The Return Of Making Work Pay

The White House is kicking around the return of the working-class tax cut for Americans used as part of the stimulus:  Making Work Pay, a $400 tax cut ($800 for couples) off the top.

The White House is weighing the idea of a tax cut that it believes would lift Americans’ take-home pay and boost a still-struggling economy, according to people familiar with the administration’s thinking, as the presidential candidates continue battling over whose tax policies would do more for the country.

Obama administration officials have concluded that the economy, while improved, is still fragile enough that it may need another bout of stimulus. The tax cut could replace the payroll tax cut championed by President Obama in 2011 and 2012, which was designed as a buffer against economic shocks such as the financial crisis in Europe and high oil prices. It expires at year’s end.

As David Dayen points out, the flat $400 tax cut would be far more progressive than the current 2% payroll tax cut, andfor more effective for lower-income Americans.

Making Work Pay, the name of the stimulus-era tax cut, was actually a better deal for the working poor. The flat $400 tax credit provided a bigger boost at the low end to anyone making under $20,000 a year than the payroll tax cut, which gave back 2% of income to everyone on the portion of their income affected by the payroll tax, around $110,000. This made it a more stimulative tax cut, since it provided more money to those with a higher marginal propensity to spend. Employers accomplished the tax cut by taking less out of withholding, making it kind of a hidden tax cut that workers didn’t know about. But it did raise their take-home pay.

Gonna have to agree with D-Day here.  This is a solid idea, it was a solid idea when it was used before, and makes a concrete pledge to cut taxes for working-class Americans with real numbers and a real world benefit that people will see and use.

Which means House Republicans will kill it, of course.

Well, after the election.

Great Scott, It's Your Kids, Marty!

As Scott Lemieux points out, this is the Mitt Romney who was Governor of Massachusetts:

Romney hadn’t even previously fathomed that gay people had children. Boston Spirit magazine reported last month that when gay activists met with him in his office in 2004, as Romney was backing a failed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in the state, Romney remarked, “I didn’t know you had families.” Julie Goodridge, lead plaintiff in the landmark case that won marriage rights for gays and lesbians before the Supreme Judicial Court, asked what she should tell her 8-year-old daughter about why the governor would block the marriage of her parents. According to Goodridge, Romney responded,”I don’t really care what you tell your adopted daughter. Why don’t you just tell her the same thing you’ve been telling her the last eight years.”

Severely conservative.  

But there's nothing Mitt can do or say for the 27% who will always vote GOP, and the 20%+ who will vote against Obama for whatever reason, enough to make him competitive (and depending on red state turnout, more than competitive in the national vote totals.)

Great guy, huh?

Yahoo Chooses To Ignore "Do Not Track" On IE

Yahoo! has been working with our partners in the Internet industry to come up with a standard that allows users to opt out of certain website analytics and ad targeting. In principle, we support “Do Not Track” (DNT). Unfortunately, because discussions have not yet resulted in a final standard for how to implement DNT, the current DNT signal can easily be abused. Recently, Microsoft unilaterally decided to turn on DNT in Internet Explorer 10 by default, rather than at users’ direction. In our view, this degrades the experience for the majority of users and makes it hard to deliver on our value proposition to them. It basically means that the DNT signal from IE10 doesn’t express user intent.

Microsoft finally got one right and decided to help users protect their privacy.  It's not rocket science to disable or change security settings, so there is no reason for Yahoo to ignore the default setting.  The reality is, if someone isn't computer savvy enough to change their browser settings, they should be cautious by default.  The crap about this setting being abused is absurd.

You can read the entire policy statement here.  It isn't very long, and after a ridiculous plug for their proprietary solutions and expecting us to be grateful for being told why certain ads were selected, they make no valid point as to why they are ignoring the privacy setting, just informing us that they are.

Nice move, asshats.  Because you really needed another public black eye, right?

Arizona Jail Stupidity

PHOENIX — The family of a prisoner who died in one of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's jails filed a lawsuit Tuesday alleging officers beat the mentally ill man and shot him with a stun gun in an unprovoked attack that marked another example of the "culture of cruelty" in the lockups.

The suit states the 44-year-old Atencio had an altercation with Phoenix police and jail officers while he was being booked on an assault charge on Dec. 15. He was found unresponsive and died five days later, after his family took him off life support.

The sheriff's office said last year that Atencio was combative when police brought him into the downtown jail, and he was placed in a "safe cell" to calm down after fighting with deputies.

The agency said Atencio was found unresponsive 15 minutes later, even though he was being monitored by medical staff.

The lawsuit, however, painted a picture of teasing and abuse at the hands of officers who made fun of Atencio's inability to follow directions and encouraged him to make funny faces while his mug shot was taken.

One officer allegedly said authorities should make it the "Mug Shot of the Week," referring to the sheriff's online contest in which people can vote on their favorite booking photo.

Atencio was attacked later by two Phoenix police officers after he refused to take off one of his shoes in a holding tank, the lawsuit states, adding that some of Arpaio's jail officers joined in and formed a "dog pile" atop the prisoner.

He was mentally ill and they dog piled him.  I had no idea refusing to take off a shoe was a murder-worthy offense.  I now understand the gravity of such an order.  Too bad Atencio was unable to understand the trouble he was in.  Or perhaps he did, and simply couldn't do anything about it.

By the way, since 1993 the county has paid over $24 million has been paid out in claims.   Imagine how many claims fell through the cracks over the years, especially before the full extent of their barbaric treatment was known.  But nah, just another person dying for no reason.  There's nothing to see here, Citizen.  Please move along in an orderly fashion.

The De-Legitimization Of An Obama Win Now Starts In Earnest

Jim Garaghty at NRO spells out a scenario where President Obama gets to 270+ in the electoral vote, but loses the popular vote by several million.

We can debate whether those remaining undecideds, ranging from 3 to 8 percent in most of these polls, will break heavily for the challenger. In 2004, George W. Bush and John Kerry split the remaining undecideds roughly evenly. But the one scenario that political scientists deem virtually impossible is one where undecideds who have declined to support the incumbent all year suddenly break heavily in favor of him. For most of the remaining undecideds, the choice is between voting for the challenger and staying home.

The polling currently suggests President Obama has a hard ceiling of about 47 percent, perhaps 48 percent. Let’s take the 50–47 split found currently in the Rasmussen, Washington Post, and Gallup tracking polls. Presume that most of the remaining undecideds stay home, and that the vote for third-party candidates amounts to about a percentage point. Under that scenario, we would see a 51 percent to 47.9 percent popular-vote win for Romney.

Steve M. predicts the result:

I think Obama will win the Electoral College. I can spell out a scenario in which the right then steals the election (by persuading us that 2000 is irrelevant to now, by hypocritically demanding that "the will of the people" be obeyed, by digging into the pasts of obscure electors). But it's not clear that will happen, and maybe it's the kind of thing that even the right-wing noise machine can't pull off.

Nevertheless, if Obama wins a second term in a split election, the media will treat him as a loser who backed into office and doesn't really deserve to be there. That wouldn't be true for Romney if he won the presidency this way, because the press has now decided it likes him more than Obama, and because, well, he's Republican Daddy -- just like George W. Bush twelve years ago. Oh, sure, if Romney somehow wins this way, the press will ask him, very politely, to live up to the tone of his debate appearances and govern from the center -- but if he then charges hard to the right, the press will just sit back and speak with awe of his "bold" moves.

The press, treating a split Obama victory as a loss, will demand that he tack right in response to the circumstances of his win. This is what Obama will face going into his second term.

I'll go further:  a scenario like this guarantees President Obama will be impeached.  And with the Senate including outright anti-Obama Democrats like WV's Joe Manchin and either Republicans or very conservative Democrats who quietly ran "Obama who?" campaigns this year like Montana's Jon Tester and North Dakota's Heidi Heitkamp, not to mention independent Angus King in Maine, and it's not entirely impossible to come up with a scenario where there are 51 67 votes in the Senate to convict without having to wait until after the 2014 election.  Extremely unlikely, but not impossible.

VP Biden would be asked to resign as a result.  President Boehner rises from Speaker of the House.  Harry Reid, in a bone to Dems, is named VP.  They would guarantee the country that tey wouldn't seek re-election.  2016 becomes wide open...after, of course, "serious bipartisan electoral college reforms" join "serious bipartisan tax, entitlement and health care reforms" and the GOP gets everything they want to maintain power for the next generation, changing demographics or no.

That's where the logical endpoint of this crazy little scenario goes.

So, no, I'm not "relaxed" and "confident".  Not with the GOP around.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Former Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi is facing a four-year prison term for tax fraud, but he is expected to appeal.
• A new article in Science Daily suggests amphibians are already adapting to global climate change through evolution.
• Hurricane Sandy has left 21 dead in the Caribbean as it churns towards the US East Coast as what could be another "perfect storm" Nor'easter.
• US 3rd quarter GDP numbers have come in at 2.0% growth, above forecasts, as the economy is slowly picking up steam.
• Germany's Pirate Party is falling out of favor as the country's voters see much larger economic issues in Europe than intellectual property freedom.

Last Call

Girls creator Lena Dunham is too clever by half (as she usually is) with her latest little slice of obnoxiousness, but at least she's trying to get out the vote.

President Obama teamed up with the most divisive 26-year-old in the world to make a suggestive ad encouraging young people to vote, but it seems to have upset some old conservative men on Twitter. Lena Dunham, famous for her HBO show Girls and her movie Tiny Furniture before that (don't ask me to find any other reasons she's famous), stars in the Obama campaign's latest ad talking about her "first time."

Your first time, "shouldn't be with just anybody." It should be with, "someone who really cares about and understands women." The consequences are, "huge," she warns. You want to do it with someone who, "cares whether or not you have health insurance, and more importantly birth control," she advises. Remembering the wondrous night of her first time, she says "before I was a girl, now I was a woman." Oh! You thought she was talking about SEX! Your pearls, let go of your pearls. You do not need to clutch them so tightly. She's talking about voting. Her other lines like, "you want to do it with the guy who got the troops out of Iraq," and "you don't want to do it with a guy who says 'oh hey I'm at the library studying' when really he's out not signing the Lilly Ledbetter Act," should have given that away? Sorry if that wasn't clear.

Yes, it's snarky to the point of me wishing it had been done by Sarah Silverman or Lizz Winstead or Martha Plimpton or any other of a host of actually funny women, but her heart (and her vote) is in the right place.  Besides, it's the first actually worthwhile thing she's done in her career, so there's that.

Another One For The (Future) Fire

Newt Gingrich is weighing in with his 2012 election predictions, and they're about as plausible as the rest of his 2012 statements.

Former Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich predicts that GOP hopeful Mitt Romney will receive “more than 300 electoral votes” to defeat President Barack Obama on Nov. 6.

Speaking to Fox News host Greta Van Susteren on Thursday, the former House Speaker offered to “end the anxiety” for Fox News viewers.

“I believe the minimum result will be 53-47 Romney, over 300 electoral votes, and the Republicans will pick up the Senate,” Gingrich said. “I base that on just years and years of experience.”

Let's keep in mind that in order to win 300 electoral votes, Romney would have to win every toss-up state (OH, NC, VA, FL, CO, NV, and NH) but he'd have to win at least one or two states well into Obama's hands right now, like Wisconsin, Michigan, New Mexico or Pennsylvania.

On top of that, he's predicting that the GOP will win all 7 Senate close races, too.

There's no evidence of either other than Newt saying it's so.

Into the Future Files you go, Newtie.

Deep In The Heartless Of Texas, Again

The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals has given Texas GOP Gov. Rick Perry his wish:  the end of Planned Parenthood in the state and the beginning of over 100,000 women without affordable health care.

As a result of Thursday’s decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Gov. Rick Perry (R) said that state officials will “immediately” begin defunding clinics operated by Planned Parenthood, which does not actually perform any abortions in the state.

Perry announced earlier this year that he’d made defunding Planned Parenthood a priority for his administration, triggering months of legal wrangling with the clinics and the federal government. Federal law requires that states not discriminate against health providers in distributing federal funds, but a court ultimately ruled that Texas could forgo federal assistance entirely and set up its own health program.

That’s precisely what Perry is doing, passing on more than $40 million in federal assistance and directing the state to exclude Planned Parenthood, which provides health care services to more than 130,000 low-income women in Texas. Planned Parenthood has 49 health centers across Texas, many of which will be forced to close due to Perry’s decision.

As an experiment, pro-choice activist Andrea Grimes said in September that she spent six hours trying to locate a women’s health clinic in Austin that isn’t Planned Parenthood but does accept Medicaid. Despite a list of 181 clinics on the state’s website, Grimes said she found just 13 actual doctors in the whole state who perform the necessary procedures and accept Medicaid, explaining that the other listings were repeats, radiology centers, labs and doctors who didn’t take Medicaid at all.

To make matters worse for many low-income women, the Kaiser Family Foundation says that Texas has one of the most restrictive Medicaid programs in the country, requiring that a family of three earn less than $188 a month to qualify for assistance. Under the president’s Affordable Care Act, however, Medicaid was slated to expand dramatically to cover nearly all low-income Americans, but Perry also said he will turn down more than $164 billion in federal money that would have been used to provide health care to 1.2 million Texans through 2023.

So as a result, 130,000 working poor women will lose their health care just to punish them for the crime of being poor in Texas.  But of course, that was the entire point.

There's no GOP War on Women though.  That's just preposterous.

Third Time Is The Charm For Mobile Meth Lab

Last week wasn’t the first time Springfield Police found what they believe was a mobile meth lab in Marshall Rhea’s pickup truck.

They say it was the third time. In as many months.

Rhea, 31, of Springfield, has been charged with multiple counts of manufacturing or intent to manufacture methamphetamine.

Police say they pulled over Rhea for failing to stop at a stop sign in the 700 block of South Fort Avenue. Rhea allowed officers to search the black pickup truck, according to the court documents.

In the bed of the truck, officers found what they believe were components of a particularly volatile type of lab — one that uses the chemical red phosphorous to synthesize the drug. According to the documents, a rubber glove had been placed over a glass container to capture phosphine gas — a highly explosive gas that is also lethal if inhaled.

On the passenger floorboard of the truck, officers found an empty package of 48 pseudoephedrine tablets, according to the documents.

Gee, I wonder if the publicity from this will be hailed by the City Council as they pretend to debate whether to take action against the evils of Dayquil.

We have an idiot with a jar full of explosive gas running stop signs.  Good catch on the part of the cops, too bad they've had to do it three times so far and the dude is still free.  Perhaps we have found the real problem with meth offenders.  

Teen Dies From Caffeine Toxicity

(NECN/WRC: Jim Rosenfield) - The parents of a 14-year-old Hagerstown, Md. girl who died in December are suing the maker of Monster energy drink, claiming caffeine in the product contributed to her death.

Anais Fournier went into cardiac arrest after drinking two 24-ounce Monster drinks within a 24-hour period, according to a complaint filed Friday in California Superior Court in Riverside.

Hers is one of five deaths and a non-fatal heart attack the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is investigating in connection to the energy drinks.

Fournier was rushed to the hospital, but never regained consciousness. 

She was later pronounced dead.

Investigations don't prove the drinks caused the deaths or Fournier's heart attack, FDA spokesperson Shelly Burgess said.

An autopsy found that Fournier died of cardiac arrhythmia due to caffeine toxicity that impeded her heart's ability to pump blood.

We have a major problem with caffeine as a society.  We drink it to wake up, drink way too much to compensate for lack of exercise and stay up too late, which means we will hit the coffee before opening our eyes the next day. Kids are becoming exposed to this at a younger age.  The line between parental responsibility and consumer safety further complicate the issue.  In this case, an unknown condition aggravated the situation, but there are plenty of kids sucking down energy shots and energy drinks, and then washing it down with soda.

Regardless of who is ultimately responsible, this is going to get worse until some common sense is applied.

The Threats Are The Rite-Hite

Add Rite-Hite Safety Systems' CEO Mike White to the list of business owners threatening their employees to vote Romney or else.

The list of corporate CEOs and owners who have tried scaring their employees into voting for Mitt Romney got a bit longer this week thanks to Milwaukee businessman Mike White.

White, the owner of the industrial equipment firm Rite-Hite, sent his 1,400 employees an email this week warning them that they needed to “understand the personal consequences to them of having our tax rates increase dramatically if President Obama is re-elected,” according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, which was sent a copy of the correspondence. The email goes on to warn that Rite-Hite would consider dropping its contribution to the workers’ retirement plan, blaming tax hikes that White says are on the way if Obama wins a second term, and that workers will lose their health care.

But don't take my word for it.  Take Mike White's.

“The tax rate we pay is not 17%, as Warren Buffett would have you believe; with state taxes it is roughly 45%. President Obama has announced that our planned tax rate would increase to roughly 65%, reducing our after tax income by 36% and dramatically reducing, if not eliminating, your and my RSP contributions.”

As a result, White said the company’s profits would not be reinvested. Instead, he wrote, “the money will be sent into the abyss that is Washington, D.C. So, on top of the burden of having your personal taxes increase dramatically, which they will, your RSP contributions and healthy retirement are also at risk, all for the sake of maintaining an over-sized government that borrows 42% of every dollar it spends.”

P.S.:  White is a big Republican donor.  How would you feel if your boss sent you an e-mail threatening you with the loss of retirement and health insurance if the wrong guy wins?  And remember, this was an e-mail he sent out to all employees publicly.  This wasn't under the radar.

But don't you dare call it class warfare, right?

Oh, and P.P.S...it looks like Mike White broke Wisconsin law.

We Come Not To Praise Teabaggers...

...but E.J. Dionne at the Washington Post has come to bury them.

If conservatism were winning, does anyone doubt that Romney would be running as a conservative? Yet unlike Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, Romney is offering an echo, not a choice. His strategy at the end is to try to sneak into the White House on a chorus of me-too’s.

The right is going along because its partisans know Romney has no other option. This, too, is an acknowledgment of defeat, a recognition that the grand ideological experiment heralded by the rise of the tea party has gained no traction. It also means that conservatives don’t believe that Romney really believes the moderate mush he’s putting forward now. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if the conservatives are forgiving Romney because they think he is lying, what should the rest of us think?

Almost all of the analysis of Romney’s highly public burning of the right’s catechism focuses on such tactical issues as whether his betrayal of principle will help him win over middle-of-the-road women and carry Ohio. What should engage us more is that a movement that won the 2010 elections with a bang is trying to triumph just two years later on the basis of a whimper.

It turns out that there was no profound ideological conversion of the country two years ago. We remain the same moderate and practical country we have long been. In 2010, voters were upset about the economy, Democrats were demobilized, and President Obama wasn’t yet ready to fight. All the conservatives have left now is economic unease. So they don’t care what Romney says. They are happy to march under a false flag if that is the price of capturing power.

I like E.J. Dionne.  I think he's a smart guy and solid political analyst and pundit.

But he has never been more wrong in his life.  Ever. 

The fact that E.J. is writing this column is empirical proof that he too has been taken in by Romney's Etch-A-Sketch campaign.  Dionne sees meaningless blanks.  I see a President far more compliant than Dubya ever was.  He will do exactly what he is told.  It will be the Dubya years all over again, only worse.

And should Romney lose, we will see an even more wingnut crazy candidate in 2016.  Santorum.  Huckabee.  Who knows?  Ryan even.  Madness.

No, what this election represents is the death of GOP moderates.  They are gone from the party for good.  And Romney is their puppet.

StupidiNews!

• Syrian government forces say they will hold a four-day cease fire over the Eid al-Adha holiday starting today, but reserve the right to respond to any rebel "terrorist acts".
• President Obama became the first sitting President to take advantage of early voting in Illinois on Thursday, casting his ballot in Chicago.
• Two drug-sniffing dog cases will be heard by the US Supreme Court next week, raising questions about the Fourth Amendment and search and seizure laws.
• Fish caught off the coast of Japan's Fukushima region show the same level of contamination as they did a year ago, raising fresh safety concerns.
• With Windows 8 out this week, Microsoft will most likely skip any second major service pack for Windows 7.

Last Call

So what about the Senate?

A couple of months ago I would have said that the Dems were in serious trouble.  Now?  With less that two weeks to go, it's looking more and more like the Dems will not only keep the Senate, but actually pick up a number of seats.  Of course, to the Washington Post, that means that the races are "essentially tied" and that "Republicans are very optimistic."

In the battle for control of the U.S. Senate, there are now at least eight critical contests in which polling shows essentially a dead heat, encouraging Republicans’ hopes that they may yet snag the chamber, which very recently seemed beyond their reach.

Some of the GOP boost is coming from the top of the ticket in the form of Mitt Romney, whose recent surge in the polls seems to be helping Republican candidates across the country.

Democrats still have an edge in their effort to keep control of the Senate, and they may have been helped Tuesday when Republican candidate Richard Mourdock in Indiana suggested that pregnancies resulting from rape are God’s will, possibly damaging his chances to succeed Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R).

But both parties agree that many of the most important races have become more competitive in recent days, and their outcomes harder to predict.

Really?  Let's take a look at the WaPo's own predictions.  Right now it has the Dems getting to 50, with 6 toss-ups.  That means in order for the Republicans to get control, they would have to win all six toss-up races and Romney would have to win the White House, making Paul Ryan the tiebreaker.  How is that in any way "optimistic"?

There's no evidence that Romney's surge, being based on Obama's shortcomings in the first debate, had any effect on the Senate races at all.

I don't see it happening.  Even the guys at Power Line, who all but have crowned Romney an easy win in November, are not seeing the GOP takeover of the Senate.

I still say the Dems will pick up a couple of seats.  They could pick up 4, maybe even 5.  It's just as likely as the GOP picking up the six they would need, right?