“Just Close Your Eyes”: The Right’s 2012 Solution While Systematically Taking Away Your Rights
Last month, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett offered a solution for women who were going to be forced by the government to undergo a completely unnecessary ultrasound against their wills: “You can’t make anybody watch, okay? Because you just have to close your eyes.” The governor’s suggestion would be almost comical, if it weren’t for the tragic fact that forcing women to watch was the whole point of the legislation Corbett supported.
But it seems that Corbett’s suggestion doesn’t just apply to women seeking abortions in the Keystone state. It is, in essence, what the GOP is telling to every woman turned off by the party’s attacks on reproductive rights, equal pay and domestic violence protections: “You just have to close your eyes.”
Mitt Romney’s campaign is banking on the fact that voters of both genders are concerned about the economy in these uncertain times. Polls show that they’re right. But just because you’re concerned with the economy doesn’t mean you ignore it when a group of people are systematically taking away your rights for their own short-term political gain.
Sadly, this is the new normal. The Tea Party’s success has been based on this “just close your eyes” formula. Swept into power on a wave of economic dissatisfaction, Tea Party legislators in Washington and the states asked the country to “close its eyes” as it did everything but fix the economy. “Pay no attention while we roll back decades of progress everything else you care about. Just close your eyes while we bash immigrants, cut essential services, make it very hard to vote, and take away collective bargaining rights”. Many minorities have been affected, particularly in the last two years, but arguably and amazingly, no group has been under attack more than the American majority — women.
A new report from People For the American Way investigates the new landscape that the Tea Party is creating for American women. Mississippi is set to become the only state in the country without a legal abortion clinic. Texas is on the path to denying reproductive health care to 130,000 low-income women. Wisconsin repealed its enforcement mechanism for equal pay lawsuits. Senate Republicans are fighting to stop the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. Following an all-male panel speaking on women’s health, a woman who dares speak in front of Congress about the importance of affordable contraception is called a “slut.”
Even with closed eyes, these things are very hard to miss.
The Romney campaign has attempted to distract voters from this train wreck of anti-woman policies by claiming that a second Obama administration will hurt women economically. Last week, they hammered hard on the claim that women have accounted for 92 percent of job losses under President Obama — a mangled statistic that ignores, among other factors, that many of those losses were the result of Republican-led layoffs of teachers and other government employees. Then they decided to accuse Democrats of waging a “War on Moms” — forgetting, perhaps, the candidate’s history of aggressively pushing low-income women to work outside of the home when their children are very young.
Women haven’t bought it. In polls, Romney still trails Obama among women voters by double digits. And in an under-reported fact, among women ages 18 to 29, he’s losing by an astounding 45 points. You don’t need a political science degree that know that that spells disaster.
Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans seem to think they can get away with almost anything because, in the end, their Election Day hopes will be saved by a bad economy. The problem is, the people they attack on a regular basis — women, gays, Latinos, Muslims, you name it — know the Tea Party’s record on the economy and its history of cynical, culture-war attacks that deeply affect the lives of real people. We have our eyes wide open.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People For the American Way, Published in The Huffington Post, April 18, 2012
“It’s Mitt’s Time”: The Romney’s Display A Remarkable Sense Of Entitlement
I found Ann Romney calling the Hilary Rosen controversy “a birthday present” a little odd. The outrage machine ginned up the culture war to defend Ann’s “choice” to stay at home, but she’s telling us she enjoyed it? She wasn’t really hurt and offended? If the president had declared a “war on moms,” as Republicans claimed, could she really experience that as “a birthday present”? Is it really all about Ann?
On “The Ed Show” last night I said it revealed Ann Romney’s sense of entitlement, that she would call such apoplexy “a birthday present.” But I hadn’t even heard the most entitled part of her interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer, in which she exclaims, “It’s Mitt’s time. It’s our turn now.” In the same interview, her husband told Obama to “start packing,” rather presumptuously (who orders around the president?), but Ann Romney declaring “It’s our turn now” is even worse. Ann, the voters will decide that. Don’t order the car elevator for the White House quite yet.
On CNBC Tuesday night, the candidate himself sat down with former Reagan staffer Larry Kudlow for a mostly admiring interview. Although it was interesting that after Romney got through slamming the Obama administration for “scaring” American businesses and generally wrecking the economy, Kudlow asked him to explain why the stock market is soaring. “Right now what you’re seeing in stock prices is the fact that businesses are profitable,” Romney acknowledged. Despite Obama, of course.
But Romney had one of his great Romney moments when Kudlow asked him if he thought the gains would continue. He tried to quote Yogi Berra, you know, like a regular Joe. Here’s how it came out:
I’m not going to predict the direction of the stock market. I–you know, I always like to quote the Yogi Berra line or as close to it as I can, which is that Yogi Berra said, in effect, that he doesn’t like making predictions, particularly if the future’s involved.
“Yogi Berra said, in effect” is a perfect example of how not to quote Yogi Berra. That’s old Mitt winging it.
By; Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, April 17, 2012
“There He Goes Again”: Mitt Romney’s ‘92 Percent’ Lie
And they say Mitt Romney can’t be trusted! Why, the man is as consistent as the sun coming up in the morning.
Mitt Romney can always be counted upon—for intellectual dishonesty.
In the latest example of his egregious lack of intellectual integrity, Romney—desperate to reverse the GOP’s catastrophic loss of popularity among women voters—invented a fictitious Obama administration “war on women” and then claimed as proof the disproportionate job losses suffered by women during the second wave of the recession.
Romney’s misrepresentation of labor-force trends was hardly surprising; we’ve come to expect misleading and untruthful statements from a candidate infamous for denying he ever said things he did say and insisting he didn’t do things he did do.
“The real war on women has been waged by the policies of the Obama administration,” Romney claimed on This Week. “Did you know that of all the jobs lost during the Obama years, 92.3 percent of them are women?”
It’s enough to make you wish that Ronald Reagan were still around to shake his head sorrowfully and say, “There he goes again.”
In the absence of Reagan and his famous line, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner dutifully made the rounds yesterday, trying to explain what was wrong with Romney’s charge. “It’s a ridiculous argument,” Geithner said, noting that the first round of job losses affected mostly men, particularly in construction and manufacturing, while subsequent budget cuts by state and local governments eliminated many jobs held primarily by women, many of them teachers.
The Obama administration was far from alone in rejecting Romney’s claims; virtually every independent analysis dismissed them as “mostly false,” as the nonpartisan fact-check site Politifact put it.
But Romney’s accusations were worse than false; they were the political equivalent of that old joke about the guy who begs the judge for mercy, saying he shouldn’t be convicted of murder because he’s an orphan—while neglecting to mention that he’s an orphan because he killed his parents.
As any debater knows, making your case is about the facts you include, but it’s also about the facts you leave out. And when it comes to the nation’s economic woes, the facts that Romney leaves out include the culpability of Republican policies and office holders for the dismal state of the labor market—particularly when it comes to women.
First of all, most of the catastrophic job losses affecting men actually occurred while President Bush was still in office. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, men lost 5,355,000 jobs between December 2007 and June 2009, whereas women lost less than half that number—“only” 2,124,000 jobs.
But after that devastating first hit, men’s job losses slowed, whereas women’s accelerated. Between January 2009 and March 2012, men lost 57,000 jobs, but women lost 683,000 jobs. Of those 683,000 jobs, 64 percent were in government, and 36 percent were in the private sector.
And it was Republican office holders at the state and local level, not Democrats at the federal level, who were responsible for a disproportionate share of those losses. According to a study by the Roosevelt Institute, 11 states that went Republican in 2010 accounted for more than 40 percent of all state- and local-government job losses.
But Romney’s claim that President Obama has destroyed women’s jobs leaves out that part, just as it omits any acknowledgment of the terrifying fiscal mess that Obama inherited from a disastrous Republican administration when he came into office.
Although Romney’s specious statistics were designed to scare women into thinking that the Obama administration has somehow vaporized huge numbers of women’s jobs while leaving men virtually unscathed, that’s hardly the reality. Of all the jobs lost since 2007, only 39.7 percent were held by women; more than 60 percent were held by men. The recession has been terrible for everyone, and it hit women’s jobs somewhat later than it hit men’s jobs, but it’s not as if anyone escaped unscathed.
Mitt Romney surely knows this—and yet his attack on Obama might just as easily have been leveled by someone who was completely clueless about labor-force trends, the structural reasons that explain how they happen, and what they mean.
No one who’s followed the presidential campaign, let alone Romney’s political career, could possibly be surprised that he distorted the facts; he’s an old hand at that stuff. But what’s really startling is how stupid his analysis was.
Romney keeps telling voters they should elect him because Obama broke the nation’s economy and he’s such a smart businessman he knows how to fix it.
But if his latest salvo is any indication of how well Romney understands the economy, Harvard Business School should demand that he give back his M.B.A.
By: Leslie Bennetts, The Daily Beast, April 16, 2012
“At Odds With Reality”: Three Conservative Myths About Government
The Path to Prosperity blueprint of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan—the foundation for the budget that the House passed last week—reflects conservative politicians’ war on government. As my Center on Budget and Policy Priorities colleagues conclude about a Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, analysis of the Ryan plan:
The CBO report, prepared at Chairman Ryan’s request, shows that Ryan’s budget path would shrink federal expenditures for everything other than Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and interest payments to just 3¾ percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050. Since, as CBO notes, ‘spending for defense alone has not been lower than 3 percent of GDP in any year [since World War II]’ and Ryan seeks a high level of defense spending…the rest of government would largely have to disappear.
The conservatives’ war is sustained by a series of myths.
Myth No. 1: Spending Is Out of Control, and Only Draconian Cuts Will Rein It In
As my colleagues at the center have shown, however, noninterest spending outside Social Security and Medicare spiked in the Great Recession but is scheduled to fall substantially as a share of GDP as the economy recovers (see chart).
To be sure, government spending will rise as a share of gross domestic product as the population continues to age, healthcare costs throughout the economy continue to rise, and more Americans become eligible for Social Security and Medicare. But, my Center on Budget and Policy Priorities colleagues have written:
When Americans hear talk of the government exploding in size and reach, they don’t usually think this means that more people will receive Social Security and Medicare because the population is growing older or that Medicare will cost more because of factors like the aging of the baby boomers and advances in medical technology that improve health and prolong life but at significant cost. Outside of those demographic and health cost factors, the portrait of a rapidly growing federal behemoth is simply at odds with reality, since costs are shrinking to levels well below their historical averages.
Myth No. 2: The Country Faces a Looming Debt Crisis Due to the Debt Incurred In the Past Few Years
That myth fueled irresponsible brinksmanship over legislation to raise the nation’s debt limit last year, and it stands in the way of meaningful deficit-reduction.
While the policies that Presidents Bush and Obama and Congress enacted to combat the financial crisis and Great Recession helped drive up deficits after 2007, those policies were temporary and will have little effect on deficits and debt going forward. The weak economy and the legacy other policies enacted under President Bush (especially his tax cuts) play a far larger role. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office calculates that under current law (which calls for the Bush-era tax cuts to expire at the end of this year), deficits would fall over the coming decade as the economy improves, and debt would fall to 61.3 percent of GDP in 2022.
Yes, the gap between spending and revenues will rise again as a share of GDP in later decades if we don’t take prudent action to rein in future deficits. Policymakers and analysts who are not ideologically committed to radically shrinking government recognize that this will require a balanced mix of revenue and spending measures. But such a balanced policy runs up against myriad tax myths, including the following:
Myth No. 3: Americans’ Tax Burden Is High and Rising
That’s certainly the impression the Tax Foundation wants to convey in its latest “Tax Freedom Day” report released earlier this week: “Americans will work 107 days into the year, from January 1 to April 17, to earn enough money to pay this year’s combined 29.2% federal, state, and local tax bill. ”
But notice, the report does not refer to “every” American or the “typical” American. That’s because, as this Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report demonstrates, four out of five U.S. households likely pay a much lower average tax rate than the one highlighted in the Tax Foundation report. Moreover, average federal income rates are at historic lows for typical taxpayers. When total taxes, including federal and state and local taxes, are taken into account, the United States has one of the lowest average tax rates among all industrialized countries.
So, here’s the question:
Are those who advance these myths interested in fixing the deficit and debt problem, as most Americans would hope, or are they conducting a bait-and-switch in pursuit of antitax advocate Grover Norquist’s quest to “reduce [government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub?”
By: Chad Stone, Chief Economist at The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Published in U. S. News and World Report, April 5, 2012
“The Wonder Years” Of George W. Bush: Barack Obama’s Best Friend In The 2012 Election
So George W. Bush, reports Politico, is laying low these days, avoiding the spotlight that shone briefly on his father and his brother Jeb recently as they endorsed Mitt Romney’s candidacy. This whole subject of the post-Bush GOP and its relationship to No. 43 is pretty fascinating. Like a crazy, drunk uncle shooting an epileptic dog because he has fleas, the current GOP shuns him for all the wrong reasons. Since the GOP will presumably spend the next few months trying to pretend the man never existed, Democrats ought to remind people that he did. In fact, the Democratic Party should spend the next 20 years talking about Bush, turning him into the new Jimmy Carter and making the memory of those eight squalid years quadrennially fresh to everyone with living memory of them for as long as is humanly possible.
Bush, Politico notes, “is in a self-imposed political exile.” Perhaps predictably, Ari Fleischer pops up to note that that’s a lowdown dirty shame because Bush “kept us safe” through a perilous time and oversaw a booming economy in between two recessions.
These claims aren’t even worth spitting out one’s cornflakes over, let alone rebutting. But merely as a point of information, people should know that the economy didn’t exactly boom from 2002 to 2008, except of course for the 1 percent of the population the policies were designed to aid. Bush’s job-growth record was the worst of any president going back to the Depression. The table you can see here goes back to Truman. Obviously, Roosevelt grew jobs at a fairly significant rate, since unemployment under him went from 24 percent to essentially zero during the height of the war. So you have to go back, I’d suppose, to Herbert Hoover to find someone who did worse than Bush’s .01 percent growth in jobs per.
Yes, Obama’s jobs record is worse—for now. But at least in Obama’s case you have a guy who really did come into office at the start of a major recession, the worst in 80 years. Since the recession eased and ended, nearly 3.3 million jobs have been added—meaning that if he has a second term, he will in all likelihood leave Dubya eating some of that famous Texas dust. In any case, Americans still pin the shattered economy on Bush. A poll released only last week from CNN showed 56 percent blame Bush, while just 29 percent finger Obama.
The fact that we’re still clawing our way out of the darkness that Bush set upon us is the reason he is still relevant. Recently, Romney made him even more so, by insisting to an audience that it was Bush and Hank Paulson who actually saved the country from a depression. Beyond that, Romney’s campaign staff and advisers are so full of Bush people—on political strategy, the economy, foreign policy, and other areas—that one former Bush speechwriter (who is not on the Romney bus) has called it “a restoration of the Bush establishment.”
And yet, even as Romney makes those moves, which only about 2 percent of the population will know about, the party will obviously try to distance itself from Bush publicly. What in the world are they going to do with him at the convention? Ex-presidents are supposed to get nice speaking gigs. Will Bush? To say what? That we must let the free market work, the way it worked on his watch in September 2008? That we must be vigilant against the terrorists, the way he was while Osama bin Laden was living a few heaves of a baseball away from a Pakistani officer-training facility? That we must protect the homeland, as he did in New Orleans? It’s hard to imagine what kind of speech he could deliver. It wouldn’t be shocking if Bush is reduced (if he would accept) to some ceremonial function, some transparent and treacly soft-focus attempt to fool Latinos, since Bush was among that small handful of Republicans known not to actively hate brown people.
Democrats really need to keep Bush in the frame here. And Dick Cheney. I know everyone says “but elections are about the future.” Well, maybe. But the Bush years were so uniquely bad, so plainly and emphatically horrible on so many fronts for such a vast majority of citizens, that to fail to mention the era would just be missing a free whack. It would be the equivalent of someone trying to slag Halle Berry without mentioning Catwoman. Very often, people—especially Democratic people—overthink politics and worry too much about how people are going to react. But this one is simple. Bush really just stank up the joint for eight years. Mention him, and the pundit class might bray about it, but most people will react by thinking: Yeah, that guy really just stank up the joint for eight years.
I often wonder about what Bush himself thinks. Does he know, deep down, what a failure he was? He must. We all tell ourselves stories that try to put a good face on things. And any president or governor can come up with a list of good deeds accomplished, so maybe he leans on those, waiting patiently for the day when, because people’s memories are short and because some rich Texas buddies undoubtedly stand ready to pour millions into a PR-rehabilitation campaign when they sense the time is right, he can reemerge in the public eye, smirk intact, smiting Democrats like in the good old days of 2002. Democrats must make sure that that rehabilitation never, ever happens.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 3, 2012
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