Quick little article on Slate.com about Paul Ryan’s budget plan. I need someone to explain to me how Republicans have such a strong support base made up mostly of people they’d like to fuck over.
Fox News finds new ways of being disturbing while also getting better at the old ways of being disturbing.
I’ll try to do this as succinctly as possible. Head over to Youtube for this clip from Fox and Friends in which Steve Doocy and Stuart Varney talk some bullshit. My commentary:
0:12 - Doocy makes his “yeah, right” face which I think we should call “a doocy.”
0:48 - Doocy, allegedly a journalist, states some numbers that he “read somewhere.” He doesn’t site a source, which would’ve knocked off some points if this were something more formal like a 5th grade social studies report.
0:59 - Varney calls Doocy’s pre-school cost estimates “probably accurate.” He qualifies this by saying he “doesn’t have the precise figures.” I don’t know why he didn’t just make something up because he’s about to make up all kinds of things.
1:28 - Varney on what Obama is doing: “Raise taxes on the rich and offer all kinds of free stuff to people who will vote for you in the future.” Varney pulls the “raise taxes” thing out of thin air. It has no relevance to anything that’s being discussed but he knows its a talking point he has to sneak in someplace. This was as good as any.
The big disturbance for me, is the insistence that education equates to “free stuff” and not vital programs for the country, which is what I tend to think of education as. I’m also not sure how well Varney’s accusation of Obama “buying votes” will work, since people are never going to have a chance to vote for Obama again, unless he goes on American Idol post-presidency.
1:55 - After admitting a few times that Obama hasn’t said how he’ll pay for the program, Varney continues to accuse Obama of doing things the president has only done in Varney’s own imagination, including “forcing big government on the states.” This is how Fox News gets it done: Speculation presented as analysis. Everything Varney says in this beat is 100% made up but everything about his delivery would suggest that it might be real.
2:18 - Doocy’s continued insistence on having read things is starting to sound like overcompensation, like he’s the kid in class who won’t admit to not having read the assignment, even though he didn’t know that Johnny Tremaine totally can’t use his other hand.
Doocy goes on the claim preschool doesn’t really help kids in the long run, something Jon Stewart did a fine job of debunking in the middle of this clip from The Daily Show. The same study that Doocy keeps claiming to have read, actually says that preschool education shows a correlation with “graduation rates, lower crime rates, increased college attendance, [and] income.” Which makes me think Doocy just read the first chapter and skimmed the rest. (Incidentally, the whole clip from the Daily Show is quite good).
3:05 - Varney calls Obama’s plan to give every kid a shot at preschool “an entitlement.” Because I think we’ve all had enough of 4 year olds leaching off the system, haven’t we?
Don’t look now, there’s a politician asking real questions and expecting a reasonable answer. Elizabeth Warren is still new, though, maybe she’ll become a spineless bureaucrat in due time.
It’s a tough economy. You’ve gotta take everything into account even your amateur pornography.
Private sector jobs created by Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton’s first three years in office.
(via inothernews)
Stephen Colbert’s version of politics as performance art passed a significant milestone – his “super PAC” has raised more than $1 million, Mr. Colbert revealed on Tuesday. The PAC — once known as the “The Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert Super PAC,” then the “Colbert Super PAC” – is officially called “Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow.” There were some well-known names on the donor list, including Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor of California ($500), and Bradley Whitford, a star of “The West Wing” ($250), Sarah Maslin Nir reported.
*These images selections are perfect examples of why I’ll never be the editor in chief of anything.
(via bbook)
Slate.com is killing it with this.
"Financial engineering is at the heart of what Wall Street now does, what it has become, and private equity firms of which Mr. Romney ran for quite awhile, are at the heart of that. They buy up companies - that’s the investment - they fiddle around with them, they borrow against them, they layoff workers quite often, they pull out money for their fees, and then they bring them back into the public market. And if everything goes well they make a fortune, and if everything doesn’t go well, the company goes bankrupt and they still make a fortune, because they’ve taken out all the fees. And, because the money they invested is investment capital, what they pay themselves, is a capital gain. And the capital gain is taxed at 15%, no matter how many millions it gets to."
— Joe Nocera of NYTimes on the Daily Show (via kateoplis)
Mitt Romney claimed this morning that he created “more jobs in Massachusetts than this president’s created in the entire country.” We’ll just leave this reality-depicting chart here and let you draw your own conclusions.
(via inothernews)
The Corporations that Occupy Congress | Reuters
Last month Citizens for Tax Justice and an affiliate issued “Corporate Taxpayers and Corporate Tax Dodgers 2008-10″. It showed that 30 brand-name companies paid a federal income tax rate of minus 6.7 percent on $160 billion of profit from 2008 through 2010 compared to a going corporate tax rate of 35 percent. All but one of those 30 companies reported lobbying expenses in Washington.
Another report, by Public Campaign, shows that 29 of those companies spent nearly half a billion dollars over those three years lobbying in Washington for laws and rules that favor their interests.
reagan-was-a-horrible-president:
The Fox News solution: more discrimination, less pay, less benefits.
Is this a joke?
Fox “News” is Republican porn…
How to encourage job growth:
- Extend unemployment benefits. Forcing people to work is bad policy and hurts everyone.
- Increase the federal minimum wage to a living wage, so people only have to work one job (freeing up secondary jobs for other people).
- Offer tax rebates for hiring people in marginalized groups.
- Stop fucking around and tax millionaires more so that people will have some faith that our government can run an economy that actually cares about the 99%, thereby encouraging spending and job growth.
- Create universal healthcare so employees can be more productive and work more days.
And voila! A job creation plan that doesn’t involve fucking over poor people.
Fucking ridiculous.
(via inothernews)
"
The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. 12 hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website. As of Today, we’ve sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again.
I really hope people keep buying it a lot, so I can have shitloads of money, but at this point I think we can safely say that the experiment really worked. If anybody stole it, it wasn’t many of you. Pretty much everybody bought it. And so now we all get to know that about people and stuff. I’m really glad I put this out here this way and I’ll certainly do it again.
"— Comedian and actor LOUIS C.K., on his successful online experiment selling copies of his latest special without a distributor.
(via inothernews)
(Source: buy.louisck.net, via inothernews)
Student loan debt has ballooned since the 1990s.
Note: This graphic is the corrected version of an earlier tumblr post, which had misleading proportions.
I know what’ll help the world: make sure gaining education is as difficult and expensive as possible.
(via inothernews)
