“Weird Science”: A Guide For Republican Candidates Asked About Earth Science
Twenty years or so ago, a few politicians got caught when somebody asked them the price of a gallon of milk and they didn’t know the answer. As a consequence, campaign managers and political consultants started making sure their candidates knew the price of milk and a few similar items like a loaf of bread, should they ever be called upon to assure voters that they do in fact visit the supermarket and are thus in touch with how regular folk live their lives. In a similar but somewhat more complex game of gotcha, Marco Rubio is the latest Republican politician to express discomfort about the question of the earth’s age. Unfortunately, unlike the price of milk, that’s not a question upon which people of every ideology agree. But if you’re a politician wondering what you should answer if you get asked the question, here’s a guide to the possibilities, and what each one says about you. There are four possible answers:
1. “The earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old.” This answer says more than, “I have memorized this particular fact.” By being stated as a fact, it communicates not only that you accept that the work of physicists and geologists is a more helpful guide to this question than counting up the “begat”s in the Old Testament, but also that you also aren’t particularly afraid of those who believe otherwise. It also might indicate that you are a believing Catholic, since the Vatican, not exactly a bastion of progressive thinking, is totally fine with the science on this one.
2. “I’m not sure of the exact number, but it’s in the billions.” Much like answer number 1, this one marks you as someone who is pro-science. But it says you aren’t a know-it-all, so that might make it go down a little easier with the folks back home.
3. “I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians…” This is Rubio’s answer, and it means, “I’m a Republican with national aspirations.” You’ll notice how he cleverly offers something for everyone. By saying “I’m not a scientist,” he acknowledges that a scientist might be able to tell you the age of the earth, as opposed to telling you the approved propaganda of the International Scientific Conspiracy. But then he says “that’s a dispute amongst theologians,” which I’m not even sure is true (do theologians really argue about this?), but in any case winks to the Republican base that maybe Rubio thinks the real answer is to be found in whether you assign each “begat” 20 years or 25 years. So if you’re a Republican, this is safe territory. Although I have no idea whether this applies to Rubio, this is also what you say if you know full well how old the earth is but are afraid that you’ll offend the rubes if you say so.
4. “The earth is somewhere between 6,000 and 9,000 years old.” This answer says, “I’m a Republican from a safe conservative district.” Not all Republicans from safe conservative districts believe this, but I’m pretty sure that everyone in Congress who does believe it is a Republican from a safe conservative district. As Representative Paul Broun of Georgia recently put it so colorfully, “All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior. You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe that the earth’s but about 9,000 years old.” For the record, despite what he said, Broun is not actually a scientist, though he did somehow manage to obtain a medical degree, which of course makes him an expert in geology, enabling him to sift through “a lot of scientific data” and determine that every actual scientist is wrong about this question.
So those are your options. I don’t know if any of the Republicans who will soon be lining up for 2016 will be asked this question, but if they are, I’m betting they’ll all choose answer number 3.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 19, 2012
“It’s Galling Season Again”: The GOP’s Phony New Compassion
When someone in any social cohort decides to act like Ebenezer Scrooge, it’s easy and quite natural for everyone else to fall into the role of Bob Cratchit. This is what several Republicans are now doing in reaction to Mitt Romney’s remarks about Barack Obama and his “gifts” to his core constituencies. But Republicans allegedly competing for the loyalties of the 100 percent is a movie we’ve seen. It doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work for a straightforward reason: free-market solutions to many of the problems faced by the 47 percent simply don’t exist. The GOP has no answer to these problems, and it really doesn’t want to have any. But, boy oh boy, are we about to enter a galling period of hearing them pretend otherwise.
In fact, it’s already started. Bobby Jindal kicked this off by saying in response to Romney, “We need to continue to show how our policies help every voter out there achieve the American dream.” Marco Rubio weighed in with the reassuring news flash that, in fact, he does not think there are “millions and millions of people in this country that don’t want to work.” Fellow Floridian Rick Scott—bless him, the Rick Scott who ripped off Medicare before he became governor and has tried to block Democrats from voting since occupying the office—says Republicans have to say that “we want to take care of every citizen of our state.” Scott Walker, Haley Barbour, Michael Steele, Susanna Martinez, and others have made similar remarks. All well and good. So now, let’s match this lovely rhetoric to the Republican record of the past decade or so.
Let’s start with health care, a big problem in the lives of many 47 percenters. True, the GOP, when George W. Bush was president, passed the Medicare prescription drug-coverage bill. That was mostly a good thing, although the bill didn’t pay for the program and it created the famous doughnut hole problem that is finally being solved by Obamacare. What else beyond that? Most obviously, they opposed the subsidized coverage for millions of working poor that is at the heart of Obamacare, defenestrating their own proposal (the individual mandate) while doing so.
And how about S-CHIP, the health plan for poor children? Children! They fought it tooth and nail. It was supposedly an imposition on private insurers who were positioned to offer similar coverage. Yet of course, they did not do so. If they had, there’d have been no need for S-CHIP in the first place.
The one health care idea they’ve come up with, health savings accounts, are widely known to be riddled with problems. They work fine until people really need ongoing care, kind of like a car that gets you where you’re going on normal days but won’t start during emergencies. Yet they tend to have very high deductibles, and people can still be thrown off if they get really sick. This is the GOP’s great contribution to addressing the health needs of the working class.
What other problems do the 47 percent face? Hardship in old age surely ranks up there. It’s they, after all, who depend wholly or mostly on their Social Security checks (which average about $1,400 a month) to get by. And what did they see Republicans try to do on this front? Privatize it—a proposal so unpopular that it died with almost no support in Congress from even the GOP, and this after Bush spent weeks barnstorming for it. People clearly don’t want Social Security privatized—just as they don’t want Medicare voucherized.
What else? Paying for college? Oh, the GOP record here is particularly stellar. Republicans in Congress spent loads of political capital fighting the Democrats’ effort in 2010 to lower student-loan interest rates. The Obama student-loan reform has been widely hailed—in addition to helping students by offering lower interest rates, it actually saves taxpayers money by eliminating the middleman (private lenders). This year’s GOP platform called for undoing the reform and going back to the old system, which, wouldn’t you know it, is the position of the big banks.
Believe me, I could go on and on and on for pages. The bottom line is this. These private-sector “solutions” Jindal and others invoke to the problems faced by people of limited means already exist. They have either been implemented and been seen to fail (or at least create big new problems), or they’ve not been implemented because a wary public knows better and has risen up to say no.
Government programs were created for a reason: needs arose that the private sector wasn’t responding to. There was no profit to be made, or not enough, or too much risk to be assumed, in providing health coverage to working-class people and their children, who were more likely to have health issues and be expensive to care for; in offering student loans to people who might not be able to pay them back; et cetera. There just were not and are not practical free-market solutions to these problems. That’s why government stepped in.
If the entire Republican Party were made up of nothing but David Frums and David Brookses, maybe well-designed and good-faith market-based attempts to address some of these problems could have a chance. But the actually existing Republican Party is more accurately represented by another David—Vitter, the Louisiana senator—who dismissed S-CHIP as “Hillarycare.”
And it’s Vitter rather than the other Davids who typifies the party because that is how the party’s voting base wants it. The darkly amusing thing about all this distancing from Romney is that in truth, all he was doing was expressing the views of the overwhelming majority of the party’s conservative base, which rose up in a mighty rage in 2009 against these “moochers” and their “gifts.”
I wish Jindal and the rest of them luck, in spite of it all. If they’re sincere and serious, we’ll have a very different Republican Party five years from now from the one we’ve known. In the meantime, permit me my skepticism. They don’t have good solutions to working people’s problems because the record shows that at bottom, they don’t really want to solve them.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, November 18, 2012
“Unvarnished Negativity”: The Romney Campaign Continues To Lack A Positive Message
Since the Republican National Convention wrapped up last week, the Romney/Ryan campaign has abandoned its brief pretense of running a positive campaign based on leveling with the American people about serious issues. It’s back to all attacks on President Obama, all the time. On Tuesday they issued multiple press releases gleefully celebrating President Obama’s giving himself a grade of “incomplete” on his first term. On the campaign trail and in interviews Ryan has repeatedly asserted, as Romney argued in his nomination acceptance speech at the RNC on Thursday, that President Obama cannot tell the American people they are better off than they were four years ago. (As Media Matters points out, cable news channels, especially Fox News, have complicitly repeated this charge without offering context of the economic freefall we were in when President Obama took office.)
A close examination of the GOP’s major speeches from last week shows that even their nominally affirmative case for small government was internally inconsistent. The crucial applause lines actually undermined their arguments. Between that, and their immediate return to unvarnished negativity, it is clear that the Republican Party simply does not have a positive conservative message for this election cycle.
The RNC was supposed to be filled with homage to the virtues of private enterprise. But both of their main speakers on Thursday night—Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Mitt Romney—implicitly made the case for the necessity of government instead.
When it comes to exhorting a nation to collective democratic action, private equity investment can seem a bit lacking. As anyone who watched the biographical video of Romney on Thursday night noticed, investing in a chain of office supply stores just isn’t that inspiring.
Perhaps that’s why Romney tried to summon memories of America’s supposed mid-twentieth-century greatness, he talked about a government program. Although he never actually used the acronym NASA, that’s what he was talking about when he said:
When President Kennedy challenged Americans to go to the moon, the question wasn’t whether we’d get there, it was only when we’d get there.
The soles of Neil Armstrong’s boots on the moon made permanent impressions on OUR [emphasis in original text] souls and in our national psyche. Ann and I watched those steps together on her parent’s sofa. Like all Americans we went to bed that night knowing we lived in the greatest country in the history of the world.
God bless Neil Armstrong.
Tonight that American flag is still there on the moon. And I don’t doubt for a second that Neil Armstrong’s spirit is still with us: that unique blend of optimism, humility and the utter confidence that when the world needs someone to do the really big stuff, you need an American.
Nothing about this reflects the advantages of limited government. The space program is a governmental endeavor, not the work of some plucky businessman. Its success illustrates the virtues of collectivism, not individuality. Indeed, Romney’s kicker: “you need an American,” makes no sense. Neil Armstrong did not get to the moon by himself. What the moon landing shows is that for “the really big stuff” you need the American government.
Similarly, Rubio said, “Mitt Romney knows America’s prosperity didn’t happen because our government simply spent more. It happened because our people used their own money to open a business.” But as anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of the modern economy knows, the vast majority of new businesses are not opened entirely with the proprietor’s own money. Rather, they borrow money from a bank or—as Romney would surely point out—venture capitalists. This in turn, necessitates a functioning banking system. As we have learned over the years, a functioning banking system requires governmental institutions such as the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
As President Obama might have said, with regard to everything from the monetary system to the space program, “you didn’t build that.”
Meanwhile, one of the most oft-repeated anti-Obama talking points was taken to its logical conclusion, and its absurdity was thus demonstrated. Republicans like to joke that President Obama has never had a “real” job, meaning one in the private sector. This has even morphed into a shorthand that he has never had a job before the presidency at all. For example, Tim Pawlenty joked in his speech in Tampa: “Barack Obama’s failed us. But look, it’s understandable. A lot of people fail at their first job.”
Strictly speaking, this is not actually true. Besides the fact that most people would probably consider community organizer, law professor, book author, state senator and US senator to be jobs, Obama worked for several years after college at the Business International Group, a publishing and advisory firm that assisted US companies abroad. (It was later bought by the Economist Group and is now part of the Economist Intelligence Unit.)
But current Republican ideology holds that jobs in the nonprofit sector or public sector are not real jobs. And since Obama never talks about his brief foray into the for-profit sector, Republicans figure they can assume their listeners won’t know about it. So, in his acceptance speech at the RNC, Mitt Romney said, “[Obama] took office without the basic qualification that most Americans have and one that was essential to his task. He had almost no experience working in a business. Jobs to him are about government.”
Even just a cursory examination of this claim shows it makes a lot less sense than Romney—and his audience, which cheered enthusiastically—assumes it does. Business is a broad category: a teenager who spends his summer flipping burgers at McDonald’s works “in a business.” Is Romney seriously suggesting that such work experience would make one better qualified for the presidency than serving in the United States Senate and teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago? Taken literally, Romney’s comments would mean just that.
Coincidentally enough, Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan and his cheerleaders in the conservative media have actually cited the summer Ryan spent working at a McDonald’s as evidence of his real-life experience. That’s because, if you accept Romney’s standard of presidential qualification, his running mate is otherwise badly unqualified. Ryan has spent his entire professional career working in politics and political advocacy. And yet this does not bother Romney nor his supporters.
It shouldn’t. There is absolutely no reason to think that Herman Cain—a successful businessman in the fast food industry, who has a ridiculous tax plan and demonstrated disturbing ignorance of international affairs—would make a better president than Paul Ryan. The president’s effect on the economy comes through macroeconomic policy making. One can understand that well, or poorly, from a variety of backgrounds. Republicans know this. That’s why they’ve nominated career politicians for the presidency or vice-presidency before, and they happily nominated Ryan this year. There is nothing wrong with that. But it means there is something very hypocritical about their attack on Obama’s work experience.
Given the rank hypocrisy of their convention rhetoric, and their reversion to one-note economic attacks on Obama immediately thereafter, it looks like Romney’s hopes of reinventing his image and reframing the race will surely be dashed.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, September 4, 2012
“Nothing Positive To Offer”: Romney Milking The VP Distraction To The Last Drop
For what it is worth, Fox News’ Chris Stirewalt makes a very convincing case for the proposition that Mitt Romney will wait until the last possible moment to announce his running-mate:
Mitt Romney has 18 days in which to announce his choice of his running mate, and you can bet he’s going to milk as much from the topic as is humanly possible. So what’s the advantage in stopping the fun early?
Romney is prepared to tantalize the press pool with another round of house calls on top-tier contenders starting Saturday as he takes bus tours through Virginia (Gov. Bob McDonnell), Florida (Sen. Marco Rubio) and Ohio (Sen. Rob Portman).
The idea here is to ramp up the speculation to the most furious levels possible – to get reporters and Republicans totally immersed in the quadrennial parlor game of running-mate speculation.
For months, Team Romney has hinted that the running mate announcement would come early so as to create more buzz and give the duo more time to campaign ahead of the convention. But does that really make sense?
Nope. As is often the case, the value of Veep speculation exceeds the value of an actual Veep, particularly if you are Mitt Romney and you are likely to settle on someone very unexciting, and particularly if your media coverage has been a mite negative lately:
If Romney were to announce that he were picking McDonnell at a rally in Manassas, Va. on Saturday, that would leave more than two weeks before Republicans convene in Tampa. That’s plenty of time in the modern media blender for the excitement to be all gone and the discussion be back on Romney’s 1040 forms or a media dissection of Romney’s handling of the media.
Plus, it would give the press corps and the Obama campaign more than two weeks to splurp out all of the juicy tidbits for any running mate’s past. By the time he took the stage on Aug. 29, the story could be about McDonnell’s graduate dissertation on gender roles in the family, rather than the speech itself.
Translating Stirewalt’s analysis from the original Foxspeak, Mitt’s on the defensive, has nothing much positive to offer, and is unlikely to choose a running-mate who creates a buzz or defies criticism and scrutiny. So why not milk the distractions involved in the Veep guessing-game as long as possible, and then bury the inevitable letdown and any negative press about The Choice in the deep sands of Convention Coverage?
Makes sense to me.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 7, 2012
“Romney’s Olympic Tax Myth”: Like A Designer Drug For The Fox News Set
More than catnip, this latest conservative tax myth is like a designer drug for the Fox News set, tailored perfectly for maximum impact at a time when Americans are hungry for anything Olympics-related. The offense: According to Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist’s anti-tax outfit, President Obama’s IRS will tax Olympic winners up to $9,000 after they return home victorious from London. Conservative blogs are having a field day and Republican politicians are clamoring to capitalize on news. Darling Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida introduced a bill to exempt Olympians’ winnings from taxes and an adviser to Mitt Romney told reporters today, “He believes that there should be no taxation of the type you are describing.” They’re calling on Obama to support the plan.
The only problem: It’s not really true. In addition to their medals, American winners are given prize money from the U.S. Olympic Committee: $25,000 for gold, $15,000 for silver, and $10,000 for bronze. Their medals are also worth about $675, $385 and under $5, respectively. ATR says this all gets taxed at 35 percent, meaning a gold medalist owes $8,986, silver winners owe $5,385, and bronzers owe $3,502.
First off, the medals aren’t subject to taxes. Mark Jones, the communications director for the U.S. Olympic Committee told Salon in an email, “There is no ‘value’ to medals and there is no tax associated with it.”
As for the prize money, according to Politifact, ATR’s claim is “mostly false.” Consulting accountants who have worked with athletes, the fact-checking website noted that while the money is certainly taxable, athletes could deduct all the expenses that went into getting them to the podium, including travel costs, equipment, training and coaching fees from the previous year. Those are all considered business expenses, and could lower or even eliminate an athlete’s tax liability, depending how much they spent. Moreover, the 35 percent rate assumes athletes are in the highest income bracket, earning over $380,000 a year. While some Olympians certainly make millions, the majority of athletes probably do not. Many are barely scraping by, lacking sponsorship deals and unable to work full-time due to training demands. (We wrote yesterday about marathoner Guor Marial, who works from 11 p.m. to 9 a.m. at a home for mentally disabled adults every night so he can spend his days training.) This would put them in a lower tax bracket where they would pay far less, or even nothing, on their winnings, even before deductions.
A quick Nexis search revealed zero stories from 2004 and 2008 about Olympians being taxed for their winnings. One would think, judging by how much attention the story is getting today, that there would have been articles written then about disappointed athletes who returned home to find a hefty tax bill. We did find several stories like that, but they were all from Canada.
Moreover, while it may be politically popular to exempt Olympic winnings, there’s no real reason why they should be treated any differently from, say, the prize money that comes with winning a Nobel or Pulitzer Prize, or even the lottery, all of which are taxed like any other income. Past Nobel laureates have complained about being taxed for their prize, which at about $1.4 million, would produce a much larger bill than the gold medalist’s winnings.
“There is no principled basis to tax Olympic prizes any less than Nobel prizes, earnings or lottery winnings. If Congress wants to give Olympic winners more money, it should transparently give them more money rather than create an obscure tax expenditure to do exactly the same thing,” David Miller, a tax attorney with Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP in New York, told Salon.
So Rubio and Romney, are Nobel laureates any less deserving than Olympians of special treatment?
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, August 2, 2012
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