Politics
- Economy killers: Inequality and GOP ignorance – Great Recession – Salon.com
America emerged from the Great Depression and the Second World War with a much more equal distribution of income than it had in the 1920s; our society became middle-class in a way it hadn’t been before. This new, more equal society persisted for 30 years. But then we began pulling apart, with huge income gains for those with already high incomes. As the Congressional Budget Office has documented, the 1 percent — the group implicitly singled out in the slogan “We are the 99 percent” — saw its real income nearly quadruple between 1979 and 2007, dwarfing the very modest gains of ordinary Americans. Other evidence shows that within the 1 percent, the richest 0.1 percent and the richest 0.01 percent saw even larger gains.
- Job Creators by digby
They used to say that the money wealthy people spent would trickle down to everyone else, but nobody was really buying it. I’m not sure anyone’s buying this either:… [read the complete article…]
- Up with Chris Hayes – Romney: Welfare parents ‘need to go to work’
The presidential campaign was consumed this week by controversy over Ann Romney and stay-at-home moms. Republicans seized on a stray comment by CNN contributor Hilary Rosen, who said Ann Romney had “never worked a day in her life.” Romney responded to the Rosen comments in a speech to the National Rifle Association on Friday, saying, “I happen to believe that all moms are working moms.”
But video from earlier this year, aired today on Up w/ Chris Hayes, shows Romney campaigning on the proposition that meaningful welfare reform should require parents with children to get out of the home and into the workforce. Responding to a question at a town hall event in Manchester, New Hampshire on January 4th, Romney described his position on work requirements for welfare recipients as governor of Massachusetts.
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- Americans Favor “Buffett Rule” by 60% to 37%
- Obama 2008 Gains Key to Presidential Battleground – NYTimes.com
- Political Scientist: Republicans Most Conservative They’ve Been In 100 Years : It’s All Politics : NPR
“[S]tarting with the 1976 election in the House the Republican caucus has steadily moved to the right ever since. It’s been a little more uneven in the Senate. The Senate caucuses have also moved to the right. Republicans are now furtherest to the right that they’ve been in 100 years.”
- Tell us more about Romney’s ‘private’ views – PostPartisan – The Washington Post
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece on Thursday, the veteran conservative journalist Fred Barnes offered Mitt Romney some advice for improving his campaign, including the sensible (and one might also say humane) suggestion that on immigration, the presumptive nominee “would be wise to move away from his harsh position in the primaries.”
Then Barnes included this fascinating sentence: “According to a Romney adviser, his private view of immigration isn’t as anti-immigrant as he often sounded.”
What exactly does that mean? Does it mean Romney said things that he doesn’t really believe? What are we supposed to make of a candidate who takes certain public positions to court one group of voters — and then tries to reassure an entirely different group of voters by leaking the fact that he doesn’t really believe what he said to win votes from the first group? How many other “private” positions does Romney hold that we don’t know about?
- Timothy Geithner: ‘No Credible Basis’ For Argument That Buffett Rule Will Hurt Economy
- Repubicans Accuse Nikki Haley Of Lying