Lowry: Romney's argument 'flawed & dangerous'

You won't hear (see) me say this often, so get ready: arch-conservative Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, is right.  He's correct.  Take his conclusion:

This tendency [to demand that poor people pay federal income tax] represents a backdoor return to country-club Republicanism, with the approval of part of the Republican base. Fear of the creation of a class of “takers” can slide into disdain for people who are too poor — or have too many kids or are too old — to pay their damn taxes. For a whiff of how politically unattractive this point of view can be, just look at the Romney fundraising video.

Wow.  He actually gets it this time.  No further comment necessary.

Romney’s 47 Percent Blunder 

His tax argument is flawed and dangerous.

By Rich Lowry

September 21, 2012 | National Review

URL: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/327961/romney-s-47-percent-blunder-rich-lowry

GOP donor: 'I'm not a miner, I just play one on TV'

This story made my day.  You can't make this stuff up, folks.  I mean, to think that somebody would think they could get away with this in today's Internet age is just hilarious.

WTF was he thinking?  Was he too cheap to hire an actor?  Too worried that none of his workers would do the ad for him, or they'd f--k it up?  Or was he just so vain that he had to be on TV himself, front and center?

Master thespian Heath Lovell missed his chance to add several authentic touches to his performance, such as coal dust on his cheek, a pack of Marlboro reds in his overalls front pocket, a canary on his shoulder...

Heath Lovell, Coal Executive, Poses As Miner In Ad For Republican Congressional Candidate Andy Barr

By Bonnie Kavoussi

September 20, 2012 | Huffington Post

URL:  http://huff.to/S783mXhp_ref=tw

Frum: Mitt played up to the rich's class terror but got burned

Conservative pundit David Frum makes it clear what the 47 percent is meant to mean to Republicans, the facts be damned:

Start with this data point:  When you ask white Americans to estimate the black population of the United States, the answer averages out at nearly 30%. Ask them to estimate the Hispanic population, and the answer averages out at 22%.

So when a politician or a broadcaster talks about 47% in "dependency," the image that swims into many white voters' minds is not their mother in Florida, her Social Security untaxed, receiving Medicare benefits vastly greater than her lifetime tax contributions; it is not their uncle, laid off after 30 years and now too old to start over. No, the image that comes into mind is minorities on welfare. 

It's also a lot of silly and, frankly, disproven fear about Obama's diabolical designs on the wealthy (his first term is almost over and America still exists, pretty much as it was under Dubya):

The background to so much of the politics of the past four years is the mood of apocalyptic terror that has gripped so much of the American upper class.

Hucksters of all kinds have battened on this terror. They tell them that free enterprise is under attack; that Obama is a socialist, a Marxist, a fascist, an anti-colonialist. Only by donating to my think tank, buying my book, watching my network, going to my movie, can you - can we - stop him before he seizes everything to give to his base of "bums," as Charles Murray memorably called them.

And what makes it all both so heart-rending and so outrageous is that all this is occurring at a time when economically disadvantaged Americans have never been so demoralized and passive, never exerted less political clout.  [...]

Yet even so, the rich and the old are scared witless! Watch the trailer of Dinesh D'Souza's new movie to glimpse into their mental universe: chanting swarthy mobs, churches and banks under attack, angry black people grabbing at other people's houses.

It's all a scam, but it's a spectacularly effective scam. Mitt Romney tried to make use of the scam, and now instead has fallen victim to it himself.

Here’s Why Mitt’s 100% Wrong on the 47%

By David Frum

September 18, 2012 | Daily Beast

URL: http://www.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2012/09/18/here-s-why-mitt-s-100-wrong-on-the-47.html

Relax, Mitt: The 47 percent includes lots of GOP hypocrites

About that 47 percent, Mitt... It's not only composed of combat troops, children, students, the disabled, and the elderly collecting Social Security, it also includes bumpkins and hypocrites who vote againt their own economic interests because they can't stand a smart black president:

The percentage of people receiving Social Security in Kentucky from 2006 to 2010 averaged 31.4 percent, compared to 27.5 percent nationally, according to U.S. Census figures. About 6.5 percent of Kentuckians received Supplemental Security Income during that time, compared to 4 percent nationally.  [...] 

Still, Romney is expected to win Kentucky easily, even with an estimated 2010 poverty rate of 17.7 percent compared to 13.8 nationally, and median household income well below the national level.

Romney's margin in Eastern Kentucky, home to many of the state's poorest counties, might be greater than across the state as a whole, observers said.

For instance, Owsley County is the poorest in the state by economic measures. More than 41 percent of its 4,900 residents were poor in 2010, and 52.8 percent of the people receive food-stamp benefits, compared with 19.7 statewide, according to state and federal agencies.

But as in several other relatively poor Eastern Kentucky counties, most residents are registered Republican. Romney will win the county easily, said Molly Turner, head of the Owsley County Community Action Team.

So relax, Mitt!  Just because Kentucky and other Southern states are much poorer than the national average, they're still in the bag, even if you publicly write them off as dependent welfare queens. They won't say no to their government cheese, but they'll still hate Obama for giving it to them.  These salt-of-the-earth Southerners have strong principles!

Kentucky residents who rely on federal aid expected to vote for Romney

By Bill Estep

September 19, 2012 | Lexington Herald-Leader

URL: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/09/19/168970/kentucky-residents-who-rely-on.html

Romney's anti-Obama bombshell goes 'pfffft-sizzle-poof!'

Romney's campaign has obviously been holding back this "bombshell" audio recording of Obama for the right moment, and they decided that now was the time, in light of the campaign-killing secret recording of Romney's remarks to a group of rich private donors in Florida in May.

Here's what Obama said 14 years ago that is supposedly so damning (note that it was edited for "shock effect" on Rush Limbaugh's program, while I'm giving you an unedited excerpt here):

What we’re going to have to do is somehow resuscitate the notion that government action can be effective at all.  There has been a systematic -- I don’t think it’s too strong to call it a propaganda campaign, against the possibility of government action and its efficacy.  [The next few sentences were deleted by Rush for obvious reasons. - J]  And I think some of it has been deserved. The Chicago Housing Authority has not been a good model of good policy-making. And neither necessarily have been the Chicago public schools.  Uh, what that means then, is that as we try to resuscitate this notion that, uh, we're all in this thing together, leave nobody behind, we do have to be innovative in thinking in, how, what are the delivery systems that are actually effective and meet people where they live. Uh, and, and my suggestion, I guess would be, that the trick -- and this is one of the few areas where there I think there are technical issues that have to be dealt with as opposed to just political issues -- I think the trick is figuring out how do we structure government systems that pool resources and hence facilitate some redistribution -- because I actually believe in redistribution -- uh, at least at a certain level to make sure that everybody’s got a shot.

This is indeed a teachable moment, but not for the reason Rush Limbaugh says.  

Context: Obama said this in 1998, when Bill Clinton was our President, presiding over a budget surplus and a booming economy, but just weeks before a hyper-partisan Republican-majority House of Representatives impeached him, and a few months before the Senate acquitted him.  Like today, Republicans back then were attacking the role of government, saying, like they always do, that it cannot do anything right and must be cut to the bone.  Like today, they were hysterical about Clinton's imminent diabolical plans to make the U.S. socialistic, take away our guns, hand over U.S. sovereignty to the UN, appease every country except our allies, you name it.

Irregardless (that's not a word, but I still use it) of the context of Obama's remarks, let's recall for a minute what the U.S. Government -- any government from the dawn of human civilization -- actually does, in pure basics: it collects taxes from the people how it sees fit, and then spends that money how it wants. It does not, for example, say, "Mr. David Koch, since you contributed 0.01 percent of federal income tax revenues in FY 2011, we are allocating 0.01 percent of the FY 2012 federal budget to you."  

Since our government doesn't do this -- since no government has ever done this, ever -- then by definition, what our government does is redistribute wealth.  Because, sooner or later all government spending ends up in private hands -- just not necessarily (and not usually) in the hands that gave it its money in the first place.  If that's not redistribution then I don't know what is.

And let's remember that Big Government is part of the GDP formula that everybody learns in Economics 101:  GDP = private consumption + gross investment + government spending + (exports − imports), or GDP = C + I + G + (X-M).

So let me put hammer a big fat nail in the coffin of the idea that government redistribution is somehow new, or controversial, or evil, or conceived by American Democrats.  In fact, that's pretty much all the government does, for good or ill. Chew on that epiphany, then try to come up with an example to prove me wrong.  I'll be waiting....

(Irregardless, we all know that America has become a Socialistic country after almost four years of Obama. That's just a fact.  We all wear government-issued gray pajamas and march each morning to work in the People's National iPhone Factory to the tune of revolutionary hymns and munch on moldy government cheese and sawdust-fortified bread 3x a day.  Right.)

We Didn't Need a Tape from 1998 to Tell Us Barack Obama is a Socialist!

September 19, 2012 | The Rush Limbaugh Show

URL:  http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/09/19/we_didn_t_need_a_tape_from_1998_to_tell_us_barack_obama_is_a_socialist