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.
But the last-minute nature of the call for donations left some in the campaign concerned that they would end up with an empty truck. So the night before the event, campaign aides went to a local Wal Mart and spent $5,000 on granola bars, canned food, and diapers to put on display while they waited for donations to come in, according to one staffer. (The campaign confirmed that it “did donate supplies to the relief effort,” but would not specify how much it spent.)
Empty-handed supporters pled for entrance, with one woman asking, “What if we dropped off our donations up front?”The volunteer gestured toward a pile of groceries conveniently stacked near the candidate. “Just grab something,” he said.
Two teenage boys retrieved a jar of peanut butter each, and got in line. When it was their turn, they handed their “donations” to Romney. He took them, smiled, and offered an earnest “Thank you.”If you took maybe three minutes to go the the Red Cross website on your iPhone, you'd know what was going to go wrong with your attempt to look helpful. Three lousy minutes, and you might've learned something, and you wouldn't leave yourself open to the massive ridicule being dumped on your over-gelled head. You wanted a good photo op? You just gave everybody a good look at just how out of touch you are.
5. Began Drawdown of War in Afghanistan: From a peak of 101,000 troops in June 2011, U.S. forces are now down to 91,000, with 23,000 slated to leave by the end of summer 2012. According to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, the combat mission there will be over by next year.
But Romney is shameless. He wants to use Sandy’s destruction as a media hook, so he re-branded his rally for the stupid and gullible members of the press as a “storm relief’ effort. To underscore the stupid deception, Mitt asked attendees to bring can goods to the rally, as if random truckloads of unsorted can goods flooding a disaster area are useful. The Red Cross is pretty specific that these kinds of efforts produce piles of supplies that cannot be used and cause real problems for relief efforts:
Does the American Red Cross accept donated goods?Something else it points up - Romney is another silver-spoon legacy puke who doesn't know the first fuckin' thing about the lives or the problems of real people, and apparently he knows even less about any of the mechanisms in place that actually work to help real people when they need it.
Unfortunately, due to logistical constraints the Red Cross does not accept or solicit individual donations or collections of items. Items such as collected food, used clothing and shoes must be sorted, cleaned, repackaged and transported which impedes the valuable resources of money, time, and personnel.
6. Eliminated Osama bin laden: In 2011, ordered special forces raid of secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in which the terrorist leader was killed and a trove of al-Qaeda documents was discovered.
Now, don't get me wrong. There's no way in hell I'm happy about this storm (in fact, I'd like to send an invoice to oil lobbyists and tell them to split the bill) and after it's done, there will be people who died (sixteen on the East Coast, 69 in the Caribbean as of this writing), and countless others left homeless, but there is a small silver lining in all those clouds.
Because the construction industry has been moribund for a while. Now it will explode, and a lot of people who didn't have jobs will have them.
And those people who have those new jobs will spend money, and that will create more jobs. How many? That depends on how much money the feds put into the recovery. (Don't forget, Wall Street brokers live in these affected areas, too.)And, oh yeah, let's see what we can learn from comparing Obama's FEMA with Jr Bush's FEMA, and then take a good look at what Willard's been saying about how he thinks FEMA should be scrapped so we can privatize those functions and make Halliburton even fatter and richer - which he then Etch-A-Sketched later.
This is really scary. It means that if these people triumph, science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible. Everything must pass a political test; if it isn’t what the right wants to hear, the messenger is subjected to a smear campaign.From the comments:
7. Turned Around U.S. Auto Industry: In 2009, injected $62 billion in federal money (on top of $13.4 billion in loans from the Bush administration) into ailing GM and Chrysler in return for equity stakes and agreements for massive restructuring. Since bottoming out in 2009, the auto industry has added more than 100,000 jobs. In 2011, the Big Three automakers all gained market share for the first time in two decades. The government expects to lose $16 billion of its investment, less if the price of the GM stock it still owns increases.I still don't like bailouts, but you have to know how to make the better choice from a very short list of shitty options.
HARD-LINE conservatives have gone to new extremes lately in opposing abortion. Last week, Richard Mourdock, the Tea Party-backed Republican Senate candidate in Indiana, declared during a debate that he was against abortion even in the event of rape because after much thought he “came to realize that life is that gift from God. And even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” That came on the heels of the Tea Party-backed Republican Representative Joe Walsh of Illinois saying after a recent debate that he opposed abortion even in cases where the life of the mother is in danger, because “with modern technology and science, you can’t find one instance” in which a woman would not survive without an abortion. “Health of the mother has become a tool for abortions anytime, for any reason,” Walsh said.He goes on with some pretty cookie-cutter verbiage (that most middle schoolers could come up with), pointing out that wearing the "pro-life" badge is inconsistent with a position that isn't also in favor of gun control (eg), etc.
