Republican painter-artist Jon McNaughton has come out with a new painting! You know, in case there was too much subtlety in his painting of Obama presiding over a terror-wracked deathscape Sharialand populated by Nidal Hassan and unemployed brown people.
This one’s called “The Runaway Slave,” and that torch means he’s voting for Romney. “Runaway” is a reference to his escape from the plantation of government dependency, and “Slave” is a reference to him, you know, being black.
3. Passed Wall Street Reform: Signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) to re-regulate the financial sector after its practices caused the Great Recession. The new law tightens capital requirements on large banks and other financial institutions, requires derivatives to be sold on clearinghouses and exchanges, mandates that large banks provide “living wills” to avoid chaotic bankruptcies, limits their ability to trade with customers’ money for their own profit, and creates the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (now headed by Richard Cordray) to crack down on abusive lending products and companies.So "reform" in this case is a relative and somewhat dubious term, but still, we got something out of it: Consumer Credit Protection, Reinforcement/Restructuring of Sarbanes-Oxley, Some restriction on banks investing in private equity instruments, etc. It's not everything I think we should have in place, but it's something.
But everyone lives off the government teat to some degree – even (one might even say especially) the very rich who have been the core supporters of both the Bush presidency and Romney's campaign. Many are industrial leaders who would revolt tomorrow if their giant free R&D program known as the federal military budget were to be scaled back even a few percentage points. Mitt's buddies on Wall Street would cry without their bailouts and dozens of lucrative little-known subsidies (like the preposterous ability of certain banks to act as middlemen in transactions when the government lends money to itself).
On September 14th, the Congressional Research Service published their long anticipated study on the correlation between the tax rates and economic growth from 1945 to today. If you go to their website today, however, the report is mysteriously missing.
Before it vanished, the New York Times downloaded a copy, which they now offer on their website. When you read the report, the reason for the pull might be as simple as what the report discovered.
As Doktor Zoom explainered with an assist from Harper’s, the GOPpies are ready and able to steal every precinct that doesn’t count paper ballots by hand. As Your Editrix explained a week or whatever ago, one of only six voting machine vendors is owned by former Bain employees. (The others, per Dok’s Harper’s article, are pretty much all owned by the Koch Brothers and run by actual felons, except for the ones that are owned by Tagg Romney.) And as some former NSA analyst explained (but we didn’t post on it, because “depressed”), the way they steal your votes is by siphoning them from the largest precincts.I hate this shit.
4. Ended the War in Iraq: Ordered all U.S. military forces out of the country. Last troops left on December 18, 2011.
