The Teflon Candidate?

Years ago, it used to be said that President Ronald Reagan was the "teflon President." It seemed, no matter what happened, no matter what he did or didn't do, rightly or wrongly, for good or bad, nothing stuck to him. The people liked him, regardless, and his ratings stayed positive.

Now, we seem to have a candidate for the presidency in one Donald Trump, who is impervious to negative downturns, to an extent. Things he's said or done that, in the past, if said or done by any other candidate, wouldn't have kept them in the political race.

Presently, we're at a moment when Mr. Trump is recorded as saying horrendous, ugly, sexist, actually exploitative things about a woman and about women, yet there are plenty of people still supporting him. Heck, even Evangelical ministers and leaders have announced in the last 24 hours, since this news story broke, that they're still behind him.

Newsman Dan Rather, today on Facebook, said it well, I think.

What does it take to knock Donald Trump out? You would think that the latest obscene, vile, repulsive audio leak would be an electoral haymaker that has him on the canvas for good. In any other election, with any other candidate, this might well have been the equivalent of a spontaneous combustion. And it might be for Donald Trump, but I have thought that many times before.

Calling Mexicans rapists and murderers? Trump went there and it set him on the path to the GOP nomination. Running over John McCain's war record? Barely a speed bump for the Trump campaign bus. Mocking the disabled? Check that off the list and Trump bounces back. Disrespecting the parents of a fallen American soldier? It seems like in the end it was merely a flesh wound for the Donald. And there were so many more instances that likely would have proven fatal to any other candidate in any other election.

Clearly Trump has a floor of support that would condone almost anything. But perhaps this is different and we will see a chipping away at his numbers. Perhaps we will see more of a free fall, although I doubt it. And yet it is also clear that his floor is not enough for Trump to capture the White House. I can't see this adding any voters to his totals, except maybe the villains of the movies from the 1980s.

If you want to see how this plays out, listen to Republicans running for election this fall. Every one of them is going to be asked this weekend to defend Trump's comments. What will they do? Will the knives come out for the party's nominee from his fellow Republicans? Will they begin to run from him, rather than with him? Will this final wave finally sink the Trump campaign?

I must add that while the severity of the latest audio is particularly disgusting, any elected official who expresses surprise must surely be feigning it. Look at Trump's Twitter feed. Listen to his statements from the past. Did you really think this kind of language was beyond him?

This election is not only about the presidency, but about who will lead in Congress and the state houses. How toxic does Trump become? Can he bounce back yet again, even if the polls seem to be moving against him? Will this doom the GOP in 2016, or even beyond? Will it realign our political system?

So many questions, but we will get answers. And we will be the ones who will give them when we go to the polls. There are few times in my career when I have been more at a loss for what I could expect for the future of my country.

Regardless, at this point, as I wrote and posted yesterday, there is no possible way Mr. Trump is winning this thing. It's just stunning he's still considered a viable candidate.

On This Day, 1986

U.S. President Reagan and Attorney Gen. Edwin Meese revealed that profits from secret arms sales to Iran had been diverted to rebels in Nicaragua. 

National Security Advisor John Poindexter resigned and Oliver North was fired.

Nothing came of the federal laws being broken.

Nothing. Ever.

To this day, legions of Americans have nothing but praise for Ronald Reagan.

On that immigration issue?

Republican Presidents on Unemployment Insurance

Someone needs to get this to the current Republicans in the party.

How's this for irony?

To Congress right now, from the Gipper himself:

 

Here's hoping those chuckleheads in Congress will do the right thing and totally avoid any government shutdown.

 

On the American National Deficit

...and responsible politicians, office holders, government representatives and political parties:

More?   Here you go:

Link: 

Federal Deficit Falls A Shocking 32% Under Obama

This will be making some Right Wing heads asplode today

The very famously business-friendly Forbes magazine, no less, writes the following:

Economically, Could Obama Be America's Best President?

From the link:

"...Presidents universally take credit when the economy does well (such as Reagan,) and choose to blame other factors when the economy does poorly (such as Carter.) But there was a clear pattern, and link, between policy and financial market performance.

Although we hear almost no one in the Obama administration taking credit for record index highs, they should. Because the President deserves attention for how well this economy has done during his leadership.

The auto rescue plan has worked. American car manufacturers are still dominant and employing millions directly and in supplier companies. Wall Street reform has been painful but it has re-instated faith amongst investors. The markets are far more predictable than they were four years ago, as VIX numbers demonstrate greater faith and less risk.

Even for small investors, such as thoughs limited to their 401(k) or IRA investments, the average annual compound return on stocks under President Obama has been more than 24% since the lows of March, 2009. This is a better result than either Clinton, Reagan or FDR – who were the prior winners in our book.

To which, we have only one thing to say to the Republicans, the Right Wingers, the Neoconservatives and all the haters out there:

Suck it, beeyotches.

Things Americans need to know about our economy (guest post)

Things we Americans need to know, now, both about our past and current situation and what we could and should do.

From The New York Times today:

The Chutzpah Caucus

By PAUL KRUGMAN

At this point the economic case for austerity — for slashing government spending even in the face of a weak economy — has collapsed. Claims that spending cuts would actually boost employment by promoting confidence have fallen apart. Claims that there is some kind of red line of debt that countries dare not cross have turned out to rest on fuzzy and to some extent just plain erroneous math. Predictions of fiscal crisis keep not coming true; predictions of disaster from harsh austerity policies have proved all too accurate. 

Yet calls for a reversal of the destructive turn toward austerity are still having a hard time getting through. Partly that reflects vested interests, for austerity policies serve the interests of wealthy creditors; partly it reflects the unwillingness of influential people to admit being wrong. But there is, I believe, a further obstacle to change: widespread, deep-seated cynicism about the ability of democratic governments, once engaged in stimulus, to change course in the future. 

So now seems like a good time to point out that this cynicism, which sounds realistic and worldly-wise, is actually sheer fantasy. Ending stimulus has never been a problem — in fact, the historical record shows that it almost always ends too soon. And in America, at least, we have a pretty good record for behaving in a fiscally responsible fashion, with one exception — namely, the fiscal irresponsibility that prevails when, and only when, hard-line conservatives are in power. 

Let’s start with the common claim that stimulus programs never go away. 

In the United States, government spending programs designed to boost the economy are in fact rare — F.D.R.’s New Deal and President Obama’s much smaller Recovery Act are the only big examples. And neither program became permanent — in fact, both were scaled back much too soon. F.D.R. cut back sharply in 1937, plunging America back into recession; the Recovery Act had its peak effect in 2010, and has since faded away, a fade that has been a major reason for our slow recovery. 

What about programs designed to aid those hurt by a depressed economy? Don’t they become permanent fixtures? Again, no. Unemployment benefits have fluctuated up and down with the business cycle, and as a percentage of G.D.P. they are barely half what they were at their recent peak. Food stamp usage is still rising, thanks to a still-terrible labor market, but historical experience suggests that it too will fall sharply if and when the economy really recovers. 

Incidentally, foreign experience follows the same pattern. You often hear Japan described as a country that has pursued never-ending fiscal stimulus. In reality, it has engaged in stop-go policies, increasing spending when the economy is weak, then pulling back at the first sign of recovery (and thereby pushing itself back into recession). 

So the whole notion of perma-stimulus is fantasy posing as hardheaded realism. Still, even if you don’t believe that stimulus is forever, Keynesian economics says not just that you should run deficits in bad times, but that you should pay down debt in good times. And it’s silly to imagine that this will happen, right? 

Wrong. The key measure you want to look at is the ratio of debt to G.D.P., which measures the government’s fiscal position better than a simple dollar number. And if you look at United States history since World War II, you find that of the 10 presidents who preceded Barack Obama, seven left office with a debt ratio lower than when they came in. Who were the three exceptions? Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes. So debt increases that didn’t arise either from war or from extraordinary financial crisis are entirely associated with hard-line conservative governments. 

And there’s a reason for that association: U.S. conservatives have long followed a strategy of “starving the beast,” slashing taxes so as to deprive the government of the revenue it needs to pay for popular programs.

The funny thing is that right now these same hard-line conservatives declare that we must not run deficits in times of economic crisis. Why? Because, they say, politicians won’t do the right thing and pay down the debt in good times. And who are these irresponsible politicians they’re talking about? Why, themselves. 

To me, it sounds like a fiscal version of the classic definition of chutzpah — namely, killing your parents, then demanding sympathy because you’re an orphan. Here we have conservatives telling us that we must tighten our belts despite mass unemployment, because otherwise future conservatives will keep running deficits once times improve. 

Put this way, of course, it sounds silly. But it isn’t; it’s tragic. The disastrous turn toward austerity has destroyed millions of jobs and ruined many lives. And it’s time for a U-turn.

Happy birthday, Ronald Reagan

Click on picture for better, easier viewing/reading:

But everyone's pissed at the black guy.

Right.

Wonderful.

Happy birthday, Ronnie.

You got away with it.

You got away with it all.

Just as Dubya' did, years later.

The formerly Right Wing, but always the icon, President Ron Reagan, on assault weapons

Click on picture for easier reading:

 

Ronald Reagan, on guns

From the Gipper himself:

Ronald Reagan August 28, 1986

"This is a matter of vital importance to the public safety … While we recognize that assault-weapon legislation will not stop all assault-weapon crime, statistics prove that we can dry up the supply of these guns, making them less accessible to criminals.”
...
“I do not believe in taking away the right of the citizen for sporting, for hunting and so forth, or for home defense. But I do believe that an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon or needed for defense of a home.”

“Certain forms of ammunition have no legitimate sporting, recreational, or self-defense use and thus should be prohibited.”

“With the right to bear arms comes a great responsibility to use caution and common sense on handgun purchases.”

“Every year, an average of 9,200 Americans are murdered by handguns, according to Department of Justice statistics. This does not include suicides or the tens of thousands of robberies, rapes and assaults committed with handguns. This level of violence must be stopped.”

“I think maybe there could be some restrictions that there had to be a certain amount of training taken.”

“Well, I think there has to be some gun control.”

Republicans and the President need to keep their hands off Social Security

None other than the Republican Party's own saint from the grave, Ronnie the Raygun on Social Security:



Hands off our Social Security, ladies and gentlemen.

Here's that horrible, "big government" President in the White House

American financial scandals, then and now

"When Americans saw the scope of the savings an loan scandal in the 1980s, which today just seems like a bad day on the unregulated derivatives market, Ronald Reagan's Attorney General, Edwin Meese III, put nearly a thousand bankers behind bars. In contrast, Eric H. Holder, Jr., can't seem to smell the stench of a fraud that cost millions of people their jobs or homes."

--Drew Weston in The New York Times today, in his article "America's Leftward Tilt?"

We need to push for banking reform, support of regulations and breaking up the "too big to fail."

Link: http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/americas-leftward-tilt/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20121104

The real Mitt Romney, from a Reagan Republican

Click on picture for easier reading:

And he's not for you and me, folks.

Pres. Reagan's OMB Director, on Paul Ryan

Not coming from anyone on the Left, here's Former President Ronald Reagan's Director of the Office of Management and Budget, David Stockman, on Mitt Romney's pick for Vice President on his presidential run right now:

Paul Ryan’s Fairy-Tale Budget Plan

PAUL D. RYAN is the most articulate and intellectually imposing Republican of the moment, but that doesn’t alter the fact that this earnest congressman from Wisconsin is preaching the same empty conservative sermon.

Thirty years of Republican apostasy — a once grand party’s embrace of the welfare state, the warfare state and the Wall Street-coddling bailout state — have crippled the engines of capitalism and buried us in debt. Mr. Ryan’s sonorous campaign rhetoric about shrinking Big Government and giving tax cuts to “job creators” (read: the top 2 percent) will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse.

Mr. Ryan professes to be a defense hawk, though the true conservatives of modern times — Calvin Coolidge, Herbert C. Hoover, Robert A. Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, even Gerald R. Ford — would have had no use for the neoconconservative imperialism that the G.O.P. cobbled from policy salons run by Irving Kristol’s ex-Trotskyites three decades ago. These doctrines now saddle our bankrupt nation with a roughly $775 billion “defense” budget in a world where we have no advanced industrial state enemies and have been fired (appropriately) as the global policeman.

Indeed, adjusted for inflation, today’s national security budget is nearly double Eisenhower’s when he left office in 1961 (about $400 billion in today’s dollars) — a level Ike deemed sufficient to contain the very real Soviet nuclear threat in the era just after Sputnik. By contrast, the Romney-Ryan version of shrinking Big Government is to increase our already outlandish warfare-state budget and risk even more spending by saber-rattling at a benighted but irrelevant Iran.

Similarly, there can be no hope of a return to vibrant capitalism unless there is a sweeping housecleaning at the Federal Reserve and a thorough renunciation of its interest-rate fixing, bond buying and recurring bailouts of Wall Street speculators. The Greenspan-Bernanke campaigns to repress interest rates have crushed savers, mocked thrift and fueled enormous overconsumption and trade deficits.

The greatest regulatory problem — far more urgent that the environmental marginalia Mitt Romney has fumed about — is that the giant Wall Street banks remain dangerous quasi-wards of the state and are inexorably prone to speculative abuse of taxpayer-insured deposits and the Fed’s cheap money. Forget about “too big to fail.” These banks are too big to exist — too big to manage internally and to regulate externally. They need to be broken up by regulatory decree. Instead, the Romney-Ryan ticket attacks the pointless Dodd-Frank regulatory overhaul, when what’s needed is a restoration of Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era legislation that separated commercial and investment banking.

Mr. Ryan showed his conservative mettle in 2008 when he folded like a lawn chair on the auto bailout and the Wall Street bailout. But the greater hypocrisy is his phony “plan” to solve the entitlements mess by deferring changes to social insurance by at least a decade.

A true agenda to reform the welfare state would require a sweeping, income-based eligibility test, which would reduce or eliminate social insurance benefits for millions of affluent retirees. Without it, there is no math that can avoid giant tax increases or vast new borrowing. Yet the supposedly courageous Ryan plan would not cut one dime over the next decade from the $1.3 trillion-per-year cost of Social Security and Medicare.

Instead, it shreds the measly means-tested safety net for the vulnerable: the roughly $100 billion per year for food stamps and cash assistance for needy families and the $300 billion budget for Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor and disabled. Shifting more Medicaid costs to the states will be mere make-believe if federal financing is drastically cut.

Likewise, hacking away at the roughly $400 billion domestic discretionary budget (what’s left of the federal budget after defense, Social Security, health and safety-net spending and interest on the national debt) will yield only a rounding error’s worth of savings after popular programs (which Republicans heartily favor) like cancer research, national parks, veterans’ benefits, farm aid, highway subsidies, education grants and small-business loans are accommodated.

Like his new boss, Mr. Ryan has no serious plan to create jobs. America has some of the highest labor costs in the world, and saddles workers and businesses with $1 trillion per year in job-destroying payroll taxes. We need a national sales tax — a consumption tax, like the dreaded but efficient value-added tax — but Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan don’t have the gumption to support it.

The Ryan Plan boils down to a fetish for cutting the top marginal income-tax rate for “job creators” — i.e. the superwealthy — to 25 percent and paying for it with an as-yet-undisclosed plan to broaden the tax base. Of the $1 trillion in so-called tax expenditures that the plan would attack, the vast majority would come from slashing popular tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance, mortgage interest, 401(k) accounts, state and local taxes, charitable giving and the like, not to mention low rates on capital gains and dividends. The crony capitalists of K Street already own more than enough Republican votes to stop that train before it leaves the station.

In short, Mr. Ryan’s plan is devoid of credible math or hard policy choices. And it couldn’t pass even if Republicans were to take the presidency and both houses of Congress. Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have no plan to take on Wall Street, the Fed, the military-industrial complex, social insurance or the nation’s fiscal calamity and no plan to revive capitalist prosperity — just empty sermons.

David A. Stockman, who was the director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1981 to 1985, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Great Deformation: How Crony Capitalism Corrupts Free Markets and Democracy.”

Conservative Republicans aren't even for this guy's budget proposal.

What's that tell you?

Links: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/opinion/paul-ryans-fairy-tale-budget-plan.html?_r=2&ref=opinion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Stockman

Do you know what happened in Washington with the Disclose Act this week?

We--you and I, the American people--were betrayed.

Yet again.

The best 4 minutes and 51 seconds you could spend today to know more about your government and our nation.

You owe it to yourself. And to all of us.

Link: http://billmoyers.com/segment/bill-moyers-essay-fighting-disclosure-killing-democracy/

Here's Reaganomics and "trickle-down economics" for you

Ladies and gentlemen, the results of "Reaganomics" and the "job creators":

Could we change, now, now that we've gotten these proven results? Please?

Quote of the day

"Some years ago, one of my predecessors traveled across the country pushing for the same concept. He gave a speech where he talked about a letter he had received from a wealthy executive who paid lower tax rates than his secretary, and wanted to come to Washington and tell Congress why that was wrong. So this president gave another speech where he said it was "crazy"—that's a quote—that certain tax loopholes make it possible for multimillionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary. That wild-eyed, socialist, tax-hiking class warrior was Ronald Reagan" -- President Obama, today.

Quote of the day

"Why did government spending rise so much under Reagan, with his small-government rhetoric, while shrinking under the president so many Republicans insist is a secret socialist?" --Paul Krugman, economist, writer, author, columnist for The New York Times. Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/opinion/krugman-states-of-depression.html?smid=FB-nytimes&WT.mc_id=OP-E-FB-SM-LIN-SOD-030512-NYT-NA&WT.mc_ev=click