Friday Funnies: Romney And….Big Bird?

Conan O'Brien:  "It's being reported that Mitt Romney's goal for tonight's debate is to make Barack Obama look like Jimmy Carter. Meanwhile, Barack Obama's goal is to make Mitt Romney look like Mitt Romney."

"Today was not only the first presidential debate, it was also President Obama's 20th wedding anniversary. I think the president got a little confused. At one point, he told Michelle that she was out of touch with the middle class and Romney that he looks as beautiful as the day they first met."

Jay Leno: "The presidential debates were earlier tonight, and I think most of the nation's all thinking the same thing – just one more day until Thursday Night Football."

Technorati Tags: Mitt Romney,Big Bird,PBS,2012 Elections,Friday Funnies,Current Events,Jay Leno,Late Night Talk

Mitt Romney, The Debate, and Medicare

  First off, Mitt was in school-yard bully mode during the debate with his constant interruption of President Obama and his near temper-tantrum attitude. With his constant rapid eye blinking, he looked as if he’d done an eight-ball of cocaine before hitting the stage, and he acted the same way.

   I take it that the Mormon religion does not follow “ thou shalt not bare false witness…” because Mitt did plenty of it last night. So what’s new, right?

  On Medicare

Obama: The essence of the plan is he would turn Medicare into a voucher program…

Moderator: And you don’t support that.

Obama: I don’t. And let me explain why.

Romney: [Interrupting] Again, that’s for future people…

Obama: I understand.

Romney: … not for current retirees.

Obama: So, [looks directly at T.V. audience] if you’re 54 or 55 you might want to listen, because this will affect you.

While Obama wants people to listen up, Romney actually said during the Medicare debate that people approaching retirement (whose benefits won’t change) could “stop listening” — as if being old means you’re so self-centered that you don’t care about your children’s and grandchildren’s futures, and beyond.     

But, if you were looking for substance, Romney’s not your candidate. He said things that sounded nice, such as, with him, you’ll be “free to pursue your dreams,” or he’ll “get incomes up” and cut the deficit while cutting taxes for “middle income” Americans (who, according to Romney, earn up to $250,000 per year).

However, Romney has no explanation or plan for how he will achieve any of these rosy outcomes, outside of the ubiquitous “tax cuts” for “job creators,” a myth already proven false.

Technorati Tags: Mitt Romney,Barack Obama,1st Debate,2012 Election,Healthcare,Current Events

 

Mitt Romney Care About The 47%, Not !

  From Jed Lewison  we get the rundown on why  Romney is not a good choice as our president for the 47%.

Mitt Romney takes his 89th position* on taxes in his latest ad, including the laughably false claim that he's the one who will ask millionaires to pay more in taxes.

The ad makes three claims: that President Obama has already raised taxes on the middle class, that Mitt Romney's plan would reduce taxes for the middle class, and that Romney's plan would crack down on millionaire tax dodgers by closing loopholes.

Let's take the claims one by one.

Claim #1: "Who will raise taxes on the middle class? Barack Obama and the liberals already have."

This claim is not true. The problem with this claim is that it focuses entirely on new taxes in Obamacare (for example, an increase in the tax on cigarettes) but ignores the fact that President Obama has cut taxes by even more. Moreover, President Obama has not increased income taxes on anybody. In aggregate, there's been a reduction in taxes not just for the middle class but for every single taxpayer, including the wealthy.

Last week, Romney himself acknowledged that Obama hadn't raised taxes. "I admit this, he has one thing he did not do in his first four years — he’s said he’s going to do in the next four years — which is to raise taxes," he said. In fact, Romney opposed many of these tax cuts, including the payroll tax holiday and the tax cuts in the stimulus bill.

Claim #2: "Mitt Romney and commonsense conservatives will cut taxes on the middle class."

The problem here is that Romney is ignoring the fact that he's promised to reduce tax deductions to pay for lower rates so that overall taxes would not go down. Last week, he told supporters not to expect to see a significantly lower tax bill under his plan. "By the way, don't be expecting a huge cut in taxes because I'm also going to lower deductions and exemptions," he said. In fact, if Romney maintains his pledge for revenue neutrality, taxes would actually need to go up on the middle class to pay for the enormous tax cuts he promises to the wealthy. The only way to avoid a tax hike would be to explode the deficit.

Claim #3: "They [Mitt Romney and commonsense conservatives] will close loopholes for millionaires."

The problem with this claim is essentially the inverse of the problem with the second claim: It's true that Romney's plan calls for reducing unspecified tax breaks enjoyed by millionaires, but it's also true that his tax plan calls for reducing their tax rate by 20 percent. The value of that 20 percent tax break dwarfs the cost of giving up deductions, so it's a trade upper income taxpayers would happily make. Sure, there would be fewer loopholes, but thanks to lower rates, the wealthy would still pay less in taxes. That's the central problem with Romney's tax plan—it means that unless he abandons his tax cuts for the wealthy, he needs to choose between exploding the deficit or raising taxes on the middle class, neither of which are politically acceptable options.

Despite the ad's distortions, it's easy to understand why Mitt Romney is running it: If he can convince voters that he actually wants to ask the wealthy to pay more and for the middle class to pay less, he could ease the sting of that 47 percent video. But the only way he can make that case is by misrepresenting the facts. As long as he insists on tax cuts for the wealthy, tax cuts for the middle class, and no reduction in revenue, Mitt Romney's tax plan is mathematically impossible. Perhaps his best bet would be to dump his tax plan altogether, but don't expect that anytime soon from Mr. No Apologies.

_{*Okay, I don't actually know for a fact that this is his 89th position. He's had so darn many of them, it's hard to keep track.}

Originally posted to The Jed Report on Tue Oct 02, 2012

Technorati Tags: Mitt Romney,47%,Taxes,Tax Cuts,2012 Elections,Current Events

Voter Fraud In Florida: Republicans Have Suddenly Lost Their Voice…

   …and I would suspect it is because Governor Rick Scott and other Republican Party leadership in the state were well aware of the voter registration fraud in the first place.

   From Meteor Blades

Florida Republicans all the way to the governor's office have made a big deal about stopping voter fraud at the polls despite studies showing the actual numbers of such fraud are less than minuscule. But with the revelation that a company with ties to Mitt Romney, Strategic Allied Consulting, was submitting hundreds of suspect voter registration forms, they don't seem to know how to proceed. Or simply don't want to. The deadline for voter registration is one week away.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating the alleged fraud. The Republican Party of Florida, which had hired SAC at the urging of the Republican National Committee, has fired the firm.

SAC has submitted nearly 47,000 voter registration forms. But neither governor's office nor the secretary of state's office has offered any guidance to county election supervisors on how to deal with forms they have received that might be bogus. Both are Republicans who have been in the forefront of an effort to remove Floridians from the voter rolls and attempt other efforts that would suppress the vote of citizens of demographics that typically cast their ballots heavily for Democratic candidates.

Michael Van Sickler at the Tampa Bay Times reports:

Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher said she is getting no direction from state officials as to how to proceed in checking the other forms filed by Strategic Allied Consulting, which was fired last week.

In the past 45 days, Palm Beach County has logged 15,000 new voters. Since Aug. 1, more than 60,000 registration forms were filed, many for changes of address or updating signatures. Bucher said she doesn't know how many of those forms, now stored in a warehouse, were filled out by Strategic Allied Consulting.

"We're not sure if we need to go back and check," Bucher said Monday. "Obviously, it causes us great concern." Bucher was hoping to find out Monday if the state was going to instruct the counties with questionable forms to adopt a uniform method to review all forms filed by the firm.

Bucher is a Democrat. Her office has flagged more than 100 questionable registration forms from SAC. Nine other counties have discovered smaller numbers of apparently fraudulent forms. In Dade County, three questionable forms came from another major registerer of voters, the National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest Latino civil rights advocate. But the magnitude is nothing like that with SAC.

SAC is owned by Nathan Sproul, a paid consultant to Mitt Romney. His firms have been previously accused of altering information on Democratic voter registration forms in several states. He ran voter registration efforts for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004, for McCain-Palin in 2008 and Romney since late last year. Before firing SAC last week, the Republican Party of Florida had paid the firm $1.3 million for July and August, according to the Palm Beach Post. The Republican National Committee has also severed ties with SAC. It has paid $3.1 million to the firm through state organizations in Florida, Nevada, Colorado, North Carolina and Virginia, according to the Los Angeles Times.

On Monday, the Post published a letter to the governor from Ted Deutch, a Democratic representative from Florida's 19th congressional district:

Governor Scott, we are on the cusp of a Presidential election. Disturbing reports suggest that professionally coordinated voter fraud occurred in Florida that is potentially massive in scale. Your silence and inaction are shocking and hypocritical considering you have spent the last year in an expensive and highly controversial effort to purge legitimate citizens from our rolls in a supposed search to find “voter fraud.” Your efforts to purge 182,000 individuals from our voting rolls continued until we discovered that the list was nakedly partisan and so error-ridden that it contained the names of tens of thousands of legitimate voters, including small business owners and a decorated World War II hero. Now, when an actual voter fraud scheme has apparently been discovered in our state, there is neither room nor time for the partisan allegiances that typically guide your Administration’s actions.

Governor Scott, you now have an opportunity to prove that you care about voter fraud even if involves the Florida Republican Party, the Republican National Committee, and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.

Faced with a clear and obvious attempt to muck with voter registration in ways that could, if widespread enough, upend the results of the election, it would hardly be out of place to think that Republicans who have been so ostentatiously attentive to this issue would be eager to get to the bottom of it. But, suddenly, cat's got their tongue.

•••

Ari Berman has a good summary of GOP voter suppression in Florida.

Originally posted to Meteor Blades on Tue Oct 02, 2012

Technorati Tags: Voter Suppression,Florida,Mitt Romney,The Republican Party,Rick Scott,Election Officials,Current Events,Strategic Allied Consulting,Nathan Sproul,2012 elections Bain Capital