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Did Reagan Raise Taxes? Let GOP Candidates Answer
January 10th, 2012
Politicians and their flacks lie every day, but it is unusual for someone prominent to utter a totally indefensible falsehood like the whopper that just sprang from the mouth of Eric Cantor’s press secretary on national television.
While interviewing the House majority leader, “60 Minutes” correspondent Leslie Stahl suggested that he might consider compromise because even Ronald Reagan had raised taxes several times. Cantor’s flack then burst out in protest, saying he couldn’t allow her remark “to stand.”
The premise of Stahl’s perceptive question was perfectly accurate, of course. But the rude Hill staffer is scarcely alone in promoting this super-sized lie about Reagan’s tax purity. And it would be worth discovering which of the Republican candidates likewise reject a fundamental truth about their party and its idol.
That video exchange is revealing for several reasons, not least because it shows Cantor trying to suggest that he was always willing to “cooperate” with President Obama and the Democrats during the current session of Congress. The public’s distaste for the obstructionism spearheaded by Cantor and supported by the tea party faction is evident in polling data, which may well worry the ambitious Cantor, who almost openly hopes to depose Speaker John Boehner.
The Lethal Fantasies of Dear Old Ron Paul
January 2nd, 2012The latest evidence of simmering racial resentment on the American political fringe showed up Monday in a Facebook post by a California man who urged the assassination of the president and his two daughters in obscene, racist language. Aside from the Secret Service, there was little reason for most of us to pay attention to this sick boob — except that he was identified as a local political leader of the tea party and an avid supporter of Rep. Ron Paul, the Texas Republican who now seems likely to place first in the Iowa presidential caucuses.
To those who have followed Paul’s long career as a failed presidential candidate — these campaigns have become a family business — the appearance of yet another racist nutjob in his orbit is scarcely news. The newsletters that earned millions of dollars for him from gullible subscribers over the decades were often soiled with vile invectives against blacks and other minorities. He is a perennial favorite of the John Birch Society and kindred extremists on the right. He once refused to return a donation from a leader of the Nazi-worshipping skinheads in the Stormfront movement.
What is it about the kindly old doctor that attracts some of the most violent and reactionary elements in society to his banner?
For many years, Paul was merely an outlying crank in the ranks of the Republican Party — a “libertarian” who courted the paranoid bigots in the John Birch Society, whose monthly magazine featured his name on its masthead as a “contributing editor.” More than a decade ago, during his 1996 campaign for Congress, the racist ravings in his newsletters were first exposed — the same series of articles that besmirched Martin Luther King and Barbara Jordan and encouraged every racist stereotype about African-Americans as criminals and welfare dependents. He disowns those words now, but back then a spokesman defended them as merely “taken out of context.”
The Republican Closet That Won’t Stay Closed
December 20th, 2011If these are the last weeks of Rick Perry’s ridiculous presidential campaign, his desperation is turning him into a nasty clown indeed. By publicly attacking the gays and lesbians who have chosen to serve their country in uniform, the Texas governor seems to have gained ground in Iowa. But at what cost did he win a few points that still leave him well below the top tier? His pollster and consultant Tony Fabrizio has been “outed,” rightly or wrongly — and worse still, the swinging closet door of the Republican Party has been flung open again. Who else will be found inside?
From the days of the Cold War, when reigning mischief-maker Roy Cohn was bedding boys and denouncing gays as “sissies,” through the hidden homosexual history that leads from Marvin Liebman, co-founder of the National Review to Arthur Finkelstein, the ad man behind the ’80s conservative revival, to the defection of former “hit man” David Brock, to Ken Mehlman, the Bush-era party chairman who didn’t dare (until recently) to speak of his own true nature, and even Karl Rove, who ran gay-baiting campaigns despite his own father’s orientation, Republicans have repeatedly watched their own intellectual and political leaders embarrassed by what emerges from that capacious closet.
In Fabrizio’s case, he was pushed out by GOProud, an organization of right-leaning gays, when its leader, Jimmy DeSalvia, complained on a message board about the latest Perry ad, which says there’s “something wrong” in America when gays can serve “openly” in the military but children cannot pray in public schools.
New ‘Mature’ Newt Is Just Same Old Gingrich
November 28th, 2011Very few politicians have provided as much villainous entertainment over the years as Newt Gingrich, who now assures everyone that he has “matured” since his brief and tumultuous reign on Capitol Hill.
While the former speaker may at last have settled into a third marriage, there is no sign of improvement in his character. He is rising in current polls because Mitt Romney repels many Republicans and he is the last alternative. But Gingrich’s most recent debate performance revealed the same brazen dissembler whose flaws proved ruinous to him and — were he to win the nomination — would be disastrous for his party. On Nov. 9, with millions watching, he uttered a bald lie that revived memories of his most embarrassing moments in Washington.
The moment of truth — or more accurately, falsehood — came when CNBC’s John Harwood noted that back in 2006, Gingrich was paid $300,000 by Freddie Mac, the gigantic federally backed housing financier. “What did you do for that money?” asked Harwood, while attempting to suggest that Gingrich sought to “fend off” stricter regulation of Freddie Mac and its sister company, Fannie Mae, by officials in the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve worried about the firms’ inflated $5 trillion in mortgage securities.
Unacceptable in Today’s GOP? Realism and Compassion
November 26th, 2011Tasteless and questionable as it was for CNN to “co-sponsor” a Republican presidential debate with a pair of right-wing Washington think-tanks, at least the branding was accurate. There among the honored interlocutors were the authors of dismal failure and national disgrace in the Bush era, such as Paul Wolfowitz and David Addington, whose presence helpfully reminds us that to elect a Republican risks a presidency that will make the same gross moral and strategic errors, or worse. Listening to them talk about Iran, a nation that unlike Iraq or the Taliban is a real military power, it was clear that we will certainly edge closer to another war with almost any Republican in power.
What the debate also revealed again is that a Republican who dares to utter a few words of compassion or realism is likely to prove unacceptable to the base of that party.
Coming off his proposal to repeal child labor laws, so that schools can force 9-year-olds to do the work of “unionized janitors,” it was surprising to hear Newt Gingrich appeal to human decency in resolving the immigration issue. But so he did, sensibly noting that deporting 11 million or more undocumented residents of the United States would be not only impractical but viciously cruel. It would mean ripping apart families that have lived here peacefully for generations.
Mindless — But Always Talking Loud
November 21st, 2011At a time when nations that tax, spend, regulate and invest more consistently outstrip the United States in many measures of progress, leading Republicans speak only of smashing government and ending vital programs. In this constantly escalating rhetorical game, it became inevitable that one of them would eventually expose the emptiness of this vainglorious display. And it was unsurprising that the ultimate faker would turn to be Rick Perry.
The dim demagogue could scarcely contain himself during the CNBC debate last Wednesday night as he turned to Ron Paul, his fellow Texan whose sincere hatred of government verges on anarchism, saying: “I will tell you, it is three agencies of government when I get there that are gone. Commerce, Education and the — what’s the third one there? Let’s see.”
With the world watching, he literally didn’t know what he was talking about. And from there it only got worse.
Grinning and groping for an answer, Perry flailed embarrassingly until Paul helpfully suggested “EPA?” But for some reason that didn’t satisfy Perry, who smirked as if someone was trying to trick him into giving the wrong response. “The third agency of government I would — I would do away with, Education, the …” For painful moments, he kept digging.
Bloomberg vs. Occupy Wall Street
November 5th, 2011Americans listen when Michael Bloomberg speaks, not only because he is the mayor of New York City, but because he is a self-made billionaire and a smart guy. People think Bloomberg knows a lot about business and investment, which he surely does. But he nevertheless sounds terribly misinformed sometimes, as he did the other day — when he complained that “Occupy Wall Street” is unfairly blaming the nation’s big bankers for the crash and recession, when the real culprits are Congress and the government-sponsored housing lenders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
“It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis,” said the mayor. “It was, plain and simple, Congress, who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp… But they were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will. They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody.”
It was Bloomberg’s misfortune to blurt those remarks a day before the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, whose offices are only blocks away from City Hall, announced that the Justice Department is suing Allied Home Mortgage Corp. for perpetrating a gigantic, decade-long fraud, in violation of federal regulations and statutes, that cost the government at least a billion dollars and forced thousands of American families out of their homes.
Speaking up for That ’1 Percent’
October 31st, 2011Lauded by the Washington press corps for his “courage” and “honesty” in confronting federal deficits and the national debt, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., wrote a budget that almost sank the Republican Party — and may still damage its prospects — because he proposed to dismantle Medicare. Yet his party still relies upon Ryan to speak on behalf of its most important constituency, now known in America and across the world as “the 1 percent.”
Addressing the right-wing Heritage Foundation on Wednesday, Ryan sought to discredit Elizabeth Warren — the Massachusetts Democratic senatorial candidate, Harvard faculty member, creator of the Consumer Finance Protection Agency and enemy No. 1 of Wall Street cheaters — for daring to utter an obvious truth.
While praising the creativity and industriousness of entrepreneurs, Warren recently pointed out that business cannot thrive without functional government providing police and fire protection, safe and efficient transportation, educated workers and myriad other public services.
Paying for those services is a responsibility that must be broadly shared, she said, and the rich who have benefited most from government in so many ways should now pay their fair share of its budgets and debts.
“You built a factory out there? Good for you,” she explained in videotaped remarks that lit up the Internet not long ago. “But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.”
What Romney’s Religion Reveals About His Politics
October 22nd, 2011Recent expressions of political and religious prejudice against Mormons and the Church of Latter-Day Saints have offered Mitt Romney a chance to play the bullied underdog — and to explain, as he did with clarity and dignity during the Vegas debate, the meaning of the constitutional prohibition against any religious test for public office.
That won’t discourage Baptist conservatives or atheist entertainers like Bill Maher from making fun of Mormons and their faith, whose history and tenets certainly sound strange to outsiders.
But is there any real reason to be troubled by Romney’s religion? What does the career of the former Massachusetts governor tell us about the ideology of the LDS church — and what his personal beliefs may portend if he becomes the first Mormon in the Oval Office?
The complaint from the religious right — which has promiscuously allied itself with Mormon leaders to oppose reproductive and gay rights (and civil rights in an earlier era) — is that the LDS church does not conform to the tenets of Christianity as they see it. Pastor Robert Jeffress, the man whose anti-Mormon crusading has now taken him onto late-night television and the opinion pages of The Washington Post, says he prefers a “committed Christian,” but doesn’t say why or what that precisely means.
The Tax Hikes That Republicans Love
October 15th, 2011From the tea parties to the corporate boardrooms to the presidential debate platforms, we hear a familiar droning whine about taxes — except the angry message is no longer simply that taxes are too high. Today, conservative politicians and pundits complain instead that some people, namely those too poor to owe federal income taxes, aren’t paying enough. So what if those people can scarcely sustain their families, like the millions of middle-class families doing slightly better but struggling, as well?
This is the Democratic “fairness” argument turned upside down, which may prove to have limited appeal. What will appeal to most Americans even less are the proposed Republican solutions, like a national sales tax. And what might surprise them is that the first president to expand tax relief for the working poor was that almighty Republican icon, Ronald Reagan, whose name is constantly invoked by politicians unworthy of his legacy.
However piously they cite the Gipper as their idol, the Republican candidates for president seem united in their desire to repeal the earned income tax credit, which he justly praised in 1986 as “the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress.”
Now, Republican politicians increasingly reject the earned income credit as an immoral form of “welfare,” because its provisions have helped to ensure that roughly 47 percent of Americans pay no federal income tax, with the poorest receiving a modest rebate, instead. That statistic has been distorted all too often into the false assertion, usually uttered on Fox News Channel or right-wing talk radio, that the poorer half of the nation’s population “pays no taxes.”
by LeAnn Michelle
"Um.. come to ohio please!! "