I'm anxious to see the Faux Left coming out of the woods again during the reign of the Orange One. All the shit they opposed when the Bush administration did it only to shut up when the Obama administration continued, or even expanded it, are they going to oppose it again? Can we at least get opposition against the targetted killing of US citizens without due process (al-Awlaki)?

What of all the Dem sycophants in the liberal wing of the media (Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Operative K, Rachel Maddow, etc) who went on a pro-HRC binge over the last months in particular, will they return to reality?

And what is Alex Jones going to? Having raged against government in general only to have his guy now be in charge of the government... is he going to sell beauty products now?

Edit: Thomas Frank, again, to the rescue:

Put this question in slightly more general terms and you are confronting the single great mystery of 2016. The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who really wasn’t all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone who didn’t accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it’s time to consider whether there’s something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.

Most economists agree that the stimulus worked. Not that that fact should stop the Koch Brothers from creating propaganda videos like this one.

Here's a WP article on a few studies: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/did-the-stimulus-work-a-review-of-the-nine-best-studies-on-the-subject/2011/08/16/gIQAThbibJ_blog.
html

"Taken literally, the top 1 percent of American households had a minimum income of $516,633 in 2010 — a figure that includes wages, government transfers and money from capital gains, dividends and other investment income." -Washington Post

In the video, Romney and the interviewer are specifically using the term "millionaires," so I have to take their exchange at face value as meaning anyone with a net worth of at least 1 million dollars. They could have a salary of $1 for all I know, but somewhere they have assets and cash available to them summing to a million dollars.

I'd be envious of an income of $500,000 all the same, since I could become a millionaire in under 3 years by just continuing to live as I do now.

>> ^cosmovitelli:

>> ^HaricotVert:
I should have clarified. The absolute definition of "millionaire" would describe anyone whose net worth is greater than $999,999.99. Many people who have barely over the $1,000,000 threshold lead rather reasonable lives, as in they don't drive Lamborghinis or own private islands or have yachts.

Surely a million doesn't get you into the 1%? Maybe in 1990.. At a guess I'd say you needed at least $5 million to qualify, no? And probably invested in a dozen properties so the 'envious' can pay off your mortgages..
Btw well done QM he's black and has big ears! Well spotted, again. Now let adults talk.

Ron Paul is against EVERYTHING, and he is savvy enough to market politically profitable "anti" positions to the correct single issue constituents without letting them know that he is also against tons of things that those constituents support.

-He is against SOPA, but he is also against Net Neutrality.(1)
-He is against our current war, but he is also against all military intervention including fighting Hitler (2), the confederate south (3) and presumably any legitimate future Hitlarian tyrant that may pop up.
-He is against drug laws, but he is also against environmental protections. (4)
-He is against Federal laws against gay marriage, but he supports them at the state level and opposes the Supreme Court ruling on state issues even if they are deemed unconstitutional. (5)
-He is against civil rights protections for minorities, women and gays. He'd like to repeal those civil rights protections and allow states to legalize discrimination at their leisure. (5)
-He is against public education. (6)
-He is against the separation of church and state. (7)
-He wants to deregulate the banks. (8)
-He wants to give corporations a huge tax cuts at a time of record productivity, record unemployment and record corporate profits. (9)
-He would make massive cuts to science (10) and is a global warming denier. (11)

He is a terrible candidate. You aren't a rebel if you support him. You are just bucking one undesirable status quo for an even worse anarcho-capitalist flavored status quo. He is consistent, but foolishly so. Look a little deeper before giving your blind support to this guy.

I'm so sick of the internet's uninformed Ron Paul circle jerk.

He is not the political savior you are looking for.

Cites:
(1) http://www.issues2000.org/tx/Ron_Paul.htm
(2) http://www.mediaite.com/online/former-aide-ron-paul-claimed-saving-the-jews-was-absolutely-none-of-our-business/
(3)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbOE4Ip7In0
(4)http://lewrockwell.com/block/block189.html
(5)http://steviemcfly.tumblr.com/post/15660334642/ron-pauls-strange-relationship-with-privacy
(6)http://www.ronpaul.com/on-the-issues/education/
(7)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Ron_Paul#Religion
(8)http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/gop-deregulate-wall-street/2011/08/25/gIQAeJmNuL_blog.html
(9)http://www.ronpaul2012.com/the-issues/ron-paul-plan-to-restore-america/
(10)http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/10/ron-paul-would-erase-billions-in.html
(11)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCc5Gk1nops

Tags for this video have been changed from 'accomplishments, taxes, deals, end of year' to 'Ezra Klein, accomplishments, taxes, deals, end of year' - edited by Boise_Lib

>> ^handmethekeysyou:

I love this idea, and I really hope they continue with it as a series. However, I take one very strong issue with this video; specifically their absolute failure in communication design. The use of circles is borderline offensive to anyone even loosely schooled in the subject.
"We got a ruler and measured out the size of the tax cut, is how big the circle is [sic]". Cool. Corresponding to what? How big the tax cut is by percentage? Dollar amount? What?

Fair, point, but it's all too rare for liberals to try to make a simple, easy to understand case for what they're doing. I don't want them to spend a lot of time talking about x and y axes when they're just trying to drive home the difference in policy priorities.

That said, I suspect it's similar to this chart, and in that one, it's the area of the circle that's proportionate to the raw number of dollars a person with the stated income would save under each proposal, compared to the baseline tax code.

>> ^blankfist:

And I like how his chart stops at 1 million. Why doesn't he show what they'd do to people who make more than 1 million? What about people who make ten million? Or 100 million? Because this is just theater.


More likely, it's because it wouldn't be fair to keep going. The Obama circles stay the same size as you go up from this point (hence the "Let the tax cuts expire on income over $250,000" thing), and the Bush circles keep getting bigger at ever-faster rates. I'm not gonna try and estimate at what income level the Bush circle would be bigger than the whole board, but I wouldn't be surprised if $10 million was close.

The Bush tax as initially proposed were estimated by the CBO to increase the deficit and they did. Massively. Extending them for everyone, as opposed to to everyone but the top 2 tax classes is estimated to add $2 trillion dollars to the deficit over the next decade by the CBO.

Source: http://www.fwdailynews.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=9057:Both-parties-unwilling-to-face-budget-realities&catid=84:brian-howey

Health Care reform is estimated by the CBO to reduce the deficit by $1.3 trillion over 20 years.

Source: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/cbo_health-care_reform_bill_cu.html

---

Explain how as someone who is purportedly in favor of reducing the deficit, you can be against health care reform but for extending the tax cuts for the wealthy.

Don't dodge the question, don't go on a tangent, don't resort to using superlatives or comparing Obama to dictators to mischaracterise reality.

If you can't, or do any of the aforementioned, I will assume that are simply hold an illogical partisan position.>> ^quantumushroom:

Who do these marxist frauds think they're fooling?
The vermin looted the Treasury and were unable to create jobs or anything else. Money is less a problem than the theft which took it by force from the productive who earned it.
Even if you left the Bush tax cuts intact, they'll barely dent the slew of new taxes from the obamateur's commiecare, already beginning to negatively the economy.

@Doc_M, I noticed you didn't take on my central point about loyalty. What you're talking about is actually something I have always believed -- there aren't really independents who are truly independent in any large number in America. Left-leaning independents vote for Democrats as often as self-identified Democrats, and right-leaning independents vote for Republicans as often as self-identified Republicans, and true independents make up a very small share of the electorate. There's actually data to back that up.

But I'm talking about something much deeper than voting patterns -- I'm talking about "epistemic closure." I'm referring to the way conservatives get all their "facts" these days only from a select number of outlets that distort, misrepresent, or outright fabricate facts to vindicate their ideology, and treat all sources with different views as "liberal", and therefore "ideological", and therefore equivalent enough to say "opinions on the shape of earth differ," when in truth the "facts" cooked up by the right-wing media empire often have little or no connection to reality.

My example was "tax cuts increase tax revenue." That has zero basis in fact. Zero. It's not "that's too complicated an issue for us to know who's really right and wrong", it's just plainly, demonstrably false. If you cut taxes, it adds to the deficit. It can produce a small stimulative effect on the economy as a whole, which makes them slightly less expensive than a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation would indicate, but it never raises growth so much that the net effect is an increase in revenue.

Not to cross too much into your back & forth with rougy, but I would definitely say that there is no left wing equivalent of the "far right" -- at best, there is an actual American Socialist party, but they don't really have a voice in the mainstream liberal movement, and they certainly don't have 1-hour opinion shows on cable news networks, and hundreds of radio shows across the country. The real problem the left has is that 90% of the Democratic party seems to be to the right of their base. People who're in line with the Democratic base (e.g. Sherrod Brown, Anthony Weiner) are perpetually labeled "far left", not just by Republicans, but by Democratic leadership.

As for the 9/11 thing, again, it's a big difference. You don't have Democratic politicians saying "9/11 was an inside job", you don't have left-wing columnists continuing to speculate publicly that 9/11 was an inside job, and certainly you don't see left-wing people who say that getting invited on Sunday talk shows to talk about foreign policy.

Our conspiracy theorists get systematically frozen out, while the Republicans are happy to repeat every crackpot conspiracy theory on the floor of Congress, including trivially disproven stuff like "Obama was really born in Kenya."

I agreed with Obama in not mandating insurance. I didn't think it should be done then and don't think it should be done now. Forcing people to buy these policies is a remarkable intrusion of government into our lives. Some random thoughts:



1. Regarding gaming the system: The fine is so minimal that I'll wait to get sick anyway. Nothing is going to change. There isn't a hospital in the land that is going to refuse me treatment today and there won't be a hospital that will refuse me treatment in five years.

2. Due to the coming financial impact on the bottom line, some pretty big name businesses are gearing up to shrink their employee roster. So much for creating jobs.

3. Your link is broken.

4. I just became Amish.>> ^NetRunner:

A couple points.
Obama was against the individual mandate for the reasons he said here -- he doesn't see why you should fine or go after people who can't afford insurance.
So, the bill he signed into law has an exemption from the fine for people who can't afford insurance, though subsidies make it pretty much impossible for insurance to be unaffordable to the poor.
Why did Obama flip-flop on the mandate? Because it's good policy. Ezra Klein explains pretty much everything you need to know about the individual mandate here, namely what it is, how it works, and why it's a necessary part of reform.
The short version: The way health insurance works (whether it's for-profit or not) is if you have a large pool of healthy people paying into the system to fund the medical costs for the few people who do get sick. If you make insurance companies accept people with preexisting conditions without a mandate, then people will be free to game the system and sign up for insurance only when they get sick. If there are no healthy people paying into the pool, then the premiums will be so high that paying out of pocket might be cheaper.
Sorry, I'm overthinking it. Obama's position on a specific implementation detail on health care is different now than it was two or three years ago. Clearly we should impeach him for being a big fat liar and a traitor to the American people.
Time to water the tree of liberty with the blood of people who change their minds in response to persuasive arguments from experts...

A couple points.

Obama was against the individual mandate for the reasons he said here -- he doesn't see why you should fine or go after people who can't afford insurance.

So, the bill he signed into law has an exemption from the fine for people who can't afford insurance, though subsidies make it pretty much impossible for insurance to be unaffordable to the poor.

Why did Obama flip-flop on the mandate? Because it's good policy. Ezra Klein explains pretty much everything you need to know about the individual mandate here, namely what it is, how it works, and why it's a necessary part of reform.

The short version: The way health insurance works (whether it's for-profit or not) is if you have a large pool of healthy people paying into the system to fund the medical costs for the few people who do get sick. If you make insurance companies accept people with preexisting conditions without a mandate, then people will be free to game the system and sign up for insurance only when they get sick. If there are no healthy people paying into the pool, then the premiums will be so high that paying out of pocket might be cheaper.

Sorry, I'm overthinking it. Obama's position on a specific implementation detail on health care is different now than it was two or three years ago. Clearly we should impeach him for being a big fat liar and a traitor to the American people.

Time to water the tree of liberty with the blood of people who change their minds in response to persuasive arguments from experts...

Ezra Klein is possibly the best place for any info re: HCR

I usually read through these every day:

http://www.dailykos.com/
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
http://thinkprogress.org/
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/

If I have time left over, I dig into these:

http://delong.typepad.com/
http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/
http://www.balloon-juice.com/
http://pandagon.net/
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

I also like these blogs, but I don't read them on a regular basis:

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/
http://www.pollster.com/ (this goes back into my daily-read list once they start doing serious 2010 polling)
http://www.wonkette.com/
http://blog.indecisionforever.com/
http://www.crooksandliars.com/

I also peruse these non-politics sites pretty much every day:

http://www.autoblog.com/
http://www.joystiq.com/
http://kotaku.com/

It almost goes without saying, but I use Google and Wikipedia a lot too.

More polling information about health care (from actually reputable sources):

Poll Finds Most Doctors Support Public Option (published originally in the New England Journal of Medicine)

Obama job approval on the rise

NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds 76% support public option

And a de-spun ABC/Washington Post poll shows 76% support a public option if it's reserved for those unable to get health insurance now -- which is the way it would work in all the drafts of legislation being considered.

Mostly though, there's one trend I've seen in all the polls, and a professional poll-watcher like Nate Silver backs me up on this, but the more specificity you provide, the more support for the package rises.

It's something I noticed during the election too -- the more information people got about Obama and his platform, the more support for him rose. Same thing is happening with health care.

First things first -- Medicare is more efficient. The rate of cost inflation for Medicare and Medicaid have been slower than the inflation costs of private insurance.

As for the "moral" question, why indeed should I care about anyone else? I mean, if my neighbor's house catches fire, surely there's no chance mine will catch too.

Surely if my neighbor loses his job, and then loses his home, my property's value won't decline.

Surely if my neighbor catches a communicable, dangerous disease like swine flu, I'm sure I'll never catch it from him.

Even people to which selfishness is a virtue should realize we're all invested in each other's fates.

Plus, are conservatives utterly convinced that they can't lose their job, or lose their insurance, and that even if they do that they're immune to serious illness?

I just don't understand why they're so dead set against a safety net, when they're as likely as anyone else to get cancer, or hit by a drunk driver.

@8:39, Ron Paul says the fear about "death panels" is justified(!), though thankfully he avoids calling them that.

The only other argument I hear from Paul in this is that Medicare costs too much. The counterpoint to that argument was given (Medicare focuses only on the elderly), but the other thing to look at is that Medicare cost inflation has been slower than private insurance inflation for nearly 40 years.

Really though, I think the House plan (summarized here and here) incorporates aspects of what all three of them talked about.

The part Paul would like is that the "exchange" is national, and effectively allows cross-state competition for individual private insurers.

The public option is meant to appease single-payer folk, since it will look a lot like single-payer except for the eponymous part -- it won't be the only payer.

The summaries I linked don't mention anything Dr. Ornish wants, but the bill does include incentives for preventative care (a mandated $0 deductable for checkups/preventative medicine, IIRC).

*long