Wal-Mart: Always Low Practices…

(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)

Could not happen to a more deserving bunch of thieves and miscreants:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) is the subject of a U.S. Justice Department criminal investigation into allegations of bribery in its Mexican subsidiary, according to a person familiar with the probe.

The Justice Department is investigating potential criminal charges under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, according to the person familiar with the probe who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly about it. Wal-Mart is conducting its own review of allegations that its representatives paid local officials in Mexico to get stores opened faster in the early 2000s…

Wal-Mart de Mexico, which is 69 percent owned by Wal-Mart Stores Inc., fell 12 percent yesterday to 37.89 pesos in Mexico City, the biggest decline since May 4, 1998. The parent company’s shares slid 4.7 percent to $59.54 at the close in New York, the biggest drop since Aug. 10….

Settlements involving the corrupt practices act are typically 1 percent to 2 percent of sales, and that would be about $4.5 billion per 1 percentage point of sales for Wal-Mart, Carroll said. FCPA investigations take 2 years to 6 years to settle, he said. The largest such settlement ever was $1.6 billion paid by Siemens AG (SIE) in 2008, he said…

Two top Democrats on congressional panels yesterday moved to start a probe and request a meeting with Wal-Mart executives.

The Times report “raises serious questions about potential violations of United States law” and “about the actions of top company officials in the United States who reportedly tried to disregard substantial evidence of abuse,” Representatives Elijah Cummings of Maryland and Henry Waxman of California, wrote in a letter to Duke…

[Via Felix Salmon.]

The Wal-Mart “miracle” has always relied on a three-legged stool of corrupt practice: Pressuring or bribing local politicians into providing regulatory & tax breaks that would allow Wal-Mart to undercut local businesses and shove employee expenses onto the government; forcing Wal-mart suppliers to constantly reduce their costs-per-item, no matter what this did to the quality of the product or the long-term health of the vendor/manufacturer; and keeping its employees underpaid, overworked, and non-unionized. It’s not a coincidence that Wal-mart got its start in Arkansas, or that it’s always done best in communities—American or overseas—where a handful of rich families have effective control over their local economies / politics. Banana Republicans thrive where the “low information voters” live under social rules not much different than those of a medieval barony, as long as the local peasantry can still consider itself superior to the neighborhood non-whites/immigrants/outcastes. Not hyperbole: Either Wal-Mart “wins”, or our democracy does… and, to be honest, Wal-Mart’s such a social parasite I doubt it would survive long if it succeeded.

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Nightmare Fuel: Political “Sugar Daddies”

Frank Rich at NYMag has a nice comprehensive terrifying roundup of “the old, white, rich men who are buying this election“:

If you want to appreciate what Barack Obama is up against in 2012, forget about the front man who is his nominal opponent and look instead at the Republican billionaires buying the ammunition for the battles ahead. A representative example is Harold Simmons, an 80-year-old Texan who dumped some $15 million into the campaign before primary season had ended. Reminiscing about 2008, when he bankrolled an ad blitz to tar the Democrats with the former radical Bill Ayers, Simmons told The Wall Street Journal, “If we had run more ads, we could have killed Obama.” It is not a mistake he intends to make a second time. The $15 million Simmons had spent by late February dwarfs the $2.8 million he allotted to the Ayers takedown and the $3 million he contributed to the Swift Boat Veterans demolition of John Kerry four years before that. Imagine the cash that will flow now that the GOP sideshows are over and the president is firmly in Simmons’s crosshairs.

His use of the verb killed was meant in jest, of course, much as Foster Friess ($1.8 million in known contributions, and counting) was joking when he suggested that “gals” could practice birth control by putting Bayer aspirin between their knees. America’s billionaires are such cards! And we had better get used to their foibles and funny bones. Whatever else happens in 2012, it will go down as the Year of the Sugar Daddy. Inflamed by Obama-hatred, awash in self-pity, and empowered by myriad indulgent court and Federal Election Commission rulings, an outsize posse of superrich white men will spend whatever it takes to have its way with the body politic and, if victorious, with the country itself. Given the advanced age of most of this cohort, 2012 may be seen as the election in which the geezer empire struck back.

Sugar daddies—whom I’ll define here as private donors or their privately held companies writing checks totaling $1 million or more (sometimes much more) in this election cycle—are largely a Republican phenomenon, most of them one degree of separation from Karl Rove and his unofficial partners in erecting a moneyed shadow GOP, David and Charles Koch. At last look, there were 25 known sugar daddies on the right (or more, if you want to count separately the spouses and children who pitch in). You’ve likely heard of Sheldon Adelson, the Vegas tycoon who is Benjamin Netanyahu’s unofficial ambassador to the GOP. But you may be less familiar with Irving Moskowitz, the bingo entrepreneur who funnels his profits into East Jerusalem settlements. Or Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund master of “flash trading” who poured a clandestine $1 million into ads attacking the “ground-zero mosque” and nearly another $3 million into a scale-model railroad in his Long Island mansion. Or Steven Lund, the co-founder of Nu Skin, which became “direct selling” sponsor of the Romney-run 2002 Winter Olympics after having spent much of the nineties settling complaints over false advertising and other unscrupulous practices with the Federal Trade Commission and six different states’ attorneys general…

I know some of you are going to point out that little of this is news to those who’ve been diligently following the progressive blogs (or even the more literate of the right-wing blogs, where they’re vicariously proud of their masters’ “accomplishments”), but it’s useful to have all the links collected in one four-page article next time someone on twitter or the facewall asks why us liberals act like being successful was somehow a bad thing….

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How Does This Money Thing Work?

Josh Marshall points out that a lot of Romney contributors have maxed out, while Obama donors generally have a lot more room to give, and says:

So one could imagine getting into late summer and Romney would be having a hard time finding new people to give while the Obama campaign would be able to keep harvesting money from his small donor base. (Things were never quite this restrictive; there are various party committees where candidates can direct money. Still, it could be a real problem.)

But under the Citizens United rules, Romney probably just sends those folks to Crossroad and Crossroads GPS. Not sure he’d ever really run into a problem.

I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it. I’ll grant that third parties like Crossroads GPS probably do some kind of in-the-background coordination with campaigns, but it’s not like they’re working under the same roof as the Romney campaign.  That matters, because it’s hard to see how Karl Rove’s message is going to be exactly the same as Romney’s on any given day in whatever state Mitt is visiting.  And is Crossroads going to pay for staffers on the ground for months prior to the campaign, as the Obama campaign has been doing even in Kay’s red county?

Don’t get me wrong—if Crossroads GPS spends $100 million, that’s significant. But it’s not as effective as the Romney campaign spending $100 million, and if Romney can’t tap some more donors, it’s going to hurt him even if Rove and the Kochs step in.

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Public Enemies: “How Pete Peterson is driving the fiscal consensus”

Felix Salmon pulls back the curtain to show who’s pulling the strings:

Trudy Lieberman has a good post at CJR on the “surprisingly broad consensus” around the need to reduce the fiscal deficit in general, and to take aim at Social Security in particular. “Social Security,” she writes, “is the one issue on which the electorate is not divided” — but that hasn’t stopped a bipartisan group of Washington grandees from preaching doom whenever it is brought up.

More generally, the idea of “fiscal responsibility” seems to have become as American as motherhood and apple pie — both parties preach it, and say the other guys are the profligate ones. The group of people saying “hey, we print our own money, interest rates are at zero, inflation is not an issue, the corporate sector isn’t borrowing, there are a thousand more important things to worry about right now, why on earth is everybody worried about the deficit all of a sudden” is in a decided minority.

The obsession about fiscal prudence is a new phenomenon, and can be dated, pretty much, to 2008, when Blackstone went public and Pete Peterson took his billion dollars in proceeds and decided to use it to found the Peter G Peterson Foundation. Wherever fiscal prudence is preached, Peterson’s money can nearly always be found…

One of the most annoying parts of the fiscal debate, at least for me, is the way in which it has become synonymous with spending cuts rather than tax hikes. Say “fiscal balance” and people start thinking in terms of means-testing Social Security, rather than, say, implementing a carbon tax or a financial-transactions tax. And so we get the likes of Paul Ryan being taken very seriously — Mitt Romney is positively gushing about him, these days — even as the idea of paying for expenditures by raising taxes becomes increasingly un-American.

Reasonable people can differ on the question of how important it is to balance the budget, but I think it’s fair to say that there are lot of screamingly important issues, from endemic long-term unemployment to global nuclear proliferation, which aren’t getting a fraction of the attention that fiscal policy is getting. Which only goes to show, I think, just how powerful Pete Peterson’s targeted millions can be.

Pete Peterson, needless to say, is not ‘donating’ his millions so much as he is investing them— in a longterm scam offering him, if he can fool enough people / buy enough politicians, a very respectable ROI.

Not that he doesn’t have plenty of help, much of it from people who should know better. It’s well worth reading Trudy Lieberman’s whole post, too, because she focuses on the media’s failures intersecting with those of our political ‘masters’:

... The media haven’t reported much about how the nuts and bolts of proposals to fix Social Security would affect ordinary people, but they’ve done a super job of showing how Social Security’s opponents have brought one of the biggest segments around to their way of thinking—Congressional Democrats, including the second ranking member of the Senate, Dick Durbin, who is often the media’s go-to guy for the progressive perspective. It’s kind of a validation of Cato’s manifesto. As Politico reported, though Durbin had long allied himself with Social Security supporters, he said he’s been convinced that action is vital. “If we don’t do something and do it quickly bad things can happen in a hurry,” he said.

“We used to have Democrats speaking out (in support of the program) which we don’t have today, “ says Eric Kingson, co-director of the advocacy group Social Security Works. It was the Democrats who pushed for the payroll tax holiday—helped along by the media, which have passed along their quotes about assisting working people. Too often the reportage has glossed over the negatives of the tax cut, without noting what would happen if the tax is not restored. Kingson’s group and others, including some Republicans, argued that if the payroll tax is not restored and the government must borrow money from the Treasury to pay benefits to current recipients, Social Security will contribute to the deficit, which it doesn’t do now. That will produce more reasons to change the program. “Once the dominant view on each side of the aisle was that seniors need Social Security, and it was fair to everyone,” said Kingson. “Generations were not in conflict.”...

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Game Of Chik’n

For some reason, this story really annoyed the hell out of me this morning.

Whenever a new Chick-fil-A opens, hundreds of its devoted fans walk in after spending days, sometimes weeks, outside the front door. Some devotees will wait in line at multiple restaurant openings, just to say they were among the first to eat at that Chick-fil-A. They must really love the chicken sandwiches there, right?

They do, but there’s another reason why they do this. At each grand opening, Chick-fil-A hands out coupons for one free Chick-fil-A Meal per week for a year (52 meals) to the first 100 people in line. For the most devoted Chick-fil-A fans who attend multiple openings, that means having free lunch and dinner for weeks, months or even years.

This leads us to Christina Heise and Matthew Robinson. They are regulars at Chick-fil-A openings, showing up to more than 70 combined. Eventually, they met and started talking. One chicken sandwich led to another, and now they’re engaged to be married.

Oh yes, NOW I remember why this story pisses me off.

As Equality Matters has reported, Chick-fil-A’s WinShape foundation has given millions of dollars to organizations that oppose marriage equality (Marriage and Family Legacy Fund, Family Research Council), bully gay students (Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Focus on the Family), and promote harmful ex-gay therapy (Exodus International). In addition, the company has a score of 0 on HRC’s corporate equality index, offering absolutely no protections to LGBT staff and even firing employees who engage in “sinful” behavior. Compare that to how many Fortune 100 companies offer non-discrimination protections based on sexual orientation (94 percent) and gender identity (69 percent).

Free waffle fries, free bigotry.  Yeah, that pretty much sums up America The Beautiful.  I wonder if they’d honor the coupons for Christina and Matthew here if they were Christina and Madison, or Christopher and Matthew, engaged to be married.  I’m thinking no.  But then again, I’m thinking they wouldn’t be in line anyway…then again, taking 52 free meals from these guys on the company’s dime seems like a pretty good entry into the sweet revenge column to me.

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Monday Morning Open Thread: Taxing

(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)

I wish that could be guaranteed, because this… fekking… guy! Paul Krugman talks about “cannibalizing the future“:

One general rule of modern politics is that the people who talk most about future generations — who go around solemnly declaring that we’re burdening our children with debt — are, in practice, the people most eager to sacrifice our future for short-term political gain. You can see that principle at work in the House Republican budget, which starts with dire warnings about the evils of deficits, then calls for tax cuts that would make the deficit even bigger, offset only by the claim to have a secret plan to make up for the revenue losses somehow or other…

Also among these political cannibals would be Willard “Mitt” Romney, who reassures his real constituents, the donors, per NYMag’s Brett Smiley:

Mitt Romney spoke to deep-pocketed supporters at a private estate in Palm Beach, Florida on Sunday night, and from a public sidewalk outside, reporters were able to overhear specifics on tax deductions he would use to offset the 20-percent income-tax cut he’s proposed for all taxpayers. At least publicly, Romney has to this point discussed his plan only in general terms. “I’m going to probably eliminate for high-income people the second-home mortgage deduction,” Romney reportedly told the crowd in a backyard…

According to the Wall Street Journal, Romney also said he would likely eliminate the state income-tax deduction and state property-tax deduction.

In addition, the presumptive Republican nominee said he would seek to make cuts in the Department of Education and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

“I’m going to take a lot of departments in Washington, and agencies, and combine them,” Romney said. “Some eliminate, but I’m probably not going to lay out just exactly which ones are going to go…”

Via Paul Constant, Tim Egan at the NYTimes has a “Tax Face-Off: Romney vs. Me“:

... Take a look at Line 7 of the 1040, the one where you report wages, salaries and tips — work. It’s from your W2. Romney, of course, had no wages, salaries or tips, which can be taxed at up to 35 percent. His biggest disclosure is Line 13, capital gain — paper profits — where he weighs in with $12,573,249 from 2010. On that, he pays a mere 15 percent.

The other place to report money earned by doing actual work is on Schedule C. That’s where I put income from books, talks, pamphleteering. And so does Romney. Under the profession category, he doesn’t report himself as a businessman or a politician. He’s listed as “independent artists, writers or performers” — just like a mime, or Carrot Top.

In 2010, Romney’s take from this dodge we share, mostly speeches for his part, was $528,871, a mere 2.5 percent of his income. Were he to get serious about being a hardworking indie performer, he might earn millions. But again, even if he were able to take a deduction for that car elevator he’s putting into his remodeled manse in California, his earnings from his speaking business would be taxed at up to 35 percent.

Better to do no work and pay taxes at a far lower rate on capital gains or a category Romney shares with certain hedge fund managers: compensation from his Bain Capital days also taxed at 15 percent called carried interest…

Messrs. Carrot Top and Gallagher may have to seek legal injunction to protect the good name (such as it might be) of professional prop comics. Willard’s more of a ventriloquist, both puppet and puppeteer, skilled at speaking out of both sides of his mouth:

... What are we supposed to make of a candidate who takes certain public positions to court one group of voters — and then tries to reassure an entirely different group of voters by leaking the fact that he doesn’t really believe what he said to win votes from the first group? How many other “private” positions does Romney hold that we don’t know about?

This is an important question because I think the Romney campaign will be engaged in a series of two-steps between now and Election Day. On the one hand, he needs to keep reassuring conservatives that he is really with them on a whole series of issues. But the whole premise that he was the most “electable” Republican rested on the unstated — was this “private,” too? — premise that he was the most “moderate” candidate in the field and could thus appeal beyond the conservative hard core. Romney wants the GOP base to think he’s a staunch conservative and swing voters to believe he’s a closet moderate. That’s why I suspect we’ll hear more hints about Romney’s “private” views on a lot of other matters…

And now that I’ve put everyone in the right sour mood for Patriots Day, aka Tax Day, what else is on the Monday agenda?

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“The Dignity of Work”

And the complete pander-iffic indignity of running for the GOP nomination. From Morgan Little, at the LATimes:

“Even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work,” Mitt Romney said in a campaign stop in Manchester, N.H., in January. “And people said, ‘Well that’s heartless.’ And I said, ‘No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work. It’ll cost the state more providing that day care, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.’ ”

The clip, aired Sunday morning on MSNBC’s “Up With Chris Hayes,” shows a candidate with less leniency toward mothers than one would think, given the outpouring of praise given to mothers of all kinds after Rosen’s comments.

Second video, from 1994, at the link:

... “This is a different world than it was in the 1960s when I was growing up, when you used to have Mom at home and Dad at work,” Romney said. “Now Mom and Dad both have to work whether they want to or not, and usually one of them has two jobs.”

Romney then promoted Bright Horizons Family Solutions, a childcare firm that is “not off where people live, but where they work,” and allows for working parents to more readily tend to their children during the work day…

To quote the late, irreplaceable Steve Gilliard: If your company tells you it’s offering so many perks ‘you’ll never have to leave the office’, it means they intend that you’ll never be able to leave the office.

Presumably Romney, like his fellow Banana Republicans, dreams of returning to those halcyon days of the original Gilded Age, when working-class infants learned their place in GOP Jesus’s chain of being right from the start. Home care for the Alphas, company creches for the lesser orders—oh brave new world!

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But Is Krugthulhu A Boss Fight?

The Invisible Hand of the Free Market has a joystick, yo.

For Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), 76, the 2012 Republican primaries are probably his last tango with presidential politics. But the aging libertarian will still achieve his life-long dream of crushing the nation’s Federal Reserve banking system… If a Houston-based video game developer is successful, that is.

Daniel Williams, 27, recently published a fundraising appeal for a forthcoming video game based on the candidate’s exploits. With the help of crowd-funding website Kickstarter, he hit the goal of $5,000 within a matter of days, based upon the commitments of just 40 backers as of this story’s publication.

Speaking to Raw Story on Wednesday, Williams said his main inspiration for the game was the 1992 8-bit classic “Krusty’s Fun House,” where Krusty the Clown from “The Simpsons” has to set traps for mice and capture them.

For the Ron Paul game, instead of mice it’s delegates. And he collects gold coins — lots and lots of gold coins — naturally. And who could forget the most epic political video game cover art of all time, featuring candidate Paul and his wife Carol in a “Star Wars”-like pose in front of a giant screeching eagle, the Statue of Liberty and exploding red fireworks?

“Faux hipster retro crap-ass crowd-source funded schlock based on one of the worst NES games ever made” so perfectly encapsulates the entire Ron Paul experience on so many different levels that it really is hard for me to imagine that it wasn’t tried before.  Blimp versus Helicopter Ben writes itself.  Kinda sad I didn’t think of it first.

No, seriously.  It’s this awesome.

Cole will totally put down WoW and ME3 and stuff to play this.

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WONKETTE EXCLUSIVE: Breitbart Was A Pimp; O’Keefe Just a Whore

For serious. Hat tip to commentor Egg Berry, and much applause for Wonketteers Matthew Phelan and Liz Farkas:

... Very independent citizen-journalist James O’Keefe and his equally self-funded co-star in the ACORN stings, Hannah Giles, got real paid shortly after finishing their videos in the early fall of 2009, according to depositions taken three weeks ago. The pair admitted under oath to signing contracts with (the now recently deceased) Andrew Breitbart and his business partner, attorney Larry Solov, for the sum total of $120,000. Pretty shocking, right? You could buy a fairly high-end sex boat with that kind of cash. Or, one could, anyway…

Studious observers of the ACORN video controversies may recall that Vera was the ACORN employee who called local police to report on James O’Keefe’s and Hannah Giles’ pimp/boyfriend and prostitute characters just hours after speaking with them. Really abnormally obsessive observers might also recall that the full transcript of the hidden-camera video concludes with O’Keefe and Giles debating with each other over why exactly Vera is photographing their license plate from across the parking lot. The two would ultimately tell the media that Vera had agreed to help them smuggle underage prostitutes through Tijuana and that he wanted to solicit the services of Giles’ prostitute character.

According to his recent testimony, O’Keefe ultimately received $65,000 for his “life rights” from Breitbart in $5000/month installments from September 2009 until September 2010 (terminating roughly around the time that O’Keefe’s failed sex boating of a CNN reporter started to make headlines). Giles, who testified the day after O’Keefe, was also supposed to receive $60,000 per year (or $5,000 per month) but was only compensated $32,000 over the course of ten months from December 2009 to September 2010. Breitbart had reduced her monthly salary to $3,000 beginning around April 2010 and terminated Giles that summer. (There may be a Lily Ledbetter Act lawsuit in Ms. Giles’s future.)...

The new details brought out by the recent depositions have done much to complicate the carefully crafted public narrative of the videos’ development. Breitbart and several others had been involved in the planning stages beginning in July 2009, following a period wherein O’Keefe and Giles had shopped around their East Coast ACORN videos basically like a pilot. “They discussed ACORN during their [Breitbart and O’Keefe’s] first phone conversation,” Iredale tells us. “Andrew Breitbart knew about Mr. O’Keefe’s plans before the West Coast videos were made, and he was aware they were recording people without their knowledge or consent.” During his deposition, O’Keefe refused to provide any details from those early discussions that did not directly pertain to the making of the San Diego video, as per the instruction of his attorney, Mike Madigan….

Much more detail at the link. Be nice if Mr. Vera could get his reputation restored, even though it’s too late to save ACORN from being (further) codified by Wingnut Wurlitzer slander. Given past performance, I assume that O’Keefe has already attempted to pin everything on his dead capo… in the best Breitbart/Drudge tradition, perhaps a chainmail rumor will be mounted that St. Andrew the Angry was murdered by his treacherous underling(s) in an attempt to shift the limelight? Be interesting to see whether O’Keefe’s d/b/a Project VeritasMyAss rates go up or down as a result of this.

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The sport of kings, the old queen’s heart

I wrote about this earlier, but if you haven’t yet, take a look at the video of Romney talking about how his wife’s not happy unless she’s on her Austrian Warmblood—a dressage horse—and about how he rides a “quarter horse” because it has such a nice gait. The Thurston B. Howell stuff has to start hurting him eventually. I don’t know why this video isn’t getting more play.

I know that Bobo and Chunky Bobo will tell us that Real Murkins love to talk about Austria Warmbloods over lunch at the Applebee’s salad bar, but I’m skeptical.

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Romney/Ryan: What’s in Your Wallet Platform?

(Ben Sargent via GoComics.com)

I can’t stop, because they won’t. The Economist’s Will Wilkinson goes gooey for the Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver:

... Unfortunately for Mr Obama, Mr Ryan is no Newt Gingrich. He is not a pompous, self-aggrandizing bloviator in the grand southern style. He’s a likeable, hardworking, detail-oriented, Midwestern wonk who just happens to be something of a looker. Moreover, Mr Ryan’s conservatism largely eschews the odious cultural politics of social conservatives and focuses instead on a pragmatic, fiscally conservative market-oriented meliorism, the appeal of which is by no means limited to the hard right. He’s an attractive politician offering an attractive comprehensive alternative to the administration’s approach. And that’s why it is a matter of urgent political necessity for Mr Obama to try to smear Mr Ryan’s budget as a recipe for brutal, devil-take-the-hindmost injustice…

Mr Ryan is ready and able to debate the substance of public policy in way only a few members of congress, left or right, can match. He’s become a de facto leader of the GOP not because he’s a big idea man in the Gingrich mold, but rather because he’s extraordinarily capable of approaching America’s big-ticket structural problems with coherent, detailed policy proposals. After Mr Obama’s Tuesday speech, Mr Ryan’s office released a sharp, systematic rebuttal on Facebook. You don’t have to agree with Mr Ryan’s politics to see the substance here. Although he is at least Mr Ryan’s equal as a debater and policy wonk, Mr Obama has not and will not win every fight he picks with him. Mr Obama seems to be gambling on the assumption he is safely encamped on the moral high ground, and can therefore lose a good few battles and nevertheless win the war…

First off, humectified much, W.W.? If Ryan-mania doesn’t blow over like every other GOP fad this season, Rick “Sarah Starbursts” Lowrey may lose the Most Transparently Embarrassing Media Moment award he stole from Chris “Dubya’s flightsuit package sends a tingle up my leg” Matthews. Secondly, because I am old enough to remember stuff that happened even before 2001, I do not believe the words “sharp, systematic rebuttal” and “Facebook” should be used in the same sentence. As for content, let’s defer to a real economist, discussing “The Gullible Center“:

The Ryan cult was very much on display last week, after President Obama said the obvious: the latest Republican budget proposal, a proposal that Mitt Romney has avidly embraced, is a “Trojan horse” — that is, it is essentially a fraud. “Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country.”

The reaction from many commentators was a howl of outrage. The president was being rude; he was being partisan; he was being a big meanie. Yet what he said about the Ryan proposal was completely accurate.

Actually, there are many problems with that proposal. But you can get the gist if you understand two numbers: $4.6 trillion and 14 million.

Of these, $4.6 trillion is the revenue cost over the next decade of the tax cuts embodied in the plan, as estimated by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. These cuts — which are, by the way, cuts over and above those involved in making the Bush tax cuts permanent — would disproportionately benefit the wealthy, with the average member of the top 1 percent receiving a tax break of $238,000 a year…

Meanwhile, 14 million is a minimum estimate of the number of Americans who would lose health insurance under Mr. Ryan’s proposed cuts in Medicaid; estimates by the Urban Institute actually put the number at between 14 million and 27 million.

So the proposal is exactly as President Obama described it: a proposal to deny health care (and many other essentials) to millions of Americans, while lavishing tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy — all while failing to reduce the budget deficit, unless you believe in Mr. Ryan’s secret revenue sauce. So why are centrists rising to Mr. Ryan’s defense?

My personal response would be “Because those self-styled ‘centrists’ are either morons or liars, or both”, but you can check the link Professor Krugman’s sober, reasoned, adult conclusions.

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Getting Worked Over

What’s going on here in Kentucky’s employment scene is typical nationally:

With the economy slowly reviving, an executive from Atlas Van Lines recently visited Louisville, Ky., with good news: the company wanted to hire more than 100 truck drivers ahead of the summer moving season.

But a usually reliable source of workers, the local government-financed job center, could offer little help, because the federal money that local officials had designated to help train drivers was already exhausted. Without the government assistance, many of the people who would be interested in applying for the driving jobs could not afford the $4,000 classes to obtain commercial driver’s licenses. Now Atlas is struggling to find eligible drivers.

Across the country, work force centers that assist the unemployed are being asked to do more with less as federal funds dwindle for job training and related services.

And that’s because Republicans have cut job training programs again and again.  Both this year’s version of the Ryan Austerity Plan and last year’s version called for massive cuts to job training programs, and the Republicans got a healthy chunk of those cuts as part of budget deals (that they are looking to renege upon now).  By the way, every single Republican in Congress voted to keep paying federal oil subsidies which would have more than covered the job training budget several times over.  Instead, these programs are out of money in April already.

To bolster training and other services for jobless workers, the Obama administration recently proposed consolidating two programs. The general dislocated worker program paid for under the Workforce Investment Act would be combined with the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, which provides training and other benefits to workers who lose their jobs because of foreign competition.

The trade program, which has an annual budget of $575 million, is typically more generous, but narrow in eligibility. The combined program would make all funds available to anyone who had lost a job, regardless of the reason.

In his latest budget proposal, President Obama also requested an additional $2.8 billion a year for job training over the next decade. “Even in this very tight budget,” said Gene Sperling, national economic adviser, “the president felt that there was an imperative to call right now for a more simplified and effective training system” that also had an increase in funds.

You’re probably saying to yourself “Why cut job training programs for people who want to work when unemployment is as high as it is?”  You’ve answered your own question, same as why Republicans want to eliminate federal programs for birth control, preventative care, sex education, early childhood education, and day care.  They don’t want anything to get better for the working poor.  They might end up with an extra five bucks to give to a Democrat.  Can’t have that.  Gotta have tax cuts for the Job Creators instead.  That’ll teach you to be poor.

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Open Thread: Treachery — It’s In Their Nature

A little schadenfreude to counteract the holiday sweetness. The GOP scorpions are feeling bottled in, and reacting as scorpions in a bottle will. Eric Cantor can’t resist the wiles of a winsome young lad…

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor went into damage control mode Friday following the revelation that he contributed $25,000 to a super PAC devoted to defeating incumbent House members — including numerous Republicans.

The news of Cantor’s contribution to the Campaign for Primary Accountability, first reported by Roll Call Friday afternoon and confirmed by a spokesman for the super PAC, was said to have taken party leaders by surprise. House Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, and National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions, knowledgeable aides said, had not received advance word that the contribution had been made…

Cantor’s contribution came during last month’s heated incumbent vs. incumbent primary between GOP Reps. Adam Kinzinger and Don Manzullo, a contest where Manzullo was targeted with more than $200,000 in CPA spending. The super PAC had been running TV ads against Manzullo, a 20-year-incumbent who had been drawn into the same district as the freshman Kinzinger, whom Cantor was openly supporting…

Ray Allen, Cantor’s political consultant, said in a written statement that Cantor’s donation to CPA had been earmarked expressly for use in the Illinois race and not in any other contests. Allen also said that Cantor had made the contribution after being approached by Rep. Aaron Schock, an Illinois Republican who also supported Kinzinger and who had asked Cantor to donate to CPA…

That would be this Aaron Schock. Cantor’s always had an eye for the ‘young guns’, as per the name of his personal PAC…

But CPA is challenging that version of events. Appearing on CNN Friday evening, Leo Linbeck, a Houston construction magnate who is one of the super PAC’s primary funders, said he was not aware that Cantor’s donation had been earmarked specifically to target Manzullo…Linbeck also framed the Cantor donation in terms that are sure to roil the House Republican Conference.

“We are delighted that the House leadership of the GOP shares our vision of creating real competition for entrenched incumbents,” Linbeck said. “I mean, that’s so forward-thinking of them. This idea that committee chairs and House leadership ought to actually compete for the support of their district, we applaud their foresight.”

[via NYMag]

And while a sobbing John Boehner drunk-dialed Nancy Pelosi, the National Weasel Federation has quietly contacted their legal representatives to quash media comparisons of Eric Cantor to any of the better-known Mustelidae family. Meanwhile, Pastor Huckabee might not have been able to beat John McCain in 2008, but he figures he can do better on the radio than that other bitter old man:

On Monday, former Arkansas governor and one-time Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee will launch a three-hour radio program on almost 200 stations across the country, going voice-to-voice with Limbaugh in the noon-to-3 p.m. time slot, Monday through Friday.

Cumulus Media, which owns and operates the new program, is already pitching Huckabee to listeners and advertisers as the “safe alternative” to a man who has recently found himself under weeks of intense fire – not for the first time – and who some believe could be vulnerable to a challenge from someone offering a kinder, gentler conservative voice.

“Our tagline is, ‘More conversation, less confrontation’,” Huckabee told POLITICO. “I’m going to treat every guest with respect and civility. Nobody is going to come on and get into a shouting match with me. That’s just not my style.”

Making a direct comparison with Limbaugh, John Dickey, the co-COO of Cumulus Media, adds, “This is going to be safer from a commercial standpoint, and more respectful from a listener’s perspective. I think that environment has been sorely lacking in talk radio.”...

Meanwhile, Leader (Perhaps) of the Civilising Forces, Newt Gingrich, tells Fox News that he’s ready for a kinder, gentler relationship with his fellow alpha Republican:

Newt Gingrich acknowledged Sunday that his campaign is “operating on a shoestring,” as he signaled he is preparing to transition from candidate to surrogate in anticipation of Mitt Romney winning the nomination…

Gingrich spoke openly about his campaign’s money troubles. He said the campaign has had to dip into personal funds—“a little bit, but not dramatically”—and that the campaign is “slightly less” than $4.5 million in debt.

“We owe much more than we wanted to,” Gingrich said. He explained that the Florida primary in late January “got to be a real brawl” and that his campaign “tried to match Romney.”...

Though Gingrich and Romney throughout January engaged in some of the most personal attacks of the presidential primary campaign, Gingrich said Sunday that the two are at peace with one another.

“I hit him as hard as I could, he hit me as hard as he could—turned out he had more things to hit with than I did,” Gingrich said. “That’s part of the business.”

Gingrich said that if Romney wins 1,144 delegates and clinches the nomination, he will do “everything I can” to support him going into November.

“We are absolutely committed to defeating Barack Obama,” he said. “I will work as hard for (Romney) as I would for myself.”

Shorter Newt: C’mon, Mitt, you’re the only reason I’m not lead dog this season! You owe me a paid consultant spot… Callista’s Tiffany jones is a lot more burdensome than Ann’s horsey dressage toys when you don’t have a quarter-billion in Bain-fed Swiss bank accounts to support it. Hey, it’s not like YOU enjoy standing in front of the media lights defending the indefensible…

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So, apart from natural history narratives, what’s on the agenda for a Sunday evening?

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Working As Intended, Folks

This Easter Sunday, the NY Times has this Jason DeParle story on red states shredding welfare safety nets and the people who keep falling through them.

Faced with flat federal financing and rising need, Arizona is one of 16 states that have cut their welfare caseloads further since the start of the recession — in its case, by half. Even as it turned away the needy, Arizona spent most of its federal welfare dollars on other programs, using permissive rules to plug state budget gaps.

The poor people who were dropped from cash assistance here, mostly single mothers, talk with surprising openness about the desperate, and sometimes illegal, ways they make ends meet. They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners — all with children in tow.

Esmeralda Murillo, a 21-year-old mother of two, lost her welfare check, landed in a shelter and then returned to a boyfriend whose violent temper had driven her away. “You don’t know who to turn to,” she said.

Maria Thomas, 29, with four daughters, helps friends sell piles of brand-name clothes, taking pains not to ask if they are stolen. “I don’t know where they come from,” she said. “I’m just helping get rid of them.”

To keep her lights on, Rosa Pena, 24, sold the groceries she bought with food stamps and then kept her children fed with school lunches and help from neighbors. Her post-welfare credo is widely shared: “I’ll do what I have to do.”

And as any conservative can tell you, this is working 100% as intended.  If those on welfare turn to crime, then it’s clearly permissible to cut welfare even further to stop coddling these criminals, and then of course pass those savings through tax cuts on to the Almighty Job Creators, who will then certainly create more jobs and uplift these broken souls back into society.  Any time now, those jobs will be just pouring out.  Yep.

Of course without that vital last part, it becomes and endless conveyor belt to transfer wealth to the wealthy and drive the poor into other states (preferably blue ones) where they become somebody else’s problem.  Meanwhile, red states like Arizona get to claim they’ve cut welfare rolls and that the rest of America needs to follow their success.

Meanwhile, the expensive private prison conglomerates designed to incarcerate the increasingly desperate among us costing taxpayers far more per person than the welfare did in the first place is beside the point, that money’s well spent because we’re tough on crime.  Certainly the GOP is licking their chops at the latest iteration of the House GOP budget, turning safety net programs into block grants they can raid for even more tax cuts and wealth transfer.  And if the GOP gets control, guess what’s happening to these programs in the future?

Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the top House Republican on budget issues, calls the current welfare program “an unprecedented success.” Mitt Romney, who leads the race for the Republican presidential nomination, has said he would place similar restrictions on “all these federal programs.” One of his rivals, Rick Santorum, calls the welfare law a source of spiritual rejuvenation.

“It didn’t just cut the rolls, but it saved lives,” Mr. Santorum said, giving the poor “something dependency doesn’t give: hope.”

As in “hope God chose you to be rich, because otherwise you’re screwed.”  Happy Easter Hunger Games from the GOP.  Don’t worry, when you die, your suffering will be rewarded in the next life.  Oh wait, it won’t because you were poor and wasted your life so you obviously sinned, so it’s okay if we kick your face in a few more times.

Like I said, working as intended.

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Shitty jobs report

Time for more tax cuts, I guess.

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