s been a Pacific Ocean climate phenomenon that changes weather patterns worldwide known as La Nina, the flip side to El Nino. La Ninas normally trigger certain extremes such as flooding in Australia and drought in Texas. But global warming has taken those events and amplified them from bad to record levels, said climate scientist Jerry Meehl at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Associated reported that this year was the second hottest on record — and last year was the hottest. They also turned up a few more disturbing facts:

  • Only nine of the lower 48 states experienced August temperatures near average, and no state had August average temperatures below average.
  • Wetter-than-normal conditions were widespread across the Northeastern United States, which had its second wettest August, as well as parts of the Northern Plains and California. Drier-than-normal conditions reigned across the interior West, the Midwest, and the South.
  • Despite record rainfall in parts of the country, drought covered about one-third of the contiguous United States, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. The Palmer Hydrologic Drought Index indicated that parts of Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas are experiencing drought of greater intensity, but not yet duration, than those of the 1930s and 1950s.
  • An analysis of Texas statewide tree-ring records dating back to 1550 indicates that the summer 2011 drought in Texas is matched by only one summer (1789), indicating that the summer 2011 drought appears to be unusual even in the context of the multi-century tree-ring record.
  • Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Louisiana had their warmest (June-August) summers on record.
  • The U.S. Climate Extremes Index, a measure of the percent area of the country experiencing extreme climate conditions, was nearly four times the average value was during summer 2011.

And if that’s not enough, Arctic sea ice is at a record level low.

So, we’ve got extreme weather that is getting more dangerous. What are we going to do? Apparently not much. Writing for the Guardian, Jule Boykoff takes politicians — especially the climate-denying Republicans — to task for ignoring the perils of climate change. Boykoff writes:

As Republican candidates rehearse Exxon-esque talking points, journalists need to ask them where their weather and climate change thresholds lie. Someone should ask Perry, “At what specific threshold would you begin to ‘believe’ in global warming?” Would he reconsider his position if Texas were thrashed by an Old Testament-style concoction of droughts and tornadoes on an even more regular basis? How regular would this thrashing have to be? More than 97% of active climate scientists are in consensus that humans are contributing significantly to climate change. What percentage does he require to eliminate doubt? 99%? 109%?

Same goes for Obama. How many deaths and billions in economic damage from extreme weather would it take for him to take action to mitigate climate change and, for example, put the kibosh on the Keystone XL pipeline?

Here’s the crux of this issue — at what point are we willing to do everything we can to change the course we’re on and demand the same from our elected officials? Perry and his Republican cohorts in the presidential race (minus Jon Huntsman) are adamant in their belief that climate change is not real despite the the conviction of 97 percent of people trained in that scientific field. Seems crazy right? Even crazier if you think about it this way: There’s a 97 percent change our ship is going to sink. Wouldn’t you want to get the heck off that boat?

There’s no way off this planet, so why aren’t we doing everything we can — Republicans, Democrats, everyone — to divert our ship from its disastrous course?”

Tara Lohan is a senior editor at AlterNet and editor of the new book Water Matters: Why We Need to Act Now to Save Our Most Critical Resource. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraLohan.

Emphasis Mine

see:http://www.alternet.org/story/152385/the_10_worst_weather_disasters_this_year_and_why_they_are_happening__?page=entire

The Republicans’ intergalactic adventures

In the alternate universe where Republican candidates debated yesterday, tax breaks for the rich apparently create jobs while deregulation spurs economic growth and preserves natural resources.

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N.B.: Our world versus their’s! 

By John Wojcik, Peoples World

“In the alternate universe where Republican candidates debated yesterday, tax breaks for the rich apparently create jobs while deregulation spurs economic growth and preserves natural resources.

In our universe, those tax breaks have created no jobs, and deregulation has destroyed our economy, our rivers, our lakes,  our air quality and the Gulf of Mexico.

In Gov. Rick Perry‘s universe, Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.

In our universe, a Ponzi scheme is something done by criminals who trick investors into giving them money that they then pocket for themselves. Social Security, in our universe, is something  It ishard-working people pay into so they can stay out of poverty when they get old. I is one of the most successful programs ever devised and has so much money in its coffers that everyone can be paid everything they are owed until 2037. No other program, government-run or private, can say the same.

In Perry’s universe, “President Obama has proven once and for all that government spending will not create one job.”

In our universe, the president’s stimulus program created 3 million jobs, 300,000 in the state of Texas, alone.

In Perry’s universe, “Keynesian policy and Keynesian theory is now done and disproven.”

In our universe, it’s the GOP program of deregulation and tax cuts that has been disproven. In our universe, deregulation caused the financial crisis and destroyed millions of jobs.

Mitt Romney and his advisors, however, ventured into the reality-based universe , if only briefly.

Romney jumped for joy after Perry reiterated his ongoing attack on Social Security. “Perry has lost,” Romney adviser Stuart Stevens said in an e-mail. “No federal candidate has ever won on the Perry platform to kill Social Security. Never has. Never will.” (A CNN poll in August found 57 percent of Republicans opposed to major changes in both Social Security and Medicare.)

Romney’s declaration last night that the nominee of the GOP must be someone committed to “saving,” not “killing” Social Security rings hollow, however.  He, like Wall Street itself, is also committed to killing Social Security with a variety of schemes that would allow people to “save and invest” rather than pay into the plan. The Romney approach is, at best, a backdoor way of turning over to Wall Street investors the huge Social Security pot of gold they have been trying to grab for years.

Romney says that corporations, which he views as “people,” should get even bigger tax breaks than they have gotten thus far and that almost all regulations on their activity should be eliminated. He has called for zero taxes on companies that have shipped jobs overseas as a way of luring them back home. In our universe, that amounts to rewarding the people who destroyed American jobs, American livelihoods and American hopes.

The Republican candidates all agreed with what Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, calls a “mindless march to austerity.” He said the Republican approach of focusing on the deficit, rather than the jobs crisis, would put the nation on  “a course of radical disinvestment and decline.

“Smart countries do not just turn a chainsaw on themselves. Instead of the current slash-and-burn approach, which is being sold through fear and fatalism, we need an approach that reflects the hopes and aspirations of the American people.”

Harkin pointed to tens of millions of jobs created by visionary leadership and government investment in the nation’s highway system, space exploration and research. For example, he noted, the federal government’s investment of $3.8 billion in the human genome project, between 1988 and 2003, translated into $796 billion in economic output and, in 2010 alone, created 310,000 jobs.

Yesterday evening the Republican candidates, under the colors of our flag and the wings of Ronald Reagan’s jet, offered no solution to the jobs crisis. Instead, they proffered a free-market fairy tale straight from their alternate universe. They made it abundantly clear that their reality is not the reality of the vast majority of the American people.”

Emphasis Mine

see:http://peoplesworld.org/the-republicans-intergalactic-adventures/

Fact checking the GOP debate of 7.9.11

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From The Washington Post

By Glenn Kessler

“…

“It is a monstrous lie. It is a Ponzi scheme to tell our kids that are 25 or 30 years today you’re paying into a program that’s going to be there.”

— Gov. Perry

Perhaps the governor does not know the dictionary definition of a Ponzi scheme. Here’s what Merriam-Webster says: “An investment swindle in which some early investors are paid off with money put up by later ones in order to encourage more and bigger risks.”

This is a frequent mistake politicians make when talking about Social Security. It is not an investment vehicle; it is intended to provide income security as well disability and life insurance. Just more than 60 percent of the 54 million beneficiaries are retired workers; the rest are disabled workers, dependents or survivors.

Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system, which means that payments collected today are immediately used to pay benefits. Until recently, more payments were collected than were needed for benefits. So Social Security loaned the money to the U.S. government, which used it for other things. In exchange, Social Security received interest-bearing Treasury securities. The value of those bonds is now about $2.6 trillion. (We have written about this at length.)

In any case, Perry is wrong to label Social Security a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes ultimately go bust and everyone (except possibly early investors) generally loses their money. Social Security faces a long-term funding issue, but one that most experts say is manageable. After all, the Social Security actuary says that Social Security’s shortfall is 0.7 percent of the gross domestic product over the next 75 years.

“Obamacare is killing jobs. We know that from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.”

— Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.)

Bachmann won’t give up on this factoid, even though we debunked it seven months ago and said it was worth three Pinocchios. It’s just not correct, and remains a perfect example of how politicians twist the facts.

The Congressional Budget Office in August 2010 estimated that the new health care law over the next decade would reduce the number of overall workers in the United States by one-half of 1 percent, which translates into 800,000 people. But that’s not the same as saying it would “kill” that many jobs.

In dry economic language, the CBO essentially said that some people who are now in the workforce because they need health insurance would decide to stop working because the health care law guaranteed they would have access to health care. (As an example, think of someone who is 63, a couple of years before retirement, who is still in a job only because he or she is waiting to get on Medicare at age 65.)

These jobs would disappear, not to be replaced, so there is an intellectually defensible argument one could make that this is bad for the economy; others, however, might argue that this is a small price worth paying for universal health care.

But in any case, the CBO did not say the health law was killing jobs.

“We’ve had requested for years at the Health and Human Services agencies to have that type of flexibility, where we could have menus, where we could have co-pays. And the federal government refuses to give us that flexibility.”

— Perry

Perry gives a misleading account of this application for a waiver on Medicaid rules. The George W. Bush administration rejected the application in 2008, saying it was incomplete and riddled with problems. As far as we can tell, the state has not resubmitted the waiver.

“Obamacare took over one-sixth of the American economy… . If we fail to repeal Obamacare in 2012, it will be with us forever and it will be socialized medicine.”

— Bachmann

“In our state, our plan covered 8 percent of the people, the uninsured. His plan has taken over a 100 percent of the people.”

— Romney

It is simply not true, no matter how often candidates say that the Obama health care law represents socialized medicine or took over one-sixth of the economy. Socialized medicine is a single-payer system, in which the government pays the bills and controls costs (much like Medicare.)

Obama’s law was modeled closely on the law passed by Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts — an inconvenient fact that Romney tries hard to run away from. His comparison here is misleading, since both plans try to deal with the problem of the uninsured by requiring an individual mandate.

“For the president of the United States to go to El Paso, Texas, and say that the border is safer than its ever been, either he has some of the poorest intel of a president in the history of this country, or he was an abject liar to the American people. It is not safe on that border.”

— Perry

Perry is referring to a speech that Obama gave May 10, in which he did some boasting that earned the president a Pinocchio. Obama did not put it quite as bluntly as Perry suggests, and calling the president an “abject liar” seems over the top for the politically tinged comments Obama actually made.

“He only went along with the Libyan mission because the United Nations told him to.”

— Former Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.)

Actually, Santorum has it backwards. The United States requested the U.N. resolution to gain international backing for the NATO-led intervention in the Libyan uprising.

“The idea that we would put Americans’ economy in jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet to me is just — is nonsense. I mean, it — I mean, and I told somebody, I said, just because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said, here is the fact — Galileo got outvoted for a spell.”

— Perry

(N.B.: Galileo?  Never ‘outvoted’ by scientists, only by the Roman Church)

We previously awarded Perry Four Pinocchios for his comments suggesting scientists were increasingly saying climate change was a fiction. We will note he repeatedly did not answer the question at the debate about whether he could name a scientists he thought was credible on the issue.

“As a matter of fact, what he’s done is, he’s said in fact to Israel that they need to shrink back to their indefensible 1967 borders.”

— Bachmann

Obama never said this. The president in May did give a controversial speech, in which he said the de facto border of 1967 should be a starting point for negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians, with agreed swaps of territory. A few days later, he further clarified his comments to make clear he was not saying the lines should be Israel’s border, to the point that he was thanked by the Israeli prime minister in a speech to Congress.

We’ve given Bachmann Four Pinocchios for making a similar claim in the past.


Emphasis Mine

see:http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/fact-checking-the-gop-debate-at-the-reagan-library/2011/09/07/gIQAFrz5AK_blog.html?wpisrc=nl_politics

Al Gore On Climate Change Deniers: It’s Crucial To ‘Win The Conversation’

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from HuffPost, see link below

“former Vice President Al Gore suggests that people today need to “win the conversation” against skeptics of climate change in the same way people stood up to racist comments during the civil rights movement.

Speaking with Climate Reality Project’s Alex Bogusky, Gore argues that in some places, even the words “climate change” have become politically incorrect.

Bogusky explains that it is often difficult to stand up to climate change deniers, but Gore says, “it is no more difficult than it was for Southerners to talk about the evils of racism.”

Gore agrees that explaining the science beyond climate change may be more difficult than confronting racism, but says the moral component is the same.

In the same interview, Gore takes on comments by Texas Governor and presidential hopeful Rick Perry, who has been an outspoken critic of climate change scientists. Perry recently said he believes there are “a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling in to their projects.”

Gore explains that scientists have previously overturned accepted views, so there’s a “natural respect” for a contrarian impulse in the scientific community. But he argues that comments by Perry and others are totally different. He says, “This is an organized effort to attack the reputation of the scientific community as a whole. To attack their integrity, and to slander them with the lie that they are making up the science in order to make money.”

Gore says members of the scientific community did not enter their profession to make money. Nor did they expect to be regularly defending themselves from political attack.

Out of fear of the public supporting “the scientific reality,” Gore contends that:

Powerful polluters … see it as a useful strategy to try to convince the public that the scientists are liars and that they’re greedy and they’re making stuff up. All in the service of their overarching strategy of creating enough doubt to persuade people that there shouldn’t be any sense of urgency about addressing this crisis.

Not all of the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination are as unconvinced of climate change as Perry, however. Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman tweeted several weeks ago that he “trust[s] scientists on global warming.”

The Huffington Post’s Lynne Peeples reported that, according to some scientists, Hurricane Irenemight be part of a growing trend of extreme weather events that are linked to climate change.

Over the past two weeks, hundreds of people have been arrested in front of the White House for protesting the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. According to Tar Sands Action leader Bill McKibben,it is expected to be “the largest collective act of civil disobedience in the history of the climate movement.”

Emphasis Mine

see:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/30/gore-climate-change-deniers_n_940802.html