Jon Stewart arm wrestles Grover Norquist (and wins)

Here's the Jon Stewart interview. (Dontcha wish actual newspeople interviewed this well?)

I have a pledge for you. And I bet it'd work.

"Any congressional district that elects anyone who signs Grover Norquist's pledge shall have its federal funding adjusted to equal its federal taxes paid."

This would affect mostly Republican districts who get more than they pay in. And it would balance the budget almost immediately.

Take it a step further: all congressional districts that elect a Democrat shall not have to pay more in taxes than they receive in federal funding. This would affect most Democratic districts who tend to pay more in taxes than they receive in federal dollars.

Ya see, here's the Big Hypocrisy: the districts that get the most from the federal government are Republican districts. And Republican districts nationwide, on average, get more from the federal government than they pay in.

So we'd be doing them a favor. We'd be helping them be honest, helping them be true to their ideals. No more federal gravy train for Republican districts who signed Grover's pledge (which he thought up when he was twelve–––I'm not making this up, it's on tape.) And Democrat taxpayers would stop being ripped off by the lazy, tax evading Republican parts of the country.

Anyway, Jon Stewart does a pretty fair job of outdebating Norquist. He points out that Reagan raised taxes a dozen or so times. He points out Clinton raised taxes and created a budget surplus and a boom, and Bush cut them and destroyed the global economy and bankrupted the country. Norquist doesn't blink or argue because it's all true.

Stewart does miss one big fat opportunity. When Norquist says we should get rid of public pensions and replace them with 401K's because then everyone knows exactly what they are going to get, Jon should have pointed out that 401K's are the accounts that Wall Street cleaned out over the past four years. The money went away. (Well, it didn't go away as much as it went into Goldman Sachs executive bonuses.)

Retirees under the privatized system have to pray really hard that the economy is up when they retire.

The thing Norquist hates about pensions is they are promises that have to be kept even if the market is being wiped out by pirates. Norquist doesn't like promises made to working people. Only promises made to pirates and CEOs, who are sometimes the same thing.

OMG––Norquist Wrote His Tax Pledge When He Was 12

From Daily Show reporter Samantha Bee, who is a pretty great interviewer.

OMG.

I'm not kidding. He says he actually did. Right on camera.

Our entire country is heading toward Greek style default because a 12 year-old in 1968 decided to rebrand the Republican Party around one simple and stupid idea. The idea of holding his breath until he got what he wanted. This may explain the brainpower problem they have.

This also explains why the GOP side of the aisle in the House is full of 8th grade boys.

Yuck.

Is a Bad Economy Part of the GOP Plan?

There was an excellent editorial the other day in the Mankato Free Press about how Republican budget cuts and no tax increases on the rich is bad policy. I wonder if anyone has said this. I'll say it:

Bad policy is the Republicans' intention. Pain and general collapse is their objective.

They want to drown government in the bathtub; they've said it often enough. It's their goal. They'd like to be rid of democratic government because it inconveniences them. It regulates them. And, who knows, it might wake up and tax them again at the rates it taxes the rest of us.

("Taxes are for little people" Leona Helmsley)

The Republicans also do NOT want the economy to recover before 2012. An economy that only recovers for the rich has its uses. As long as they are sitting on their cash and the middle and working classes are afraid to spend or don't have jobs, and as long as government, the only entity that can spend in a deep recession, is cutting back, the economy will stall. That has been their goal. They are achieving it.

Republicans despise government so much they want it NOT to function. If enough people lose confidence in government they will vote to dismantle it, and the vacuum can be filled by corporations and private operators. Unregulated of course. They do have their eye on the ball.

The GOP and their rich clients have been hoarding cash to ride out another recession that they can blame on Obama. The end result will be an economy more like Mexico's, with a very rich and powerful upper class and a vast, poor, obedient, fearful working class that is grateful to work for whatever is offered. Think of the American population as a huge labor pool for hiring off the back of a truck.

This isn't a far fetched scenario. It's radical, but the modern Republican Party is radical. It can't be called conservative because it is systematically attacking the strong institutions and fair practices that worked well for the best fifty years in American history. The engine of the economy during those best fifty years was a prosperous, confident, secure working and middle class.

I might even go further than radical and describe this new Republican Party as vandals. Greater Minnesota needs to recognize what their cynical strategy will do to rural communities.

Who is Happy With This Economy?

Do you ever wonder if the Republicans actually want the economy to fail? There's been a lot of conversation about it. The signs are pretty clear. But the media are too polite to bring that discussion into the open. Here are a few links. Not much pops up in newspapers or television news.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_05/playing_a_game_of_chicken_with029667.php

http://www.tnr.com/article/magazine/79739/washington-gop-opposition-quantitative-easing

http://www.businessinsider.com/bernanke-is-being-grilled-about-muni-debt-because-republicans-want-the-states-to-collapse-2011-1

http://www.newsweek.com/2009/09/01/the-failure-caucus.html

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/06/24/republicans_want_america_to_fail

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/block-heads-by-digby-so-republicans-are.html

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/02/dire_news.php

http://gawker.com/?_escaped_fragment_=5572444/are-republicans-trying-to-ruin-the-economy#!5572444/are-republicans-trying-to-ruin-the-economy

When they are honest Republicans actually say it themselves:

Another economic meltdown would do Republicans a lot of good.

An economy that doesn't recover (except for the very very rich) hurts Obama's chances of re-election.

It would spread the blame for the collapse of 2008 and make the Bush administration look less inept.

Republican clients like having an insecure, underpaid workforce that's grateful to work for less.

Republican clients are doing fine. They were bailed out. Their stocks (which many of them scooped up at the bottom of the market) rebounded. They paid themselves bonuses for this. And the less for us, the more for them. What working people don't earn, the rich get to keep. It's called a Plutonomy.

I love how the Wall Street Journal equates lavish personal spending and heavy lifting. (Some of their spending is lavished on shapers of public opinion.)

A weaker economy makes tax revenues drop. Republican clients want lower revenues because a weaker government can't regulate them.

(Just as an aside, here are some suggestions for the anti-government crowd, to help them avoid hypocrisy. A little list of the things they should do without.)

Thing is, the Republicans want government NOT to work. Democracy is a nuisance. They want to get elected to government... so they can make it NOT work.

They (in the famous words of Grover Norquist) want to drown our form of representative government in the bathtub. Goodbye democracy.

To help kill our government they are happy to run up an enormous debt and not pay for it.

And in the interests of putting fewer, richer people in charge, they'd like it if fewer people voted. They'd like a small elite deciding what a vast uninformed and poorly paid population does.

Are you following this so far?

A government that can't function is less popular with average people. This is the Republican goal. When government doesn't have the funds to function properly it makes people mad, not at the Republicans who made it not work, but at government itself, which has always been reliable. It helps to have a public that doesn't pay attention or is easily misled.

Republicans like it when government doesn't work. They've been saying this for decades. They've finally delivered and this is what we are experiencing every time we hit a pothole, every time class sizes increase, every time our tuition rates go up. Wait till our fire departments can't get to us. Wait till the government can't respond to the next flood or the next wave of violent storms. Wait till the government can't shore up the financial system or starts selling the national parks.

This bad economy can't support a decent, functioning government, and that is exactly what the Republicans want.