Last year Stefan Hankin of Lincoln Park Strategies threw Craig James into a statewide poll and found that James was less popular in West Texas than Barack Obama. ‘It’s not that people in West Texas don’t like him,’ said [GOP political consultant Brian] Mayes. ‘It’s that nobody likes him.’

—

Ladies and gentlemen, Craig James!

Via Deadspin

1:54 pm - 27 Jan 2012
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Filed under: #politics #football #Craig James #Texas

Via CLT Blog

9:34 am - 26 Jan 2012 - 1 note
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Filed under: #politics #Bev Perdue

Forget seasteading. There’s already a libertarian paradise, where no one is responsible for anything but their own property, out in the California desert.

10:11 am - 25 Jan 2012 - 1 note
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Filed under: #politics #Slab City

By the [Wall Street] Journal’s logic, if I give you a dollar and you have to pay 15 cents of that dollar to the IRS, then your tax rate isn’t 15 percent. It’s 15 percent of whatever was left after I paid my taxes, and after my friend George, from whom I won five bucks in a poker game, paid his taxes, and after his Aunt Sally, who gave him twenty-five bucks for shoveling her walk, paid her taxes, and after Aunt Sally’s customers at the local diner, who gave her fifty bucks in tips the week before, paid their taxes, and … tra la la. It’s a wonder, after all that upstream taxation, that there’s any money left at all.

— Timothy Noah on what should be, I think, the last word on the “capital gains are taxed twice” nonsense. Sure, we should find ways to incentivize investments, but the current 15% tax rate is far below historical norms.

9:15 am - 25 Jan 2012 - 2 notes
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Filed under: #politics #taxes #Mitt Romney

They make one especially keen point: if it were really about adding efficiency, why do the same people lead takeovers in many industries, instead of people with specific expertise in each industry doing the job? Their answer is that these specialists are specialists in deal-breaking, not value creation.

— Paul Krugman on private equity firms. Again, nobody is against making money; we simply ask if those who value making money over all else have perhaps got their priorities out of whack.

9:41 am - 23 Jan 2012 - 2 notes
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Filed under: #economics #politics

Examining TransCanada’s business operations, the Cornell Global Labor Institute report finds that TransCanada has already purchased most of the steel it intends to use for the pipeline from India; that most of the work will be conducted by people already employed by TransCanada; and that the Perryman Group included already-completed pipeline projects in its job-creation estimates.

In other words, there weren’t a lot of jobs that would have been created by the Keystone XL pipeline, neutering just about every argument for shoving through the project immediately. In the post linked above, ThinkProgress cites 1,400 new jobs (PDF); the L.A. Times cites 4,200. Over three years. That’s nowhere near the 20,000-465,000(!) jobs that some are claiming the project would create.

Rather, the decision was more about weighing the larger imperative to gain access to petroleum closer to home versus environmental concerns, and caution won the day. The project is far from dead, in fact, and TransCanada just has to figure out how to do it without, you know, ruining important Nebraska land.

1:46 pm - 18 Jan 2012 - 35 notes
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Filed under: #oil #Keystone XL #politics

BuzzFeed hits big by finding this bit of documentation that was, apparently, left out in the open.

9:26 am - 18 Jan 2012
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Filed under: #politics #Mitt Romney

What the history books are going to show, I believe, is that the Reagan revolution never happened. It was a campaign slogan. Government wasn’t reduced; taxes were cut marginally, but the basic functions of the federal government didn’t change.

— David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s former budget director.

7:36 pm - 15 Jan 2012 - 5 notes
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Filed under: #politics #Ronald Reagan

And in all the years [Ron Paul] published those articles with his name on them written in the first person “As a congressman I…” he never read them and nobody he knows ever read them, right? Nobody he knows, no family member, no colleague, no constituent, no neighbor, no friend ever said, “Hey Ron, I read that article in your newsletter the other day and it was full of racist crap. That doesn’t sound like you at all. What gives?” Isn’t that odd?

— Slate.com commenter “Michael Streiffert” laying out the core problem with Ron Paul’s racist newsletters.

11:45 pm - 26 Dec 2011
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Filed under: #Ron Paul #politics

areasofmyexpertise:

It is not enough to say, as some of these men do, “I am wealthy, and I got some lucky advantages, but I also worked really hard and found some opportunities, and I am proud of it.”

You must instead say: “my extreme wealth proves that I DESERVE to be wealthy, because I am better.”

This logical fallacy is the core of Social Darwinism, but you’d think after a while that Homo Robber Baronensis would have bred some thicker skin.

(Source: areasofmyexpertise)

10:22 am - 21 Dec 2011 - 1,502 notes
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Filed under: #politics