“You should never raise taxes in order to cut taxes. Surely congress has the authority and it would be right, if we decide we want to cut taxes to spur the economy, not to have to raise taxes in order to offset those costs. You do need to offset the cost of increased spending. And that’s what republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.“

Jon Kyl (11/27/2011):

In an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” the Arizona Republican argued that continuing a cut in the employee share of the payroll tax would undermine the Social Security system.

[...]

“The problem here is payroll doesn’t go into general revenue, it supports Social Security, and you can’t keep extending the payroll tax holiday and have a secure Social Security,” he said.

This really gets at the heart of present day GOP obstructionism. They will tout some idiotic ideological truism such as “you should never have to offset the cost” of lowering taxes, but then just as fast, they will argue the complete opposite when their own interests have nothing to gain. In the first case, it was the Bush Tax Cuts that disproportionately benefited the wealthy. In the second case, it’s the extension of Obama’s Payroll Tax Cut for the working class.

Besides this hypocritical rhetoric, it should also be noted (1) that the idea that tax cuts don’t have to be offset is straight up bullshit – in fact, almost 2.5 trillion dollars of our national debt was incurred by failing to offset the Bush Tax Cuts; and (2) the second Kyl statement is factually incorrect, since the the payroll tax cut extension is funded by a surtax on people who make more than 1 million dollars per year.

Update: A previous version of this post stated the Bush tax cuts cost 1.5 trillion dollars.

Recently, seven unemployed voters in Paul Ryan‘s district decided to take matters into their own hands and stage a sit-in at Paul Ryan’s Kenosha, Wisconsin office with the hopes of speaking to their elected official. All they got, however, was having the police called on them by Ryan’s staff and a form letter from the congressman stating:

Although I was unable to personally meet with those who stopped by my Kenosha office, I appreciate hearing from so many on the urgent need to create jobs in Southeast Wisconsin. I pride myself on being accessible to those I represent.

If accessibility means not facing those you represent, then yes, Paul Ryan should pride himself on being accessible.

…My husband said, “now you need to get a post-doctorate degree in Tax law.” Tax law? I hate taxes. Why would I do something like that? But the Lord says, “Be submissive wives; you are to be submissive to your husbands.”

Michele Bachmann (8/11/2011):

“I’m in love with him. I’m so proud of him. And both he and I — what submission means to us, if that’s what your question is, it means respect. I respect my husband. He’s a wonderful, godly man, and a great father. And he respects me as his wife. That’s how we operate our marriage.

Ali G – Respect:

The latest in-your-face behavior involves a public exhibition of lobbyists tucking money into the Republican Party’s garter belt, in ways that are clearly obscene, but may fall just short of meeting the public standards definition of obscenity:

Campaign finance experts said the two main Republican campaign committees are breaking new ground — and treading close to the legal line — in soliciting corporate contributions to help throw an election night party.

The lobbying and law firm Akin Gump, together with the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, are circulating the solicitation, asking between $2,500 and $10,000 for levels of sponsorship of the event at the posh rooftop bar at the W Hotel in Washington, D.C.

The event seeks “underwriters” rather than contributors, and the solicitation reads at the bottom: “This is not a fundraising event. This reception is being held in compliance with applicable federal ethics rules.”

That’s all it takes. You can go out and raise money to finance a clearly political event. All you have to do is make sure that you
a) formally label your donors something else
b) self-certify that what you’re doing is not fundraising, that everything is perfectly legal and ethical.

Not everyone is impressed, of course:

Meredith McGehee, the Policy Director at the Campaign Legal Center, a non-partisan group that favors finance regulation and is chaired by John McCain‘s campaign lawyer, said she’s never seen an invitation to an event that listed both party committees and corporations as hosts.
[...]
“Because of the soft money limits and because there are party committees involved, parties should have an abundance of caution in ensuring they comply with the law, and they seem to have found a clever lawyer who figured out this is permissible because it’s not a fundraiser,” said McGehee. “It’s a little too cute by half.”

Another prominent campaign finance lawyer unconnected to the event asked not to be quoted by name, but emailed: “The NRSC and NRCC are raising money to pay for this event. That sounds like contributions to me and soft money is illegal.”

But there aren’t going to be any consequences to the Republican Party from these people being unimpressed. McGehee herself concedes the point:

But McGehee said the Federal Elections Commission would be unlikely to attempt to enforce anything in this gray area, and this may simply be a pioneering new loophole in the Swiss cheese-like regulatory regime.

So why should the Republican Party care? It may look like a duck, and it may waddle and it may quack. As long as there are not going to be any proceedings to see if it meets the legal definition of a duck, it ain’t no duck at all.

(2)
Here’s how flagrant the GOP’s political prostitution has become. They have no problem putting stuff like this in writing:

With the majority in the balance, donors can pay between $10,000 and $2,500 for benefits beginning with “prominent signage” and special “VIP” access.

Also available are “other benefits as determined by underwriter’s needs.”

Put up the money, guys. And be sure to let us know what you need, okay?

(3)
The NSRC, meanwhile, is trying to hide behind the skirts of this fiction: that it’s really not their event at all, they are just one of a large number of co-hosts.

And NRSC Communications Director Brian Walsh defended the committee’s role.

“The NRSC is not soliciting funds or in any way raising money for this event. We’ve simply paid our allocable share to co-host an election night event and celebrate what we hope to be a great night for Republicans,” he said.

And the NRSC isn’t even one of the big-bucks co-hosts. They’re just a $5,000-level co-host.

All $5,000-level co-hosts are not equal, though. Some are co-hosts with benefits. The “underwriting” solicitation somehow gives marquee billing to a lousy $5,000 co-host.

Then it turned out that less than 3% of small businesses would be affected by letting the Bush-era tax rates expire for the top tax brackets. For an impressive period of time, that didn’t matter a bit to Republican leaders and spokesmen. They kept on cheerfully repeating the claim that small businesses would get hammered, and the economic recovery would be jeopardized. Because, let’s face it, for a very long time now — at least since the inauguration of George W. Bush — the Republican Party has simply not cared whether the things they repeat to the American people ad infinitum are true or not. And because, let’s go ahead and face it again, they knew perfectly well — as they have known for a very long time now — the media was never going to call them on their flat-out misrepresentations.

Then, for some strange reason — which may have to do with how a prolonged orange tan affects the functioning of the human brain — House Minority Leader John Boehner unexpectedly conceded that the 3% figure was true. According to him, though, that was really an irrelevant detail:

BOB SCHIEFFER: Now let me just say this. The– the Joint Committee on Taxation, which is a– which is a non-partisan body, says that only three percent of those small business people you keep talking about all the small business people, they’re going to get taxed, only three percent would– would be affected by that. Do you quarrel with that figure? Is that a right figure or a wrong figure?

REPRESENTATIVE JOHN BOEHNER: Well, it may be three percent, but it’s half of small business income. Because, obviously, the top three percent have half of the– the gross income for those companies that we would term small businesses.

The question that naturally arose was: if the top 3% of “small business” generated half of all small business income, then how small really could these so-called small businesses be? And Boehner seemed to underline the incongruity by using the language he did: “those companies that we would term small businesses”.

So intrepid journalists have now diligently researched the issue. Some of the results are truly surprising.

According to The Washington Post:

The thing is, some of those businesses are not particularly small. In fact, they’re quite large.

Among the firms Republicans want to protect from new taxes, according to research by House Democrats: The management team at Wall Street buyout firm Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts (KKR), which recently reported more than $54 billion in assets managed by 14 offices around the world. Auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, a household name with operations in more than 150 countries. And the Tribune Corp., which owns the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun.
[...]
Added Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a member of House leadership who heads the committee charged with electing House Democrats: “Republicans are trying to disguise this issue as a small business issue when the facts tell a different story. Among the major beneficiaries are hedge funds, billion-dollar private equity funds, major Washington lobbying firms and other million-dollar special interests.”

Bloomberg adds:

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell says President Barack Obama wants to subject half of all small-business income to a tax increase, a move that he says would strike a blow at the U.S. job-creation engine.

McConnell’s numbers add up only if you consider people like billionaire investor George Soros, most movie stars and Obama himself small-business owners, tax experts say.

That’s because the lawmaker is basing his figure on a broad definition of the term that experts say includes authors, actors and athletes who employ few if any workers. It also encompasses businesses that many people wouldn’t consider small, such as Soros’s hedge-fund firm and major law partnerships.

“Every student who is a part-time Web designer, partner in a law firm with a billion dollars of revenue and investor in a hedge fund gets lumped together in the data, along with real small businesses,” said Edward Kleinbard, a former staff director of the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation and now a law professor at the University of Southern California. “We are being over-inclusive in our use of small-business income.”

 
(Note: The title was revised after the post was published)

We can’t let the people who’ve been hit hardest by this recession and who we need to create the jobs that will get us out of it foot the bill for the Democrats’ two-year adventure in expanded government.

So deep in his heart, McConnell knows that those who have been hit hardest by the recession are not the ones who lost their homes, not the ones who lost their jobs and can’t get new ones, not the ones who can’t feed their families, but the wealthiest among us?

Presumably, then, the hardest hit of the hardest hit would have to be the “the richest 120,000 people in the country.” These are the richest 0.1% of Americans. The poorest members of this group “have annual incomes of more than $2 million, and the average member makes more than $7 million a year”.

These are the people to whom McConnell wants to give wants us to give a cool $300,000 each year. Because of how much they are hurting right now. And how stoically they bear that hurt.

But at least the world is back to normal. That is to say, Republicans have en masse rejected Boehner’s temporary flash of sanity.

In fact, James Oliphant and Don Lee of The Chicago Tribune are even claiming that:

By the end of the day Monday, Boehner issued a statement dropping his earlier suggestion and saying he too would fight higher taxes affecting any bracket.

Don’t see that anywhere else, though. And Oliphant and Lee offer no quotes from this alleged statement or any other details.

So even though The Los Angeles Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer carried the Oliphant-Lee story, I’m skeptical that it’s actually true.

Two and a half weeks ago, Mission Essential Personnel, LLC, (MEP) proudly put out this press release:

Mission Essential Personnel, LLC, (MEP) is pleased to announce it has been included again on Inc. magazine’s prestigious Inc. 500 list of the nation’s fastest growing companies based on percentage revenue growth. MEP ranks #162 overall this year, after having hit #52 last year. The company’s revenue has grown from $43 million in 2007 to more than $375 million in 2009.

“It’s great for MEP to be recognized for its continued strong growth,” said MEP CEO Chris Taylor. “Inc.’s recognition highlights our company’s tremendous success expanding its current business while beginning to branch into new areas of work. Our great personnel in the U.S. and across the world deserve credit for their unwavering commitment to our customers and their mission.”

Depends on the definition of “unwavering commitment to our customers”.

According to a whistleblower, that phenomenal growth rate — which represents a trebling of revenues each year — was achieved by the most callous kind of fraud. The kind that costs lives.

More than one quarter of the translators working alongside American soldiers in Afghanistan failed language proficiency exams but were sent onto the battlefield anyway, according to a former employee of the company that holds contracts worth up to $1.4 billion to supply interpreters to the U.S. Army.

“I determined that someone — and I didn’t know [who] at that time — was changing the grades from blanks or zeros to passing grades,” said Paul Funk, who used to oversee the screening of Afghan linguists for the Columbus, Ohio-based contractor, Mission Essential Personnel. “Many who failed were marked as being passed.”

After being asked about the allegations, U.S. Army officials confirmed to ABC News they are investigating the company.

Funk outlined his claims in a whistleblower lawsuit unsealed earlier this year against Mission Essential Personnel, saying the company turned a blind eye to cheating on language exams taken over the phone and hired applicants even though they failed to meet the language standards set by the Army and spelled out in the company’s contract. He alleges that 28 percent of the linguists hired between November 2007 and June 2008 failed to meet the government’s language requirements. The company has contested those claims in court, and this week rejected them as false in an interview with ABC News.

Civilian translators have for nearly a decade been playing a crucial if unsung role in the Afghanistan war, embedding with troops as they have moved through the countryside, helping soldiers gather information from local villagers, and attempting to spread the message of security, moderation and peace that undergirds the U.S. presence there. Some Afghan veterans have rated the value of a skilled interpreter as equal to that of a working weapon or sturdy body armor.

But a former top screener of translators heading to Afghanistan tells ABC News in an exclusive interview that will air tonight on World News with Diane Sawyer and Nightline that he believes many of the translators currently in the field cannot perform their function.

“There are many cases where soldiers have gone out into the field and have spoken to elders [who] handed messages to the interpreter that a possible ambush three miles up the road would occur. The interpreter cannot read the message and they are attacked,” Funk said. “We’re talking about soldiers lives here.”

As Blue Girl points out, the Defense Languages Institute exists to train military personnel as linguists. But the Bush-Rumsfeld war philosophy was always: why go to war with the army you can have, if you can go to war instead with contractors who you can pay really big bucks to royally bugger up things instead?

MEP dismisses Funk’s allegations with an impressive amount of outrage. But ABC News‘s investigation supports Funk’s allegations. For example, there is this casual circumstantial evidence:

In a hearing before a congressional committee in July, CEO Chris Taylor testified that within a year of accepting the Afghan contract, his company “was able to achieve a 97 percent fill rate of the government’s requirement for linguists. Previous contractors never exceeded 43 percent.”

How Mission Essential Personnel was able to find hundreds of willing and translators (sic) from among a tiny pool of qualified Americans — which Peltier put at roughly 3,800 — was initially something of a mystery to Funk. He said the company struggled to find American citizens who spoke the Afghan languages Dari and Pashto. Ultimately, Funk alleged in his lawsuit that the company resorted to fudging their proficiency test results in order to hit staffing targets that entitled them to more money from the Army.

There are the ridiculously poor quality control practices MEP followed (unconscionably poor quality control, if you consider the stakes involved):

Funk told ABC News he wrote emails to the then-CEO of Mission Essential describing how job candidates would cheat on oral exams conducted over the phone.

“I told him that it was corrupt. Stand-ins were taking the test. That’s comparable to, if you’re a lawyer, that’s comparable to taking the bar exam over the phone. You need to be face-to-face with that individual. You need to identify them. You need to know who they are and they had stand-ins on the phone taking the test,” Funk said. “They had stand-ins on the phone taking the test because there is no way that these people could possibly pass if they can’t even get through an interview.”

One of the company’s translators working in Afghanistan now confirmed the practice in an interview with ABC News, saying he personally had taken the exam for others who could not have passed it themselves. The employee, who described the practice on the condition he not be identified, called a follow-up written exam “bull.”

ABC News also reports that “American war veterans confirmed… that many of the interpreters are simply unable to perform the delicate work of interpreting conversations between Americans and Afghans.”

There is also the first-person testimony of soldiers who were in a position to judge the language skills of contracted interpreters:

Genevieve Chase served as a Pashto-language-trained US Army Sergeant in Afghanistan in 2006 in Bagram and Lashkargah, Helmand Province. She told ABC News it was not unusual to encounter interpreters who were unable to speak Pashto, or had limited English. At times, she said she believes the failure to communicate has put soldiers lives at risk.

“Somewhere along the line somebody is doing something they’re not supposed to be doing,” Chase said. “It is not difficult to pick out somebody who can’t speak Pashto. In fact, for me it was rather simple to isolate those people.”

Chase said Army units quickly identified interpreters who could not do their jobs. She recalled odd exchanges where Afghan elders would speak at great length and the interpreter would turn to the American soldiers and translate, “He said, ‘Okay.’”

It is currently the consensus of their headline writers and editors that the word attuned means “holding strong opinions”. (Perhaps some dictionaries will attune them to the real meaning of words, which would be a step up from just having strong opinions about them.)

This was the headline: “AP-GfK Poll: Most attuned voters tilt toward GOP“.

And this is what it’s attached to:

Americans with the strongest opinions about the country’s most divisive issues are largely unhappy with how President Barack Obama is handling them, an ominous sign for Democrats hoping to retain control of Congress in the fall elections.
[...]
In another danger sign for Democrats, most Americans extremely concerned about 10 of the issues say they will vote for the Republican candidate in their local House race. Only those highly interested in the environment lean toward the Democrats.

What is hilarious is that the people whom the headline describes as “most attuned” are described in the story as “highly opinionated”.

He gave the scoop to Marc Ambinder, who duly wrote up a very sympathetic post. I don’t have any problem with that. I do have a problem, though, with the blatant dishonesty Ambinder displays in the second sentence of his post:

Ken Mehlman, President Bush’s campaign manager in 2004 and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, has told family and associates that he is gay.

Mehlman arrived at this conclusion about his identity fairly recently, he said in an interview.

When a 44-year-old man announces he’s gay, one may well wonder what “fairly recently” means. Is Ambinder really saying Mehlman just discovered he’s gay? Did Mehlman really say that?

I guess that depends on your definition of “fairly recently”. Ambinder must be a poet, because he seems to have used a super-size dose of poetic license. Before you read further, you would do well to make sure you have nothing in your mouth.

What Mehlman said was:

It’s taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life. Everybody has their own path to travel, their own journey, and for me, over the past few months, I’ve told my family, friends, former colleagues, and current colleagues, and they’ve been wonderful and supportive. The process has been something that’s made me a happier and better person. It’s something I wish I had done years ago.

And:

I wish I was where I am today 20 years ago. The process of not being able to say who I am in public life was very difficult. No one else knew this except me. My family didn’t know. My friends didn’t know. Anyone who watched me knew I was a guy who was clearly uncomfortable with the topic.

Fairly recently, indeed!

(2)
I found this comment by Ed Gillespie, another former RNC chairman and “long-time friend of Mehlman”, to be utterly hilarious:

Gillespie acknowledged that the party had been inhospitable to gays in the past, and said that he hopes Mehlman’s decision to come out leads the party to be “more respectful and civil in our discourse” when it comes to gays.

So it was okay to be mean to gays when you were talking about Cheney‘s daughter, but now that you’re also going to be talking about Ken Mehlman, suddenly everyone is going to be extra sensitive?

(3)
Amanda Terkel, who is “Deputy Research Director at the Center for American Progress and serves as Managing Editor for ThinkProgress.org and The Progress Report at the Center for American Progress”, is now also writing for The Hufffington Post.

It’s a perfect mystery why. I challenge anyone to read her post about the Ambinder-Mehlman revelation, and explain to me why this deserves to be in The Hufffington Post. (Or anywhere at all, for that matter.)

She barely scraped up the energy to append one sentence at the front-end and two at the back-end of a short quote from Ambinder’s post. Her post says “First Posted: 08-25-10 06:08 PM … Updated: 08-25-10 06:12 PM”.

Really? One of those three sentences was updated within four minutes?

I can’t imagine it was “Ken Mehlman, who headed the Republican National Committee between 2005 and 2007, has come out in an interview with the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder:”. But then that leaves us with “Mehlman headed the RNC when the Republican Party was pushing anti-gay initiatives and increasingly speaking out against marriage equality.” or “Former RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie and Mehlman’s longtime friend called Mehlman’s coming-out “significant,” but added that he remains opposed to gay marriage.”

See what I mean?

Maybe she originally had only two sentences? And some qualms of conscience kicked in to make her add a third?

Cantor offered the kind of thoughtful, well-reasoned response we’ve come to expect from the GOP leader.

That thoughtful, well-reasoned response consisted of stuff like this:

Everybody knows America’s built on the rights of free expression, the rights to practice your faith, but come on.

Isn’t it a travesty of the English language to call this joker a leader? All he does is obediently follow every extreme position taken by the extremist faction of the Republican base.

And he is, of course, hardly alone in this. The exact same description fits House Minority Leader John Boehner, for example, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. And starry-eyed presidential hopefuls like Tim Pawlenty.

We should just stop calling these clowns leaders, when what they are so clearly is followers.