Praying for the Apocalypse: Dispatches From the GOP's Last Stand

One of the great joys of this past week has been watching the Tea Party-Republican reaction to the fiscal cliff deal reached on Tuesday morning. I wrote about my displeasure with it here and I have many of the same grievances with the bargain that hardcore Teapublicans do. The only difference is that I'm telling the truth and they aren't.

Most of the commentary that I've seen railed against the tax increase and the $4 trillion in new debt. The only problem with this critique is that if the GOP got it's way, the debt would have been much worse.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that almost all of the $4 trillion comes from the expansion of the Bush tax cuts for those making under $400, 000 and the permanent patch to the alternative minimum tax. The "new spending" (and that term requires that you believe that tax cuts that aren't paid for aren't spending, which they are) equals about $300 billion.

But Republicans generally, and the Tea Party in particular, wanted all of the Bush tax cuts made permanent, plus the patch of AMT, which would have made CBO's deficit projections larger still. That's the math, folks. Arguing with it doesn't change it.

That would have been fine if Republicans had a plausible way of paying for it. Luckily for them, Republican dogma dictates that tax cuts aren't spending, so the deficits that result from them, in the immortal words of Dick Cheney, "don't matter."

Of course, that brings us to loophole reductions highlighted in the various Ryan plans and the Romney campaign. These of course were nothing short of blatant lies, which we know because no one ever presented a list of deductions to be eliminated or the math behind them. The only reason to leave that information out is because you know that it would be politically impossible to pass. Romney and Ryan would have gotten their tax cuts, to be sure. But they either wouldn't have been paid for or the burden of doing so would have fallen squarely on the middle class.

And if deductions and loopholes are such a wonderful way of paying for tax cuts, why wasn't the idea explored in 2001 and '03? It had been done rather successfully in 1986 and there was certainly no shortage of economists in the Bush White House. My guess is - and this is only a guess because I'm not aware of anyone else asking the question - is that they either knew that the math didn't work or the optics of having the middle class pay for it would be politically worse than the deficits themselves.

But you can cut spending to pay for tax cuts, right?

Yes, that's theoretically possible. But Republicans have never actually tried it before. Neither Reagan or the second Bush tried cutting spending anywhere close to the costs of their tax cuts. In fact, both dramatically ramped up defense spending, which obliterated the savings from domestic spending cuts. But that too was okay because the GOP doesn't believe that defense spending is "spending," either. Indeed, Mitt Romney promised a third surge in security spending without bothering to figure out how he was going to pay for it.

Nor has anyone complaining about Obama's budgeting bothered to come up with anything close to $4 trillion in domestic cuts over a decade. They've promised a lot of reforms, but none of those take effect for a decade after enactment and are guaranteed to have monstrous transition costs. President Bush's 2005 Social Security plan was estimated to cost a trillion dollars in the first ten years, and I expect that Medicare reform based on personal plans would cost at least that much, and probably much, much more.

If the Grover Norquists and Erick Ericksons of the world had their way and everyone in the U.S government was suddenly a Republican, the projected deficits over the next 10 years would grow faster and larger than those currently on the table. Though they like pretending otherwise, their policies have costs, too. Both history and simple arithmetic teach us that.

As I've said before, I was fine with the sequester with its brutal, wide-ranging and immediate cuts. It was the GOP who objected to it most strongly because half of those cuts came directly from the Pentagon's hide, and the Republican platform calls for a dramatic increase in military spending. Another ideological perversion of the Republican Party is their failure to understand that defense spending, being wholly dependent on foreign policy, is the most discretionary spending of all. And at over $600 billion a year, it's the biggest discretionary program of all.

So when Republicans refuse to pay for their tax cuts or cut spending in a serious or timely way, they're left with one fallback position - shut down the government and possibly default on the debt.

You get a good idea of how unserious these people are when you read something like this;  "Specifically,( Pennsylvania Senator Pat)  Toomey tells Joe Scarborough, “We Republicans need to be willing to tolerate a temporary partial government shutdown, which is what that could mean, and insist that we get off the road to Greece because that’s the road we’re on now.”

Excuse me, but what in the fuck is a "temporary partial government shutdown?"

My guess is that it means that the parts of the government (which also happen to be the biggest parts of it) that Republicans like, such as the military and the CIA, continue conducting business as usual. The GOP might be stupid, but it isn't as suicidal as you might think, so Social Security checks will continue to go out and doctors will keep getting paid under Medicare and Medicaid. All "a temporary partial government shutdown" means is that there's no urgency to reach a deal.

Not being a real government shutdown, that allows people like Erickson to think that Republicans have room to maneuver. This is because people like Erickson don't know how life works outside of their silly ideological bubbles.

Friends, this isn't going to be a replay of 2011. Back then, both sides were negotiating before the government hit the debt ceiling and continued as Treasury was juggling existing money to pay the bills. In this case, the ceiling was reached on Tuesday morning, Obama is on the record as saying that he isn't going to negotiate serious spending cuts and Boehner has said that he isn't going to negotiate with Obama at all. In addition to that, I expect the intellectual misfits in the Tea Party to start calling for a default by the end of next week.

The timing of this suggests to me that a default is a serious possibility this time. In fact, I think it's probable.

The markets freaked out in 2011 just because the GOP talked about defaulting and America's credit rating was downgraded for the first time in history. Can you imagine what will happen if those crazy bastards actually do cause a default?

Remember the meltdown following the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy? This will be much worse. At least the government had access to $1.6 trillion for TARP and the Recovery Act then, which it won't this spring because no one will lend America money at anything less than ruinous interest rates. The economy won't "slow down," it'll come to a screeching halt and the United States could start losing a million jobs a month immediately.

By the way, do you know how hard killing terrorists will be when Congress doesn't even have change for the bus? China might also use the opportunity to ramp up its ambitions in the South Pacific, and God only knows what signals Iran will read into a U.S default and Depression.

And all of it will happen at the insistence of alleged "fiscal conservatives."

It's time to finally, finally admit that these people are fiscal conservatives the same way that Lindsay Lohan is sober and chaste. They are to sound economic policy what snake handling is to modern spirituality.

These people are willing to usher in Armageddon based solely on the factually unsupportable belief that Jesus will be waiting at the other side.

If you live outside America, you would be wise to get whatever money you have there out soonest. And if you live in the United States, know that Glenn Beck is probably right and you should start stockpiling gold, canned goods, firearms and explosives forthwith

The Republican Party is going down and they're fixing to take America down with it.

A Fiscal Cliff Deal That Makes Things Worse

At least in financial matters, it's hard to come to any conclusion other than that the United States is governed by emotionally damaged and intellectually challenged children. All things being equal, it is not as different from North Korea as you might have been lead to believe. I'm only sort of kidding when I say that I hope that Pakistan is developing a plan to take control of America's nuclear arsenal because Americans can no longer be trusted with it.

I never had all that much faith in a fiscal cliff deal that accomplished much of anything, but what passed last night made things spectacularly worse. It's actually pretty impressive when you think about it.

You might remember that the fiscal cliff itself was a product of the 2011 debt ceiling clusterfuck. Just off  the top of your head, can you name the other grown-up countries that have a debt ceiling at all? The correct answer is "none." Has the ceiling done anything to control U.S debt? The answer to that is pretty clearly no. It's an archaic and dangerous tool that long ago outlived any usefulness it may have had.

This completely invented crisis began with the Republican Party's singular inability to tell the truth about the debt. Ronald Reagan tripled it and George W. Bush doubled it again, but it's all Barack Obama's fault. That set the stage for the GOP to hold the economy hostage in the summer of '11 and very nearly caused the first default in U.S history.

This week presented the last best opportunity for the United States to right its fiscal ship. Not only was the "sequester" - drastic, automatic spending cuts - set to take effect yesterday, the Bush tax cuts and Obama's payroll tax holiday were set to expire. Oh, and the debt ceiling limit was hit at midnight on New Year's Day. Never again will there be a chance as good as this one to make a serious effort to address the coming catastrophe. America is now guaranteed to hit an economic iceberg and they will do so soon.

The positions of both sides were childish, ineffective and based more on politics than economics. President Obama spent the last five years saying that he wanted to make the Bush tax cuts permanent for everyone making under $250,000 a year and cut almost nothing in spending, whereas House Republicans wanted all the tax cuts made permanent, sought "entitlement reforms" that took over a decade to be enacted and wanted further Pentagon spending. While the Democrats were slightly more serious than the Republicans, that isn't saying much, since it's almost impossible to be less serious than the Republicans.

House Speaker John Boehner is incapable of controlling the Tea Party mongoloids in his caucus, making him less than useless as a negotiating partner. So he insisted that a deal come from the Senate, despite the Constitutional dictate that money bill originate from the House. That left it to Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to hammer out a deal.

Here's what they came up with.

— Tax rates will permanently rise to Clinton-era levels for families with income above $450,000 and individuals above $400,000. All income below the threshold will permanently be taxed at Bush-era rates.
— The tax on capital gains and dividends will be permanently set at 20 percent for those with income above the $450,000/$400,000 threshold. It will remain at 15 percent for everyone else. (Clinton-era rates were 20 percent for capital gains and taxed dividends as ordinary income, with a top rate of 39.6 percent.)
— The estate tax will be set at 40 percent for those at the $450,000/$400,000 threshold, with a $5 million exemption. That threshold will be indexed to inflation, as a concession to Republicans and some Democrats in rural areas like Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mt.).
— The sequester will be delayed for two months. Half of the delay will be offset by discretionary cuts, split between defense and non-defense. The other half will be offset by revenue raised by the voluntary transfer of traditional IRAs to Roth IRAs, which would tax retirement savings when they’re moved over.
— The pay freeze on members of Congress, which Obama had lifted this week, will be re-imposed.
— The 2009 expansion of tax breaks for low-income Americans: the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, and the American Opportunity Tax Credit will be extended for five years.
— The Alternative Minimum Tax will be permanently patched to avoid raising taxes on the middle-class.
— The deal will not address the debt-ceiling, and the payroll tax holiday will be allowed to expire.
— Two limits on tax exemptions and deductions for higher-income Americans will be reimposed: Personal Exemption Phaseout (PEP) will be set at $250,000 and the itemized deduction limitation (Pease) kicks in at $300,000.
—The full package of temporary business tax breaks — benefiting everything from R&D and wind energy to race-car track owners — will be extended for another year.
— Scheduled cuts to doctors under Medicare would be avoided for a year through spending cuts that haven’t been specified.
— Federal unemployment insurance will be extended for another year, benefiting those unemployed for longer than 26 weeks. This $30 billion provision won’t be offset.
— A nine-month farm bill fix will be attached to the deal, Sen. Debbie Stabenow told reporters, averting the newly dubbed milk cliff.

Congratulations everybody! You just accomplished nothing!

Republicans say that America has a spending problem, while Democrats insist that the problem is with revenue. Anyone with any brains knows that the issue is with spending and revenue. This deal addresses neither.

Obama's insistence on returning to the Clinton tax rates for everyone making over a quarter million dollars raised negligible revenue. And he settled on $450,000 which raises even less.

Guess what this mess costs? Actually, you don't have to. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it'll be a fortune.

The extension of lower tax rates for a bulk of the nation's taxpayers and the addition of a permanent patch to the alternative minimum tax would add roughly $3.6 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, the CBO said. Other individual, business, and energy tax extenders would add another $76 billion. The extension of unemployment benefits would cost roughly $30 billion, and the so-called "doc fix" would tally another $25 billion through fiscal 2022.

The CBO says the budget agreement will lead to an overall increase in spending of about $330 billion over 10 years.

When all is said and done, all the White House and Congress managed to do was increase the debt by $4 trillion.

Oh, and it was political clusterfuck for everybody involved, too! Liberals and conservatives are both furious with their own representatives. Pretty much everybody's credibility was destroyed yesterday.

And because the debt ceiling wasn't raised and sequestration was delayed for two months, the worst part of this mess is yet to come. More interestingly, neither side has a particularly strong hand to play. President Obama has shot his load on taxes and the GOP is still too rattled and scared from the November elections to be effective at much of anything. Nobody has the juice to make a Grand Batgain at the end of February. The Bush tax cuts are now effectively the Obama tax cuts, taking away the negotiating leverage he had on the revenue side.

As of Monday night, the United States has no authority to borrow. The Treasury Department can juggle around existing money until about the first of March, but that's it. After that, the federal government shuts down. At the same time, the sequester takes effect, automatically making excruciating cuts everywhere.

Since both sides have lost the trust of their respective bases, I can't see how a deal is made. I can't imagine that the GOP will give Obama a debt ceiling increase without drastic, non-defense cuts and the president would be a fool to give a weakened, scared and divided Republican conference anything close to what they want.

What is likely is the trifecta of ugliness: a government shutdown, brutal automatic sequestration cuts and a default on the national debt - all within about a week of each other.

If you think the markets are going to respond well to that, you're out of your friggin' mind. The stock exchange will crash harder than it has since 2008 and the international bond market may start to melt down. Treasury Bills will very probably become worthless overnight and the U.S government will have trouble funding itself when it resumes operation.

Both unemployment and interest rates could skyrocket, which might throw the country into a depression, possibly causing another round of bank failures. The meltdown of the European PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) would seem leisurely compared to a complete political and financial collapse in the United States. It's also important to remember that there's nobody capable of bailing America out.

Oh, and did I mention that the United States added $4 trillion to it's national debt last night? Because the United States added $4 trillion to its national debt last night. And they did that while accomplishing nothing more than delaying the apocalypse by 60 days.

Good work everybody!

Why am I the only one wondering why Americans hate america so much? I rather liked it when it was a serious country.

Who is Rick Santelli and Why is He Saying These Stupid Things?

I knew that the Tea Party movement was doomed to long-term irrelevance, brutal stupidity and almost cosmic hypocrisy the second it was formed around the now infamous "Santelli rant" of February 19, 2009.

Rick Santelli is a former hedge fund cocksucker who later migrated to the equally devious, unethical and wrong profession of financial journalism. He really is the worst of both possible worlds.

For my right-wing friends that love disseminating conspiracy theories about George Soros and his profiteering from the collapse of world currencies, you should know that Soros Fund Management is also a hedge fund. Long-Term Capital Management was also a hedge fund that required a massive Federal Reserve-supervised bailout in 1998, after it put all of it's eggs in the east Asian and Russian currency basket, which subsequently crashed. Because of the nature of their trading, hedge funds are largely unregulated, despite the enormous potential for destruction that they cause.

Even in the wildly overrated journalism, financial reporters are among the very worst, at about the level of gossip columnists and fucking astrologers. That anyone believes anything these assholes have to say tells you everything you need to know about why capitalism is the mess that it is today.

If you want to take a walk down memory lane, I highly recommend that you read back through what those fucking people had to say about the banking and real estate sectors from 2002 through the middle of 2007. You'll look long and hard before you find them saying anything negative. This is because financial reporters are the most cronyistic motherfuckers on God's green earth. Shit, even political reporters are embarrassed by them.

But the Santelli rant of Ought-Nine was unique onto itself for it's balls-out ignorance and hubristic hypocrisy. If you never saw it, here it is. If you haven't seen it in awhile, you should watch it again.



Remember, that was Santelli on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, not quite five months after all of those dumb fuckers were bailed out by the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP.) There were no populist rants from those people in September of 2008 because they were too scared to fucking speak without shitting themselves to death.

This guy says that Santelli was against TARP, which isn't exactly true if you watch the clip he provides. Santelli acknowledged that the government had to do something, but that it should wait a few days.



And that would have been fucking crazy. Not only was the financial service industry rapidly melting down, it was beginning to take the stock market with it. The consequences of that for the larger public were catastrophic and most people still haven't recovered from them.

Back in the 80's, employers moved from Defined Benefit Packages (which you know as pensions) to investing contributions in 401K plans, which were almost all in stocks. When Lehman Brothers collapsed, the market lost over half of its value in a single day. When the GOP started fucking around with passing TARP - and it failed to pass the House the first time - the market bled out even more.

Those 401K lost over half of their value. Some lost closer to two-thirds. If you were anywhere near retirement in the fall of 2008, you were basically fucked.

Because of the interconnectedness of the debt, most through derivatives like credit default swaps, all of the investment banks would have gone down. The ones that weren't directly taken out by the mortgage meltdown wouldn't have had anyone to borrow from to meet their overnight margin requirements. And because the repeal of Glass-Steagall Act allowed them to become bank holding companies, the commercial banks would have started toppling like dominoes very shortly thereafter.

No one who knows anything about anything has ever suggested otherwise. After four years of my asking, people like Santelli have never told me how you maintain a modern civilization without a banking industry. Like it or not (and I hated it) TARP was the least bad available option out there. No sensible person thought there was a guarantee that the markets would have survived another week.

But when the government rather timidly suggested that the banks (which caused the problem in the first fucking place and had just been given tens of trillions of dollars in loans and guarantees) renegotiate the mortgages of the actual victims of the crisis, shitheads like Santelli and his cocksucker friends with their bailout bonuses burning a hole in their fucking pockets had the incredible temerity to get indignant about it on the CBOT floor.

Fuck them. No wonder the Tea Party is so goddamned dumb. They're based on a fundamentally stupid premise. If Rick Santelli was capable of shame, he would've ended his rant by putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger.

Yet Santelli can't stop bringing the stupid. Just this morning he was bringing it hard.



Jesus God, the stupid just doesn't stop with this guy, does it?

We're not even talking about ancient history here, folks. We're talking about 1990-'93. The first President Bush increased marginal rates and President Clinton moved them slightly further northward. and you know what? The world didn't end. Innovation didn't stop and capital didn't flee the market anymore than it already had because of globalization.

Look, I know that the tech buble was responsible for the economy of the 90's and the balancing of the budgets (to the extent that they were, which was not at all,) but the modestly increased rates certainly helped

But look at what happened subsequently. The second Bush gutted the rates, fought two wars and dramatically expanded entitlement spending without paying for any of it.

From time to time, you'll see incredibly misleading nonsense like this (which you know is partisan horseshit because it labels the 2000-'01 downturn as "The Clinton Recession," while the 2007-'09 near-depression is called "The Mortgage Crisis" instead of "The Bush Calamity."

The main reason those charts are misleading is because they focus only on the deficits and not the consistently growing debt. Bush and the GOP Congress engaged in a really neat accounting trick during much of that administration. Specifically, the funded much of their crap - and the wars almost exclusively - through continuing resolutions, which bypassed the budget process entirely. That spending went directly to the debt and wasn't reflected in the annual deficits.

To the right, you'll see a chart of the gross federal debt, as opposed to the deficits, that you'll see consistently went up throughout the Bush years.

Here's something else you need to know about George W. Bush: He's the only person I'm aware of in human history who actually cut taxes while waging not one, but two land wars in Asia. That was so fucking crazy that even Hitler knew better than to try it.

One of the reasons that the deficit exploded under Obama is because he put all of that spending back on the books. Once you do that, of course the annual numbers will be unskewed against previous years. But dishonest hacks will continue to try to throw that hack trick at you because they think you're retarded.

Even with the massive 2001 and '03 tax cuts, combined with hack accounting tricks that would send you directly to fucking prison of you tried them in the private sector, American GDP only grew by an average of 1.6% during the second Bush administration. Growth under George H.W Bush and Clinton was 2.1% and 3.8% respectively. Even after inheriting a catastrophe, Obama's average growth numbers are likely going to be better than Bush 43's were.

The great Jay Batman said something this week that I've been saying for years and I couldn't be happier that someone finally is joining me in saying it.

Social issues and their alienating power are but one problem the Republican Party must overcome; in order to address the utter lack of credibility it has on fiscal issues, Republicans must realize some very hard truths indeed.

When you have to finance an initiative with the issuance of debt, you are spending money. When you cut taxes and create deficits, the deficit and the tax cut that created it will be financed with the issuance of debt. The tax cut thereby becomes a spending item.

No one seriously argues that financing the purchase of a television or a car with debt in the form of a loan or credit isn't spending; however, Republicans will argue until the sun goes down that a tax cut is not spending no matter how much debt it creates. No tax cut that is unaccompanied by a commensurate cut in spending items should ever be passed into law. You can have whatever you damn well wish to pay for, but as it relates to government spending, it is better to pay as you go than to pay with interest because the government has the unique ability to print money in order to lessen its debt obligations. The net result of such practices is that Americans pay higher prices over time and lose purchasing power in the process.

Santelli knows that you can raise taxes without raising the rates, but he won't tell you that because he and his asshole friends love the virtual welfare that the tax code gives them. And no, I'm not talking about capital gains, dividends, or the corporate rates, which are fine where they are or could even come down some.

The carried interest rate, for example, should be a prime target for raising to regular income rates. Contrary to popular opinion, carried interest isn't capital gains or dividend income. It's essentially a "management fee" paid to the hedge funds and private equity firms by companies that are the targets of leveraged buyouts (LBOs.) It's regular income that was given a cute name that suggests that it's something different by lobbyist bloodsuckers.

If you want to know why Mitt Romney paid only 13% in the years that he released returns from, it's because his income was primarily carried interest from Bain Capital, which he resigned from "retroactively" in either 1999 or 2002, depending on who you believe.

There are other neat tricks in the tax code that can be fixed, too. Did you know that people in Santelli's (presumed) income bracket can claim the home mortgage deduction on second, third and maybe even forth properties?

Pretty much everyone agrees that the real time bombs are Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. What you probably don't know is that those programs aren't financed with general revenue from the income tax. That money comes from the payroll tax, which for whatever bonehead reason, is capped at $100,000. Get rid of that artificial cap and you can lower rates, thereby creating more disposable income from the middle class and the working poor, while helping the solvency of the programs.

Granted, you'll still need to raise the retirement age, limit benefits and means test both Medicare and Social Security to guarantee their long-term survival, but eliminating the payroll tax cap gives you some breathing room in how you go about doing that.

Santelli started this morning's rant off with a brutally fucking dumb premise. He said “The only people who bring tax revenues to the party are people who work, and the discussion is mainly about the people that are working, that are way at the top.”

No shit, Rick. People who don't have an income are actually pretty famous for not paying the income tax. Go figure.

While I think that taxing the rich is as good a place as any to start, I also know that the numbers don't work if you end there. Barack Obama is being singularly irresponsible in suggesting that they can, just as the Republicans are being overpoweringly stupid in thinking that you can fix this exclusively with cuts.

The middle class are going to have to take it in the nuts, too. Firstly, that's where the real fucking money is. Secondly, those are the assholes that voted America directly into the hole it's in.

Remember the fake budget wars of the 1990s? Back then, the GOP wasn't fighting for cuts. They just wanted to limit the rate of growth. It's well past time for that now. These days, shit - including and especially defence, which is the largest ticket item in discretionary spending - is going to have to be pared down dramatically. And if that has to go, it becomes harder to justify all the goodies in the tax code for the middle class.

Supposed conservatives, just like liberals, have fallen down on explaining the responsibilities that accompany rights. Just as much as liberals have, conservatives have encouraged people - mostly the middle class - into believing that they can vote themselves stuff without any cost to them.

They always assured you that economic growth would pick up the difference, despite thirty years of evidence to the contrary. But not only did those fucking people vote for tax cuts, they voted for higher program spending, too. Remember, George W. Bush didn't lie to anyone about his plans. He was upfront about doubling federal education spending giving hard-on pills to grandpa. And that spending disproportionately befitted the middle class.

Well, as you now know, there is no fucking free lunch, and the waiter is standing by your table with the bill. I'd suggest that you keep your credit card in your wallet because it's maxed out.

As I've said before many times, the U.S debt bomb is more dire a threat than even World War II was. Propaganda aside, there was never a real threat that the Nazi war machine was ever going to occupy western Pennsylvania. But nothing will destroy the American way of like quite like a national default.

That means shared sacrifice. Everybody's going to have to take a hit. It would be nice if the poor and the working poor could be spared, but I'm not sure that's even possible. $16 trillion is, after all, a shitload of money.

If you parse through the tax code and the budget, you very quickly find that the overwhelming majority of it is geared to the wealthy and, especially, the middle class. It's welfare that has been called anything but for far too long now.

Rick Santelli and his well-heeled asshole friends think that if you can get away with not paying the piper, they won't have to, either. But as a nation, you called the fucking tune and one way or another, that piper's getting paid.

Let's Talk About Bain: Capitalism, Private Equity and Leveraged Buyouts

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Truth and Consequences: Simpson-Bowles or the Fiscal Cliff?

One of my greatest personal joys in the aftermath of Tuesday's election is watching Republican shitheels bemoan the fact that "the American people voted to continue fiscal irresponsibility." The basic fact of the matter is that the American people weren't given a choice in the matter, other than possibly supporting Gary Johnson's Libertarian ticket.

President Obama never really had a plan and the GOP couldn't stop lying about theirs. Both sides were dealing in fantasy economics that were predicated on not ending a sixteen trillion dollar debt (which makes it important to remember than American GDP is only fourteen trillion) without touching their beloved middle class or current entitlement recipients, which is a recipe for disaster.

You can't say that you're going retire a debt of that size - or even significantly reduce deficits - in a reasonable period of time without going to where the money is.

The Romney-Ryan plan cut rates in ways that no mathematically literate adult thought they could pay for and was more than made up for with trillions in new defense spending. Furthermore, by cutting entitlement spending only for future retirees, they exploded the short-term deficits.

Republicans said that they oppose any tax increases because they would hamper future economic growth, which is another indication that they don't know what they're talking about if they're, in fact, telling the truth.

As I've mentioned before, what happened in September of 2008 wasn't a recession. The recession started in the summer of 2007. The collapse of Lehman Brothers precipitated a financial panic, which is a very different breed of animal. History tells us that financial panics take a decade or more to fully recover from. The world's third-largest economy, Japan, still hasn't recovered from its 1990s financial panic.

There are other reasons to doubt a full American recovery. Most significantly, The economic superpower status of the United States was artificial to begin with. America grew the way that it did after World War II for the simple reason that all of its major competitor economies were destroyed by the war.

By the time that Europe and Japan fully recovered from the war, in the early 1970s, real American household income stagnated, which was hidden by massive borrowing, both public and private. By 1980, the frugality of the "Greatest Generation" was dead, American families began living on credit and inflation was rampant. President Reagan broke inflation by inflicting the 1982 recession on the economy, but his tax cuts exploded the public debt. Throughout it all, Congress ballooned both military and entitlement spending. Private business grew the economy in the late '80s with the Leveraged Buyout (LBO) phenomenon, but that further raised the level by which debt as a driver of economic growth.

Globalization aggravated the problem by almost entirely wiping out the U.S manufacturing sector. Without manufacturing, there was no way that America could sustain its already artificially high living standards, except through the debt of last resort: their home equity. As manufacturing died, the financial service industry replaced it, but only for a time. You can only grow an industry like that so long as there remains a window to create debt.

In the fall of 2008, the bottom fell out of the debt-driven economy that sustained everything for almost forty years and that window slammed shut. Worse, there's not going to be anything to replace it in the near or mid-terms. I have no reason to believe that the United States will ever return to the levels of its Golden Age.

Neither the Republicans or the Democrats are going to tell you the truth about that. Ever. To do so would burst the bubble of the American Dream that has kept Washington from ever being questioned in anything resembling a serious way.

All that leaves is debt. In perverse way, the death of American economic expansion creates the ideal atmosphere in which to address that debt. Even a really bad recession won't look or feel much worse than what the United States is in now, so Washington doesn't really need to worry about the political cost of structural economic reform that minimizes at least the pubic debt. Of course, that requires the political class finally telling people the truth for once in their fucking lives.

The Republican party, in particular, has been singularly unwilling to do that, instead relying on Paul Ryan's almost pornographic fantasies to save them. This brings me to The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, which most of you know as Simpson-Bowles.

Contrary to Republican assertions, Obama didn't "walk away from Simpson-Bowles. The GOP strangled it in the cradle.

Any realistic solution to an intrinsic problem is going to cause pain and if there's one thing a democracy abhors, it's pain. That's why commissions like Simpson-Bowles are created in the first place, to do the job that Congress can't.

Simpson-Bowles was supposed to be modelled after the military base closing commission that was created after the end of the Cold War. Presidents Bush and Clinton, along with Congress, knew that base closings were to be an all or nothing proposition.

For that reason, Congress created a commission that severly limited its own powers. The commission's final report would be introduced and Congress could only give it "an up-or-down vote," meaning that amendments couldn't be attatched to it and it wouldn't be subject to the Senate's filibuster rule. It worked beautifully with base closings and it was supposed to be the model for Simpson-Bowles.

Then the six Republicans that had sponsored the enabling legislation to create Simpson-Bowles voted against it on final passage. That meant that if Obama introduced its final report to Congress, it would be amended to death in the House and filibustered in the Senate. Worse, the GOP would be able to demagogue all of the worst parts of it on the campaign trail this year. The President would have been crazy if he did that.

And the GOP continues to be singularly dishonest. On Wednesday, Speaker John Boehner took a break from crying to say that "We’re willing to accept new revenue under the right conditions." That sounds great until you realize that what he means by "revenues" is closing loopholes through tax reform, but not raising new revenues with tax increases.  Basically, he's using the Romney plan as his negotiating position.

Now, I don't know how many of you were paying attention this week, but the Romney plan was pretty thoroughly discredited. Unless he's completely out of his mind, I can't see why Obama would bother to win an election only to pass the crown jewel of the loser's economic plan. Can you?

To be fair, the Democratic plan to raise taxes on "the top 2%" is also horseshit because it doesn't raise anywhere near the revenue needed to address the problem in a serious way. Also, the rich aren't driving the debt, the middle class is, with all of its insane entitlements and tax breaks. The Bush tax cuts need to expire for everybody. That alone raises about $4 trillion over the next ten years.

There's absolutely no chance of a "Grand Bargain" between now and December 31. And Washington should definitely not be allowed to kick the can down the road by passing legislation to defer the sequester by even a second. If you do that, you effectively make the Bush tax cuts permanent and make things even harder to negotiate down the road.

That leaves two choices: A clean vote on Simpson-Bowles or the fiscal cliff. I prefer either to waiting and seeing nothing get done.

Why Capitalism is Best of All

There's no end to the people who bitch about capitalism. Sure, they're leftie academic assholes mostly, but not exclusively. Hipster jerkoffs and associated fuckheads have also gotten into the game.

It's stunning how little these people know about history, even including the history of their own political movements. Generation Xers and everyone younger should look at their parents, the godawful fucking Boomers, who remain history's greatest monsters.

If you look at your parents and aunts and uncles, there's a better than even chance that at least half of them were hippies. These days? None of them are. In fact, around 1973, they busied themselves going to graduate school, becoming investment bankers, buy homes with two car garages and shitting out little cocksuckers like you. And not only is that what your family did, so did Jerry Rubin.

The fact is capitalism won. The Stalinist Chinese and Godless Vietnamese are hyper-capitalist, while North America and Europe have essentially returned to the Gilded Age. Not only has capitalism triumphed, it managed to defeat a century's worth of constraints on it through globalization and deregulation.

It's even better than that. Capitalism's victory is so overwhelming that it has relieved pretty much everyone of the need to know anything at all about economics. That's true of both the political left and right.

Republicans and Tea Partiers, along with their misfit cadres on the Internet and in the media will tell you that "Marxism is on the march!"

Really? Where? All statements like that tell me is that no one knows what Marxism actually is anymore. I haven't heard anyone anywhere advocating that the workers take control of the means of production in at least a generation. And you know what? Neither have you. Fidel Castro and whichever Kim is currently run North Korea know that to be nonsense. The only people who believe that are Glenn Beck, a few McCarthyite Revolutionary War reenactors deep in the asshole of South Carolina, idiot bloggers and a GOP that has managed to somehow embrace both cynicism and ignorance.

There's nothing funnier to me than an assload of hillbillies cheering some scumbag lobbyist who declares that "Government sucks! And here to prove it are Representative Michele Bachmann, Senator Jim DiMint and Governor Sarah Palin!"

Not only is Barack Obama to the right of all but a very few elected officeholders in the democratic world, he's largely to the right of the GOP of the Reagan era.

The left is just as bad, if not actually worse. Democratic socialism has largely turned out to be neither and the leaders of liberal political parties; such as (but not limited to) Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Jean Chretien, Paul Martin and Michael Ignatieff have repudiated everything their followers used to believe in while their followers celebrated them for winning because of it.

Here's a neat fact. Both the individual health care mandate and cap and trade were revolutionary Republican ideas in the early 1990s that the left came to embrace as the right drifted off into a fantasy world of counter intuitive economic nonsense, religious superstition, foreign adventurism that is alien to historical conservatism and rape-based politics.

In modern electoral politics, there really isn't a left anymore. In large part that's why Tea Party shitheads keep waving the bloody shirt of Saul Alinsky, ... who died in 1972. Were it not for the fact that he would have made Earl Butz so uncomfortable, Barack Obama would have fit in Gerald Ford's Cabinet.

You know what the left has got? Occupy Wall Street: a leaderless and idealess motley crew of unwashed assholes who are against something, but aren't quite sure what. And until they figure it out, they'll shit on a police car. The only people who think Occupy Wall Street is worth anything are idiot celebrities and washed-out, cynical political hacks who govern to the right, but need to sell badly written books from time to time.

If these unwashed fuckheads think that they're going to change a corrupt and oligarchical banking construct by laying around a fucking park until the cops club then about the head and shoulders, all the corrupt and oligarchical banking system need do is wait until those retards choke on their own fucking tongues, which is inevitable!

Occupy is the political version of a 35 year old broad who thinks she's a witch and can only cum by cutting herself. And no reasonable person is ever going to buy into that fucking nonsense. Comparing Occupy to the Tea Party is little more than a demonstration of how stupid some people are. The Teapers are organized and, no matter how retarded their message is, at least they have one. And it took a lot of money to get that many people to dress that oddly in one place at one time.

Even the most perverted version of capitalism is going to snap the necks of those worthless fucks, each and every time.

You know why? Capitalism has something that Occupy is never going to have. Kate Upton's tits.

If there's one thing I've learned from life, it's that cute blonde girls with their huge jugs hanging out always win! And I'm far more partial to brunettes. But facts is facts!


The pictures in this post are from Miss Upton's advertising campaign for Skullcandy headphones. The only thing I've ever heard about the product is that is that it's a worthess piece of plastic shit. But I'm willing to buy three of them on the off chance that one of her fantastic udders falls out during the next commercial. Six, if we find out if she's completely shaved like all the best women are.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter how much pain and suffering that subprime mortgages and an utterly deregulated derivatives market has demonstrably caused. If you attach a cute young blonde with giant, exposed milkbags to either, nine out of ten Americans will jump on the bandwagon all over again.

Don't believe me? Go to an Occupy encampment next spring and count the Skullcandy headphones.




Pictures and video lovingly stolen from Popoholic

"I don’t understand what is going on.”

The doomed Romney-Ryan campaign has upped their game when it comes to finding excuses as to why they're underperforming so dismally. They're actually getting quite good at it.

For years now, I've been listening to Republicans tell me that this election was a "gimmie," quite possibly the easiest thing in the world. "Barack Obama is the reincarnation of Jimmy Carter," I was repeatedly told. "We can't help but win!"

Folks are now coming around to the view that I put out there years ago: That presidential elections are always serious business, especially where defeating an incumbent is involved. And while Obama might be Carter, Mitt Romney sure as shit isn't the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan.

People generally, and Republicans and the media specifically, make much too much of the 1980 election. There is no clear analogy between '80 and this year for a couple of reasons.

First, Obama didn't have a brass-knuckle "future-of-the-party" primary fight, like Carter had with Ted Kennedy. Kennedy didn't win very many primaries at all, but he did expose Carter as being weaker than anyone expected. Further, the Kennedy challenge forced Carter to spend time, money and other resources beating it back that otherwise would have been used defining the GOP and developing a general election narrative.

Second, the President doesn't have a third party candidate drawing from his vote, as Carter did with John Anderson. As an anti-Reagan Republican, Anderson was directly competing with Carter for support, which meant that Carter was actually running against two campaigns. Reagan was not.

Regardless of what Democrats tell you, 1992 worked essentially the same way. Given Ross Perot's issue set, fiscal responsibility, it's almost impossible to believe that he drew support evenly from Clinton and Bush, nor have their been any particularly convincing studies to back that assertion up.

Let's look at the raw numbers of 1980, shall we? Reagan won 50.7% against Carter's even 41%. But Anderson got 6.6% of the vote, all of it out of Jimmy Carter's hide. Take Anderson out of the equation and you have a much closer popular vote and, very probably, Electoral College result. Anderson did nearly three times better than Ralph Nader did in 2000, and most people think that Nader cost Al Gore the presidency.

Yes, Ronald Reagan still would have won, but the result would have been more in keeping with an average election spread.

2012 not only isn't 1980, it was never going to be.

Of course, Republicans are now trying to explain their early overconfidence, which was actually much closer to ignorance.

For a few weeks, it's been "skewed polls," which I explained yesterday is delusional for any number of reasons and even Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday said was unmitigated horseshit. Paul Ryan even went with the exhausted (and easily disproved) old trope of "media bias," even though he couldn't provide a single example of it.

Slowly, but surely, we're starting to get to the truth.

During the summer, the Romney campaign said it could not match the Obama campaign’s ad spending because Romney’s coffers had been depleted in a tough primary fight and campaign finance laws forbade Romney from spending money raised for the general election before accepting the Republican nomination at the party convention in Tampa.

As fall began, the Romney campaign explained that Romney appeared at relatively few public events — perhaps one rally or town hall a day — because he had to devote a large amount of time to fundraising. That was necessary, aides explained, because President Obama blew up the system of publicly finance campaigns, forcing Romney to devote precious time and resources to fundraising.

Ouch!

All through the spring and summer, all I heard about was FEC reports showing how much Romney was raising and Republicans bragging about it. It was so bad that Obama was forced to start begging supporters to not let him be the first president to be outspent in an election.

I noticed this a couple of weeks ago.

Like so much of Mitt Romney's existence, this was a trick of creative accounting. It turns out that a lot of the money he raised was for the Republican National Committee and independent PACs, which is money that he doesn't control. Just to get through August, when Romney-Ryan wasn't doing much in the way of ad buys, the campaign had to borrow $20 million.

By essentially going dark through the summer, Obama was given the freedom to define Romney unchallenged. This of course happened when idiot bloggers (specifically at Red State) were endlessly going on about Mitt's stellar fundraising and an Obama "burn rate" that would leave him broke after the convention.

And this is where things get hilarious. Just like when he was Bain, Romney used the borrowed money to give his top campaign staff bonuses.

Just as he started pulling the fire alarm about media bias on Sunday, Ryan is now panicking about money in public.

Now, it’s October, and that moment is apparently not here yet. In an interview on Laura Ingraham’s radio program Monday, vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan pointed to a lack of money as the reason the Romney-Ryan campaign is trailing the president in some key issue areas. “Why do you think that on the tax issues, and on the handling the economy issue, that Romney-Ryan trail Obama-Biden?” Ingraham asked. “What is it in the messaging, or is it the coverage, that isn’t connecting?”

“When you’re outspent massively on TV with absolutely false and misleading ads by your political adversaries who are suggesting that this somehow raises people’s taxes, it clutters and confuses,” Ryan answered. “We are entering the debate phase of this campaign. We are entering the choice phase of this campaign. And we are making it crystal clear to people that all these falsehoods that are coming out of the Obama campaign about our tax policy, about our Medicare reform and everything else, are just that.”

“But are you guys going to release big ads?” Ingraham asked. “I mean, where are the ads? I thought you guys had this huge war chest. We’re now being massively outspent in ads?”

“They have more money for TV,” Ryan said. “That’s very clear. Everybody knows that. They’re even outspending us three-to-one in Ohio recently, and we’re still in the hunt, in a very close race.”

I've repeatedly said this now. Romney is not only running a shitty campaign, he learned exactly the wrong lessons from the primaries.

There was never any real possibility that Mitt Romney was going to lose to any of the misfits running against him in the primaries. So Romney decided to bury them in money.

What never occured to him is just how much time and money it took to slaughter those assholes once and for all. And most of them were busy destroying themselves at any given time.

But Romney just kept soldiering on into the general with a money strategy that didn't work as well as it should have during the primaries. And it's hard to argue that Newt Gingrich isn't half the politician Barack Obama is. It was fatally flawed and irredeemably stupid from the very beginning.

On the other hand, I'm a uniter, not a divider. So I'd like t announce for the very first time that I agree with Newt Gingrich on a matter of some importance.

“I don’t understand it,” says former House Speaker, and former Romney rival, Newt Gingrich. “Everything I thought up until about August 1 was that the Republicans were going to outspend the Democrats. I don’t understand what is going on.”

The View From the Fiscal Cliff

I've made it pretty clear that if you vote for either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, you'll get what you deserve. While I've taken plenty of shots at the challenger, I'm hardly enamoured with the incumbent, especially when it comes to dealing with the budget.

The Obama plan, such as it is, is a joke when you start getting into the weeds of it. The White House counts money that they never planned on spending (such as for the now-completed war in Iraq) as an $800 billion spending cut, which is ludicrous. They're also counting cuts made in last summer's debt ceiling agreement as future cuts. Their plan is riddled with accounting like this.

If the President was as ballsy or as smart as everyone tells me he is, he'd call Congress back into emergency session and introduce the Simpson-Bowles plan and vow to veto anything other than a "clean bill" without any amendments. He doesn't like Bowles-Simpson, but the Republicans don't either, although they won't stop demagoguing and, frankly, lying about it.

Look, I think Bowles-Simpson is the most realistic deal yet presented, but neither party will support it because it forces tough choices on their respective goodies. Therefore, it should be taken off the table entirely during the campaign. And the political benefits to Obama are potentially enormous. Harry Truman did something similar in the summer of 1948, calling the GOP Congress back into session to pass their recently enacted party platform into law. When they didn't, Truman's re-election prospects were immediately resurrected.

In my opinion, America's last best hope is the thing that everything fears most: the so-called "fiscal cliff."

When the 2011 debt ceiling debate failed to reach a reasonable deal, Congress passed and Obama signed a law that implemented a "sequester" if no deal was reached by January 1, 2013. The sequester provides for brutal, automatic cuts to almost everything Washington does, including the big prizes of Medicare and national defense.

On the same day, the Bush and Obama tax cuts also expire. One of the things that I've been saying for years now is that all of the tax cuts should expire, including those for the middle class. First, they've blown a giant hole in the budget for over a decade. Second, they haven't stimulated the economy in any real way. Average U.S economic growth since World War II has been 3.2%. During the Bush years, following the two largest tax cuts in human history, it was not quite 2.1%.

Democrats like playing fancy and suggest that they can raise the revenue they need from the upper class, those making over $250, 000 a year (although Mitt Romney yesterday hilariously suggested that this was the "middle class.) That's nonsense. The money just isn't there. Republicans are actually right in saying that going after "the 1%" and corporations doesn't provide very much in the way of revenue. On the other hand, Republicans also stupidly believe that revenue isn't the problem, which it decidedly is.

More importantly, I think the current debt load is the single greatest challenge facing America since World War II. And goddammit, that requires shared sacrifice. The American middle class is, to a large extent, the problem. Politicians have been subsidizing their fantasies for far too long and even that wasn't enough, so they used their homes as ATMs. Fuck the middle class, those assholes.

Now, I should warn you that going over the fiscal cliff will throw the economy back into a really bad recession. That's a given and I'm not going to lie to you about it.

But here's what you need to know. The U.S economy isn't recovering anytime soon, anyhow. What happened five years ago today when Lehman Brothers went tits up wasn't a recession, the United States had already been in one of those for over a year. What began on September 15, 2008 was a financial panic. Historically, economies take a decade or more to recover from a financial panic. A more contemporaneous example is Japan, which has been struggling for 15 years now. Anyone who tells you that they can create 4% GDP growth in the next four years is lying. Period.

That being the case, now is precisely the time to put the budget in order. No one is going to do it in a robust economy for fear that it'll create another recession, so if not now, when? I'll cite again the Canadian experience, when the Chretien-Martin government enacted brutal cuts (as much as 25% across the board) before our economy had fully come out of the 1990-'92 recession. The difference is that the previous Mulroney government had already put in place huge new revenue streams with the Free Trade Agreement and a national value-added tax.

Yes, it's gonna hurt everybody even worse than they already have been. But if it isn't done now, it won't be done at all until the international bond market does it for you. And the only thing that'll be worse for everybody than the fiscal cliff is a giant increase in interest rates in the near future, which is exactly what will happen if this isn't taken care of soon and in a substantive way.

The Great Depression caused Americans to re-think the role of government in their lives. It was suddenly desirable for the federal government to implement expansive entitlement program for the people. Presidents Roosevelt and Truman accompanied this with a fantastically large standing army (which the Founding Fathers all argued strongly against) and an institutional "military-industrial complex."

Beginning with the Kennedy Administration, it became philosophically acceptable to join large tax cuts with expansive entitlements and an activist foreign policy, which had become the conventional wisdom by 1980. This created a culture of debt, both personal and public. Contrary to the fantastic ability of Republicans to dissemble about everything, Barack Obama did not create this, he just happened to be lucky enough to be holding the bag when the bills came due.

To understand this, you need to understand how America became an economic superpower in the first place. The simplest way I can put it is to say that the parents of American prosperity in the 20th century were Adolf Hitler and Hirohito.

The war restarted America's industrial engine while also destroying the economies of all of its major industrial competitors. Most of Europe endured food rationing until the late 1950s and their industrial output was insignificant for almost thirty years. Asia was even worse off, with the Second World War not really ending there until the fall of Saigon in 1975. China didn't reverse it's Maoist policies and begin to realize its huge economic potential until late 1978 under Deng Xiaoping.

The United States was alone in enjoying explosive economic growth from 1945 until about 1973. That wasn't because Americans were smarter or more exceptional than anyone else, it was because everyone else was crippled by the hangover of the war. When that hangover ended, the U.S economy began to unravel with remarkable speed.

All of it is now unaffordable and there's no better time to address it than the present. In retrospect, this should have been done at the end of the Cold War. Instead, Washington chose been in a state of perpetual war since 1989.

More importantly, the United States might not have a choice in the matter. China is thought to be entering an economic slowdown and, if it is, they might no longer be so generous in underwriting American frivolity. When your banker goes broke, the federal government bails him out. But when America's banker has significant issues, no bailout is possible.

The Chinese also aren't stupid. They built their prosperity by sending cheap shit to fat Americans with money to burn. But they knew that wasn't going to last forever so, over the last decade or so, Beijing's major project has been building a domestic consumer base. Regardless of what happens with the Chinese economy in the short-term, it is going to be less and less dependant on American consumers in the medium and long-term. Moreover, as consumer demand in China increases, so too will the cost of importing those goods to the United States.

To paraphrase Bill Clinton, "The era of buying cheap shit with no money is over." No matter what happens, the emerging industrial economies seem to have determined that their primary responsibility is to increase the standard of living of their own people, which is going to make being an American considerably more expensive in the long term.

This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for Americans to fundamentally rethink the role of government - in all of it's aspects - in their lives and the economy generally. The tragedy is that neither major party wants to talk about it in a serious or even halfway honest way. Democrats and Republicans alike are living in a fantasy world where it's going to 1955 forever.

The even greater tragedy is that most Americans want to believe this nonsense, ignoring the laws of both history and math, and shunning in the most forceful way the last best chance they have to save themselves.


Image lovingly stolen from Jai Krishna Ponnappan

Bain damage: Can the GOP really be this sad?

Remember when Mitt Romney was romping around the country, stomping his enemies without mercy and repeating Conan the Barbarian's moto about what is best in life? It was only about four months ago but, Christ, it feels much longer.

The fact that it took Romney as long as it did to put away the seven dwarves - easily the single greatest collection of misfits ever to run for the Republican nomination -convinced me that he was in serious trouble in the general election.

Say what you will about Barack Obama, but he's a pro. He won't be put to sleep halfway as easy as retards like Michele Bachmann, psychopathic idiots like Herman Cain and Rick Santorum, stoned morons like Rick Perry and syphllitic monsters like Newt Gingrich were. Three quarters of them - including Cain - sounded as though they were running for the presidency of the Confederate States of America. And it still took Romney four months to take them down.

If there's one thing that the Governor's primary season competitors from 2008 and this year have in common, it's that they all think that he's a skunk. A few of them have even said so in public, none more so than Newt Gingrich, who has a natural instinct to find a like-minded skull-fucking sleazebag. It's the kind of thing you can read about in National Geographic, if you're so inclined.

Romney's response at the time was "Stop whining." And you know what? He was right. To quote the late Finley Peter Dunne, "politics ain't beanbag."

Of course, Mitt's a much more rugged individual when he's dishing it out. He's not nearing as good at taking it. Ultimately, that's going to kill him. You can ignore Rick Perry and bury him in money because Rick Perry is a joke. A sitting president of the United States? Not so much.

On January 5, 2008 - five and half years ago - I wrote that Mitt Romney was virtually unelectable. One of his chief problems, I said at the time, would be Bain Capital.

Romney has a serious problem with his business record that I'm surprised that other Republican candidates haven't exploited yet.

You see, when a successful businessman runs for office, he does so by pointing out all of the wonderful jobs he created. As the CEO of a private equity firm called Bain Capital, Mitt Romney can't exactly do that. One of the things that private equity firms do is buy a company, sell off the pieces individually, and throw all of the employees out of work. One of the main functions of a private equity firm is to create unemployment as a means to maximize shareholder dividends.

While that might be a perfectly acceptable way to run a business in a capitalist system, it poses political issues that are nothing less than enormous. And Mitt has already learned that the hard way. In the '94 Senate race, Ted Kennedy ran an ad featuring the fired employees of an Indiana company that Bain Capital liquidated.

The problem is that Mitt is, on top of being the most unnatural politician since Richard Nixon, he's an unnaturally slow learner.

Not only did I predict that Bain would be serious issue five and half years ago, Ted Kennedy clobbered him over the fucking head with it eighteen years ago.

As recently as February, Gingrich and Rick Perry were describing Romney and Bain as "vulture capitalism." The subsequent Obama and Democratic attacks on that front have been relatively mild compared to what other Republicans said as recently as six months ago.

Romney, unlike most similarly situated politicians, has had two decades to to prepare for the attack that he's facing today. And he just couldn't be bothered to do it. Despite it being used against him in a Senate election and two presidential primaries, he just couldn't be bothered to craft an effective defense against it. It's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in politics.

If you're a worried Republican out there, don't worry. Pillhead DJs are out there inventing conspiracy theories to save the day!


 

“Do you know the name of the villain in this movie? Bane. The villain in The Dark Knight Rises is named Bane, B-a-n-e. What is the name of the venture capital firm that Romney ran and around which there’s now this make-believe controversy? Bain. The movie has been in the works for a long time. The release date’s been known, summer 2012 for a long time. Do you think that it is accidental that the name of the really vicious fire breathing four eyed whatever it is villain in this movie is named Bain? ...

You may think it’s ridiculous, I’m just telling you this is the kind of stuff the Obama team is lining up. The kind of people who would draw this comparison are the kind of people that they are campaigning to. These are the kind of people that they are attempting to appeal to.”

That's right, fucking Batman is out to get Mitt Romney.

Actually, it gets even better than that.

Conservative commentator Jed Babbin told Secrets, "Now we have the new Batman movie with super-villain Bane, the comic book bad guy who broke the Bat's back. How long will it take for the Obama campaign to link the two, making Romney the man who will break the back of the economy? Romney can't win if he's constantly on the defensive," he said.

Even GOP advisor Frank Luntz jumped into the fray. "Hollywood does it again," he told Secrets. "[Romney] had to know all this was coming and he should have done a lot more to prepare for it."

For the better part of four years, I was almost alone in thinking that Mitt Romney was going to be the nominee this year. As recently as January, there was no shortage of Republicans out there convinced that Gingrich, Santorum or a Republican to be named later would kick the shit out of Romney.

Of course it's Hollywood! Hollywood and the homosexual Jews that control it are all-knowing! Omnipotent even! And because they know the Republican nominating process even better than Republicans do, they got together three years ago and threw between $250 and $300 million dollars into a comic book movie project to defeat a guy that was far from a sure thing for winning the nomination.

The GOP should have seen this coming. After all, didn't arch-conservatives Barry Levinson, Robert DeNiro and Dustin Hoffman force President Clinton's penis into a young girl's mouth and his air force into Eastern Europe? It's happened before, and it'll happen again, people! Start paying attention.

For those of you who aren't as politically astute as I am, these aren't just paranoid ravings. I mean, sure, they mostly are.  Limbaugh is a cynical hack who will say anythng to keep his mouth-breathing audience tuned in. This wouldn't be the first instance of his saying something something unbelievanly crazy to keep his morons listening, and it won't be the last.

But when you have serious people like Luntz getting in on the act, it's because they know that their guy is not only losing, but losing badly.

And they're right.