Paul Begala Makes the Case for Senator Gomez

If you were to rank all of God’s creatures from the least loathsome to the most, then the Paul Begalas of the World would belong somewhere between serpents and pedophiles. (That would also be a fitting place for the Democratic strategist and CNN political contributor to spend eternity.)

 

But, on Saturday, Mr. Begala actually made a positive contribution to society. He gave Massachusetts voters a concise list of reasons (the most compelling I’ve seen) to vote for Gabriel Gomez in the upcoming special election to the U.S. Senate seat formerly occupied by John Kerry (D). Get a load of this: 

In the Senate, Democrat Ed Markey will fight alongside Massachusetts' rising star, Elizabeth Warren; Gomez would cancel her vote. Markey will support President Obama; Gomez will oppose him. Markey will stand for progressive change: an increase in the minimum wage, universal prekindergarten, tax fairness, rebuilding our roads and bridges and more. Gomez will empower obstructionist Republicans like GOP leader Mitch McConnell and the tea party extremists.

Sounds good to me. Remember, in the left-wing, business-as-usual lingo of Beltway insiders that Begala speaks fluently, members of Congress who fight for liberty and against big government oppression are "tea party extremists," Republicans who zealously represent their constituents' interests and try to stop bad policies from being enacted are "obstructionist," and "tax fairness" means "giving huge tax breaks to the president's cronies and shifting the tax burden even further onto the people who actually work for a living so that the millions of Americans who pay little or nothing in federal taxes can continue to live off the labors of others."

 

When the appropriate translation is made, Begala's pitch is also an uncharacteristically honest bit of rhetoric from him, proving my point that, on the rare occasions when Democrats tell the truth, they end up making some very persuasive arguments for voters to vote Republican.

The Obama-Nixon Comparison Is Indeed Appropriate

Steve Chapman, the Chicago Tribune columnist and editorial writer whose semiweekly musings range from the sentient to the delusional, has convinced me that the comparison of Obama to the late President Nixon is not only justified but apt. How? Well, take a look at this from his latest column:  

In recent days, those people have triumphantly likened Barack Obama to Richard Nixon, particularly on the misuse of the Internal Revenue Service for political advantage. In 1974, the House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Nixon because, among other reasons, he tried to cause "income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner."

This, of course, is exactly what the IRS now admits doing when it singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny. The Treasury Department's Inspector General found, "The IRS used inappropriate criteria that identified for review Tea Party and other organizations applying for tax-exempt status based upon their names or policy positions."

The misconduct happened under the current president. Therefore, Obama = Nixon.

Makes sense to me, except for that "Obama = Nixon” part. The two presidents may be guilty of similar acts, but they’re not the same man. (I recently tweeted my displeasure at the profligate comparisons of Obama to Nixon; people shouldn’t speak so ill of the dead.)

 

Chapman then explains that he was just setting up a straw man. Equating the two “is like concluding that babies are like poisonous snakes because some of them have rattles." Nice one, Steve, and were that hackneyed quip the worst part of your column, I wouldn’t have been moved to write this post, but then you say, "Maybe information will someday emerge to confirm the conservative suspicion that Obama thuggishly subverted the IRS to win re-election, but so far, it falls in the realm of make-believe."

 

I’d say it falls in the category of “undiscovered evidence,” the kind that warrants a dedicated, persistent and earnest congressional investigation and the appointment of an independent counsel. Chapman did at least review the history of how Nixon used tax agents as political operatives, but then he went way out on a limb with his assertion that, in "the case of Obama, there is no evidence that he or his Treasury Secretary was aware of the mistreatment of conservative groups -- much less that either of them requested it."

 

Well, here's what we do know: According to The Associated Press: 

Many conservative groups complained during the 2012 election that they were being harassed by the IRS. They accused the agency of frustrating their attempts to become tax exempt by sending them lengthy, intrusive questionnaires.
 
The forms, which the groups have made available, sought information about group members' political activities, including details of their postings on social networking websites and about family members.
 
In some cases, the IRS acknowledged, agents inappropriately asked for lists of donors.
 
There has been a surge of politically active groups claiming tax-exempt status in recent elections -- conservative and liberal. Among the highest profile are Republican Karl Rove's group Crossroads GPS and the liberal Moveon.org.
 
These groups claim tax-exempt status under section 501 (c) (4) of the federal tax code, which is for social welfare groups. Unlike other charitable groups, these organizations are allowed to participate in political activities, but their primary activity must be social welfare.
 
That determination is up to the IRS.
 
The number of groups filing for this tax-exempt status more than doubled from 2010 to 2012, to more than 3,400. To handle the influx, the IRS centralized its review of these applications in an office in Cincinnati.

The IRS agents in Cincinnati reportedly came up with a list of things to look for in an application, including the words "tea party" and "patriot." Donors to conservative groups and Republican candidates were harassed, audited and elderly. (Their age is not the IRS's fault, but it is a common trait I've noticed among the conservative/Republican victims of the Obama Administration's witch hunt.) 

Lois Lerner, who runs the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations, knew about the targeting of Tea Party groups as early as June 29, 2011, according to the Inspector General's draft report released last week. On Aug. 4, 2011, staffers in the IRS's Rulings & Agreements office "held a meeting with chief counsel so that everyone would have the latest information on the issue." This raises the question of whether then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman perjured himself at a hearing before the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight on March 22, 2012, when he testified, "There's absolutely no targeting." (This was in response to Rep. Charles Boustany's question, "Can you give us assurances that the IRS is not targeting particular groups based on political leanings?") Yesterday, Shulman testified before the Senate Finance Committee that he learned “sometime in the spring of 2012″ that “there was a list that was being used” to identify political groups for further review and that the term “tea party” was on the list. That may have also been a lie, but assuming for the moment it was true, Shulman did not immediately (or even shortly thereafter) notify the subcommittee of this. Rather, he left a false impression with Congress and the public until this month, when he finally corrected the record. However, if "everyone" means "everyone," then it means that Shulman was clued into the targeting well before he testified to the contrary. Not surprisingly, Lerner invoked her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself today in a hearing before the House Committee on Oversight. 

   

As for whether the president and his Treasury Secretary personally knew about this misconduct, here's some "evidence" for Steve Chapman. The White House coordinated with the Treasury Department over "how the IRS would disclose its targeting of conservative groups." And, the White House was caught in another lie on Monday, when Jay Carney acknowledged that, contrary to what he had previously told the press corps, Senior legal Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler was told on April 24 about the IRS audit that showed tax officials unfairly targeted Tea Party groups and that she then told White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough "and other senior officials" about the investigation.

So, Steve is wrong about there being "no evidence" that the Secretary of the Treasury knew about the mistreatment of conservative groups, but the rest of that sentence is correct--if by "evidence" he actually means direct evidence that has come out. Circumstantial evidence of the president's culpability in this affair is mounting every day. Let's not forget that it took a considerable while after the Watergate burglary in June 1972 for evidence of Nixon's personal involvement in the cover-up to surface. The fallout from this particular scandal is still in its larval stage. If there's any talk on this subject that falls "in the realm of make-believe," then it's coming from those who are scoffing at and deriding the notion that President Obama's hands are clean in all this. Stay tuned.

Richard Nixon at 100

(AP Photo)

 

My apologies to our readers for not posting anything in a while. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been spending between 90 and 95% of my waking hours either studying for the bar exam or searching for a full-time job in the Obama economy. sportsfan is recovering from watching his beloved Fighting Irish get their asses handed to them in the BCS Championship, and the rest of our contributors have various excuses (some very compelling) for not wasting their time on blogging.

 

Still, I couldn't let such a significant occasion pass without acknowledging the man who would have been 100 years old today.

 

Perhaps no U.S. president has had a more mixed record than Richard Milhous Nixon. His achievements included re-opening relations with China, France and Egypt, ending U.S. involvement in Vietnam (and the draft), and lowering the federal voting age to 18. But then there were the scandals. Oh, the scandals.

 

Nixon fit the classic definition of a Greek tragic hero: a great man with a tragic character flaw that brought about his downfall. In his case, it was paranoia. That paranoia drove him to plant listening devices around the White House during his presidency and five members of his re-election campaign to break into the DNC headquarters at the Watergate complex on an apparently ham-handed investigatory mission. What the White House originally dismissed as a "third-rate burglary" ultimately led to an unprecedented (and, to date, unrepeated) event: our president's term cut short, not by death, but by his own resignation.

The Watergate scandal alone would have been enough to indelibly tarnish Nixon's legacy, but his administration also suffered the taint of corruption from the activities of his vice president, Spiro Agnew, who turned out to have been on the take since his days as Baltimore County Executive. in October of 1973, less than a year prior to Nixon's departure, Agnew pled nolo contendere (no contest) to a charge of federal income tax evasion and resigned his office.

Even as scandal brought down his second-in-command and other scandals threatened to prematurely end his presidency, Nixon never let up in his efforts to further American interests abroad. After making good on his promise to withdraw all U.S. troops from Vietnam, he met repeatedly with then-Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev, their last meeting taking place while former White House counsel and unabashed weasel John Dean was spinning tales as fast as he could to the Watergate Committee in a desperate attempt to save his own skin. Negotiations between the two leaders (known as the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT) led to the signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972.

Per Nixon's directive, the U.S. provided vital support to Israel during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. He visited Cairo in June of 1974 and agreed to provide Egypt with nuclear technology. Not long after that, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment related to the Watergate cover-up. Before the House of Representatives could vote to impeach him, Nixon released transcripts of tape recordings that implicated him in the cover-up and announced his resignation.

Even after leaving office, he remained an authoritative voice on international affairs. President Clinton even reportedly sought his advice, and the New York Times (which seemed to never have a kind word for Nixon when he was alive) acknowledged, "The former President was always strongest writing about foreign policy." He continued to visit foreign countries and meet with world leaders, and he wrote prolifically. (His memoir RN was okay, but if you really want to get a handle on the man's world view and/or mental processes, then Six Crises and The Real War are both worth a read, and I've read good things about Beyond Peace.)

I can remember learning of his death in 1994. I was in first grade; as I left school, I stood under the flagpole gazing at Old Glory. It's my earliest memory of seeing a flag flown at half-mast.

One day not long after that, while rooting through my parents’ closet looking for a box of monies (you know, like every kid does at one point or another), I found a shoebox full of political memorabilia. My father and grandmother had collected it over the years. There were buttons from every presidential campaign from 1900 to 1972, many of them bearing Nixon’s name. It turns out the '68 campaign was the first one my father had been involved in. He told me how he and his best friend David would stand out in front of my grandmother’s house, near the road, with a big NIXON sign, and passing motorists would honk or smile or shout at them (Every once in a while, someone would stick his head out the window and shout, “Vote for George!”—i.e., George Wallace, the Alabama governor and defender of segregation who ran for president in '68 on a states’ rights platform.) Nixon, of course, won the 1968 election but narrowly lost Texas. We still have the issue of the Star-Telegram from the morning after Election Day with the headline “NIXON IS ELECTED PRESIDENT.”

Dad wasn't the only active Nixon supporter in my lineage. Years before my folks ever met, my other grandmother served as precinct chair for Nixon's re-election campaign in 1972. Like many Nixon supporters, she was bemused by the scandals that unfolded so soon after an incredible victory she and thousands of others had worked fervently to ensure.

"All I got out of it was a red face and a letter from John Wayne," she later told me. (The Duke had supported Nixon in all three of his presidential bids and apparently sent letters to those who worked on the campaign, thanking them for their work.)

As a child, I idolized Nixon. Not because of my family, but because of what I learned about the man through my own research. Certainly, Nixon did a lot of things to warrant admiration, even by those who never knew him personally. His ascendancy to the vice-presidency was one of the fastest in U.S. history; after returning home from World War II, during which he had served in the Navy, Nixon was elected to Congress in 1946. While his role in the Alger Hiss investigation arguably stood out as the most salient highlight of his time in the House of Representatives, he also helped write the Taft-Hartley Act (a.k.a. The Labor Management Relations Act of 1947), which passed over President Truman's veto. During his second term in the House, he was elected to the U.S. Senate. His support for civil rights and opposition to price controls, illegal immigration and public power, along with his erudite speeches warning of the threat of "global Communism" endeared him to many conservatives, and in 1952, the Republican National Convention nominated the 39-year-old freshman senator to run for vice president on the ticket with Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower and Nixon won in a landslide--twice--even carrying several states in the "solid South" (including Texas, Tennessee, Florida and Virginia). 

 

As vice president, Nixon honed his already keen foreign policy credentials, touring dozens of countries and chairing National Security Council meetings in the president's absence. On a trip to Moscow in 1959, he challenged Khrushchev during their infamous "kitchen debate," bluntly telling the Communist leader, "You don't know everything." 

 

Nixon held the distinction of losing the closest presidential election in U.S. history and winning a presidential election by the biggest landslide in U.S. history. His successful 1968 campaign, waged eight years after a devastatingly close loss to JFK and six years after losing his bid for governor of California, remains one of the great political comebacks of all time. He's the only person to be twice elected vice president and twice elected president of the United States.

My appreciation of his work wasn't ideological, either. Domestically, Nixon could not be called a conservative, not in any sense of the word. He expanded the size of the federal government, signing into law legislation that created, inter alia, the EPA, EEOC, OSHA, CBO and FHLMC (better known as "Freddie Mac"). As part of his "New Federalism" agenda, he proposed a new welfare program that would have guaranteed a minimum payment to all needy American households, regardless of work ethic. He also put in place wage and price controls and took the U.S. off the gold standard. He cut some taxes but raised others, including the capital-gains rate. His administration commenced affirmative action, though arguably at a time when institutional racism was far more widespread in the U.S. than it is today. The federal revenue-sharing program, under which the federal government shares its tax revnues with local governments, also began under Nixon, so every time you see/hear some worthless politician wailing about how spending cuts will mean fewer teachers/police officers/firemen, they're probably lying, but their mendacity is facilitated by one of President Nixon's policies.

His policy mistakes aside, Nixon was a brilliant and hardworking man who made some bad choices. Nothing he is known to have done, however, is/was bad enough to justify ignoring all of his good deeds in damnatio memoriae. Count me as a fan who believes his accomplishments were far greater than his transgressions.

To some, Nixon will always be a villain, but he was certainly a hell of a lot better president than the one we have now.

Something to Think About on Taxes

After I started this post, I read Stephen F. Hayward's piece in the December 3 issue of National Review, in which he offered House Republicans an idea on how to deal with Taxmageddon: 

The House GOP should call the Obama-Krugman bluff--of letting us go over the fiscal cliff on January 1--by passing a sweeping, pro-growth tax reform package right now, and sending it to the Senate, coupled with an announcement that it is not going along with tax increases for anyone unless taxes increase for everyone. The House GOP could even just pass Simpson-Bowles, and rightly say they are passing the plan President Obama's own commission recommended.

I was about to suggest much the same thing, albeit in my customarily garrulous style. Since taxes still seem to be the focal point of the negotiations between President Obama and Speaker Boehner, the House Republican Conference might as well accept that they're not going to convince the president and enough Senate Democrats to agree to a reasonable substitute for what will happen under current law before year's end and pass something like the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Unless they already have something drafted, however, that might not be feasible, so they could just use the Simpson-Bowles plan, but tax filers who itemize should still be allowed to take the full deduction for charitable contributions.

The other part of Hayward's/my idea--that the House GOP should announce that it is not going along with tax increases for anyone unless taxes increase for everyone--may sound like a move wrought with peril. At first blush, it sounds like it would play into the Democratic meme that Republicans are holding middle-class tax cuts "hostage" to protect "the rich," but the GOP has a ready retort, courtesy of the same Democrats who are levelling that charge: "shared sacrifice".

The argument is simple: If President Obama and congressional Democrats are serious about everyone needing to "share" in the "sacrifices" that must be made to get our fiscal house in order, then any deal we reach to reduce the deficit ought to send the message that "we're in this together," and therefore it's only fair that either all wage earners pay higher income taxes, or nobody pays higher income taxes.

Clever Democrats (yes, there are a few) might counter that the "sacrifices" that middle- and lower-income households will have to make should not come in the form of taxes but rather in cuts to entitlements and social welfare programs, but if they made that argument, then Republicans could simply challenge them to name specific programs and services they're willing to cut and at least offer an estimate of how much less they're willing to spend. (I have long believed that Senate Democrats will not be able to provide enough votes for the kind of spending cuts and entitlement reforms that would entice a sufficient number of Republicans to agree to the kind of massive tax hike for which the White House is calling.) 

In this vein, Republicans can also usurp the "fairness" issue, which Democrats always seem eager to inject into any debate over tax policy. Obama has demanded that the top individual income tax rates go from 33% and 35% to 36% and 39.6%, respectively, and that all other tax rates should stay the same. Prior to EGTRRA (the first Bush tax cut), the top rate was 39.6% and the lowest income tax rate was 15%. That's an 8:3 ratio between the highest and lowest income tax rates. Since 2003, individual income has been subject to a six-bracket (one more than under Clinton) schedule with a top rate of 35% and a bottom rate of 10%, a 7:2 (or 3.5 to 1) ratio. In other words, the current federal income tax is actually more progressive than it was under Clinton. Obama wants a six-bracket schedule with a top rate of 39.6% and a bottom rate of 10%, the most sharply graduated rate schedule in a generation. Not only should this be troubling to anyone who understands bracket creep, ubt I think most middle- and lower-income Americans would agree that it's not "fair" to lump a household making $300,000 or $400,000 a year into the same tax bracket as Donald Trump and Bill Gates (unless it's a flat tax, which Democrats have long eschewed). 

There's another dynamic at work here: The debate over the best way to effect a tax increase--whether to do it by raising tax rates or by limiting/eliminating tax credits and deductions--is fueled in part by the prospective impact of any such change in current tax law on future efforts to reform the tax code. Arch-conservative Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) recently said that he "would rather see the rates go up than do it the other way because it gives us a greater chance to reform the tax code and broaden the base in the future."

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform who I think has some pledge or something maybe I don't know, had previously explained why he didn't like the concept of "raising revenues" through "closing loopholes," as House Republicans offered to do in their initial proposal to avert the "fiscal cliff". As he told Neil Cavuto:  

"They’re not talking about a few deductions and credits. They’re talking about a trillion dollars’ worth of deductions and credits; that’s what -- that's what the other team wants. If you do that [then] you’ve just killed tax reform for a generation. Why? How do you ever get the rates down if you don’t have the deductions and credits? What Obama’s hoping to do is raise taxes, spend the money, kill tax reform for individuals dead all at the same time."

It's something every Republican--in fact, every member of Congress who cares about the future of this country--ought to consider before voting, or even pledging to vote, for any bill designed to raise taxes, whatever the method. "Tax reform," as I and I think most other fiscally-astute Americans think of it, means cleaning up the tax code by lowering income tax rates and reducing and/or eliminating credits and deductions. If there aren't enough credits or deductions to reduce/eliminate, then this endeavor simply becomes a tax cut.

With this in mind, Taxmageddon is starting to look like an awfully appealing option. If they haven't already, then congressional Republicans ought to start hammering out an income tax reform bill along the lines of what Messrs. Simpson and Bowles called for. Post-Taxmaggedon, they'll be able to sell it as a middle-class tax cut that extracts more revenue from wealthy Americans. If the Democrats don't have a comparable counter-offer ready, then they'll be boxed in: oppose the GOP bill and keep taxes high on middle- and lower-income Americans, or sign on to it and effectively concede defeat on the tax policy argument.

What a great way to start Obama's second term.

101 Reasons to Elect Mitt Romney (or, to replace President Obama with a President Romney)

Recently, National Review published a list of 689 reasons to defeat Barack Obama. It was very good, but I wanted to give voters who were still on the fence as many good reasons as I could to not just vote against President Obama in 2012 but to vote for Mitt Romney, so I set about making a list. Admittedly some of the reasons on the NR's list are also reasons to vote for Romney, but I decided not to reuse any of those reasons. So, here now is my list of reasons to elect Mitt Romney president of the United States:

1. He’s actually balanced a budget.

2. He signed a balanced budget into law every year as governor.

3. His signature health-care reform law is popular.

4. His signature health-care reform law didn’t include over 20 different tax increases.

5. His signature health-care reform law didn’t include a single tax increase.

6. He read his signature health-care reform law.

7. He never disavowed his popular health-care reform law that didn’t raise taxes, despite numerous entreaties from the Right to do so.

8. Because he doesn’t kowtow to the Right.

9. Because the people who claim he kowtows to the Right need to be smacked upside the head with reality.

10. Because his health-care reform law was a constitutional exercise of the state government’s power to regulate commerce within the state, so he didn’t have to lie and tell people it wasn’t a tax, then send his solicitor general before the Supreme Court to argue that the individual mandate is constitutional because it is a tax.

11. “Corporations are people.”

12. The Left’s reaction to “Corporations are people.”

13. Because corporations are founded by, run by, owned by and employ people.

14. We’ve never had a bad president from Massachusetts.

15. Nobody else in this race is serious about balancing our budget. (No, Gary Johnson doesn’t count.)

16. Massachusetts’s credit rating was upgraded under his tutelage.

17. During his term as governor, household income in Massachusetts increased.

18. During his term as governor, Massachusetts’s unemployment rate dropped from 5.6% to 4.7%.

19. He cared enough about the family dog to bring him on vacation instead of dumping him in a kennel somewhere (or eating him. Let’s not forget Obama ate dog.)

20. Paul Ryan

21. Vice President Paul Ryan

22. President Paul Ryan

23. Because the next Supreme Court appointment should be made by a president who actually respects the Constitution.

24. Because he never said he likes firing people.

25. Because we like being able to fire our bank, our insurance company, our long-distance carrier etc. if we’re not satisfied with the services they’re providing us.

26. Because we ought to fire our president and hire someone who understands what it means to be accountable to people.

27. We need a president who understands the difference between outsourcing and offshoring.

28. He used money people chose to invest with him, knowing the risks they were taking, to help create jobs here in the U.S.

29. Barack Obama used taxpayer money to stimulate companies that expanded their overseas operations. (Union members: that means “companies that ship our jobs overseas.”)

30. He knew that GM and Chrysler would eventually have to go through bankruptcy before they could “come roaring back.”

31. Obama didn’t.

32. Planned Parenthood has spent millions slandering a man who stood by his wife through her battles with breast cancer and multiple sclerosis.

33. That wife donated $500 to Planned Parenthood.

34. Make Planned Parenthood regret their smear campaign even more than Ann Romney regrets that donation. (Ideally, their regret should be magnified by the ratio of their total ad spending this year to Ann Romney’s donation.)

35. Enough “Recovery Summers”; it’s time for a recovery presidency.

36. Forcing Lawrence O’Donnell to cover the defeat of President Obama by Mitt Romney is the second-most fitting just dessert for his vicious attack on Ann Romney. (A kick in the head from Rafalca would be the most fitting, for those of you who were wondering.)

37. Mitt Romney donated a greater share of his income to charity in 2011 than did President Obama.

38. Paul Ryan donated a greater share of his income to charity than Joe Biden, the man who said it’s “patriotic” for people to pay higher taxes.

39. Paul & Janna Ryan actually made less money in 2011 than Joe & Jill Biden but gave more to charity.

40. Because charity comes from the heart, not from the Dept. of Health & Human Services.

41. It’s time for Kathleen Sebelius to get rejected by Brookings and wind up teaching at some third-rate university.

42. Because nearly 47% of wage earners in this country pay no federal income taxes.

43. Because most of the people voting for President Obama really do consider themselves “victims” who are entitled to “free” stuff.

44. He gave an honest answer when asked about security concerns ahead of the London Olympics.

45. When it comes to being a leader, candor is more important than tact.

46. We shouldn’t reward voyeurism.

47. To teach Barack Obama that lying doesn’t pay.

48. To teach the mainstream media that they are not puppetmasters.

49. To teach Priorities USA that we’re not that gullible.

50. He’s the most experienced executive to be nominated for president by a major party since Dwight D. Eisenhower.

51. He was a success as the head of Bain Capital.

52. He was a success at running the Olympics.

53. He was a success as governor of Massachusetts.

54. Obama has been a failure as president.

55. If Obama’s presidency has been a success, then it would mean that he was trying to weaken us as a country, in which case we need a different president.

56. Lech Walesa endorsed him.

57. Hugo Chavez endorsed Obama.

58. Ann Romney won’t chide Olympic gold medalists for eating at McDonald’s.

59. He can tell the good components of Dodd-Frank from the bad parts.

60. He will approve the Keystone Pipeline.

61. He's a self-made (multi)millionaire.

62. The Left hates that fact.

63. Joe Soptic

64. He doesn’t want the United States to be a “major customer” of foreign oil.

65. He has a serious plan to wean us off foreign oil.

66. His plan to wean us off foreign oil doesn’t involve dumping billions of tax dollars into “green energy” scams.

67. Prove to the world that we can be counted on to choose style over substance.

68. Because economic policies based on principles of economic freedom, limited government and “rugged individualism” actually do work.

69. Because he understands that, and Obama apparently doesn’t.

70. For Gibson Guitar.

71. For the 90,000 U.S. troops currently serving in Afghanistan.

72. For the millions of seniors who will lose their Medicare Advantage plans if Obamacare is fully implemented.

73. For every policyholder who has seen his/her insurance premiums increase since Obamacare became law.

74. For every worker who has lost or is going to lose his/her health-care plan because of Obamacare.

75. For the children trapped in failing public schools.

76. He actually has a record of working across party lines to get things done.

77. Because he’s willing to work with a guy who stood on the Senate floor and told untenable lies about his taxes and said he’s “not the face of Mormonism”...

78. ...but we’re supposed to believe Obama can’t work with congressional Republicans because their floor leader in the Senate acknowledged that they want Obama to be “a one-term president.”

79. He’s actually saved and created jobs.

80. Because, while government can create jobs, it’s better to let the private sector do that.

81. Jack Black

82. His detractors claim he wants to “cut” education.

83. Even though he cut spending as governor, the Commonwealth’s schools were ranked first in the country.

84. People respect him enough to spend $50,000 to dine with him at a friend’s house; no appearances by George Clooney, Beyoncé or Jay-Z necessary.

85. Let the Obamas spend their next anniversary in the romantic seclusion of private life.

86. He won’t lambast you for going to Las Vegas.

87. So that our nation can begin to heal.

88. Because, while Osama bin Laden is dead, al Qaeda is very much alive.

89. He wants to sign the repeal of Obamacare.

90. He will grant waivers to all 50 states until Obamacare is repealed.

91. He won’t be distracted during important meetings by a recurring nicotine fix.

92. He’s willing to touch the third rail of American politics.

93. He’s offered specific reforms to save our entitlement programs from bankruptcy.

94. He keeps track of the promises he makes.

95. He’s never raised taxes.

96. Because it is possible to balance the budget without raising taxes...

97. ...which he did as governor of Massachusetts.

98. Nancy Pelosi said, "Mitt Romney is not going to be president of the United States. ... I think everybody knows that."

99. Sandra Fluke

100. He did more to create jobs as one man in the private sector than Barack Obama has done with all the power and resources of the presidency.

101. We need a president we can trust.

This list may grow as time passes, but with only a month to go before Election Day and early voting already underway in most states, I decided to go ahead and post what I had. Check back often!

The Washington Post Needs Better Fact-Checkers

Following Paul Ryan’s address at the Republican National Convention last month, self-styled “fact-checkers” went nuts, seizing on what they perceived as false and misleading statements in the vice-presidential candidate’s speech. Their critical analyses provided much fodder for Ryan’s detractors, who tried to make him out to be a liar who couldn’t be trusted. Whether or not they were successful is hard to tell, but that’s not the focus of this article.

The Washington Post has had a mixed record this election cycle when it comes to fact-checking. A completely unbiased and disinterested observer with no dog in the fight might fairly conclude they’ve been overly harsh on both the Obama and Romney campaigns. I’ve noticed multiple mistakes in the paper’s sundry “fact checks” conducted this year, but they’ve also done a lot of good work. Of late, however, they seem to be getting sloppy...or lazy...or maybe they're just dropping the mask and letting their bias show. Whichever it is, I’ve decided the time has come to catalogue some of the most egregious malefactions I’ve seen.

Before I commence castigating individual fact-checkers, I should identify who’s who. Glenn Kessler writes the Post’s “Fact Checker” column (the one that uses the "Pinnochio" rating scale). He is assisted in this endeavor by a reporter named Josh Hicks. Post columnist Ezra Klein is the editor of Wonkblog, a blog under the newspaper’s aegis. Suzy Khimm, Sarah Kliff, Dylan Matthews and Brad Plumer are all contributors to Wonkblog.

Now then, a couple weeks ago, I challenged anyone who accused Paul Ryan of lying in his convention speech to identify one actual lie he told. To date, no one has brought such a lie to my attention. (Brief caveat: I don't consider a statement a "lie" if the person making the statement doesn't know/realize it's false at the time.) Somebody referred me to this post on Wonkblog, and while it didn't expose an actual lie in Ryan's speech, I did notice several errors the author, Dylan Matthews, made in his "fact check". For starters, he labelled the claim that "[a] GM plant in Ryan’s district shut down on Obama’s watch" FALSE and attributed the claim to Ryan. The problem is that Paul Ryan made no such claim. Surprisingly, Matthews actually admitted this--sort of--as he quoted what Ryan actually said: 

My home state voted for President Obama. When he talked about change, many people liked the sound of it, especially in Janesville, where we were about to lose a major factory.

A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: “I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.” That’s what he said in 2008.

Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day.

Now, if you've done your research, then you should know that all of those statements are/were true. Matthews, however, didn't fact-check these statements. Instead, he wrote, "Ryan says that Janesville was 'about to' lose the factory at the time of the election, and Obama failed to prevent this." According to Matthews, this was "false," but Matthews is wrong; the plant was "about to close" when then-Senator Obama came to Janesville and made the remarks Ryan quoted. Notice also that Ryan never said "Obama failed to prevent" the plant's closing, though I suppose one could infer that from what he said, but even if he did, it's true; Obama didn't prevent the plant from shuttering. The issue is not whether he was in a position to save the plant; it's whether the plant closed or not. 

Matthews also distorted Ryan's claim about the stimulus. Here's what he wrote, exactly as it appears on Wonkblog:

The stimulus was the biggest expenditure in government history – The stimulus, Paul Ryan writes, “cost $831 billion – the largest one-time expenditure ever by our federal government.” This is false any way you cut it. By comparison, the Congressional Research Service estimates (pdf) that World War II cost $4.1 trillion in 2011 dollars. That was the biggest one-time expenditure ever, not the stimulus. Ryan is simply incorrect.

Notice that, again, the "claim" Matthews attributes to Ryan (in bold) differs substantially from what he quoted Ryan as saying. (This odd behavior is not unique to Matthews; see below.) Even aside from this glaring analytical error, however, is his premise that World War II "was the biggest one-time expenditure ever."' The stimulus was one bill that became one law, PL 111-5; it was a "one-time expenditure". By contrast, the $4.1 trillion "cost" of World War II was authorized through multiple appropriations bills, none of which reached anywhere close to $831 billion.

Matthews also cut out a couple of statements Ryan made--to wit, “The stimulus was a case of political patronage, corporate welfare, and cronyism at their worst,” and ”We got a long, divisive, all-or-nothing attempt to put the federal government in charge of health care.”--that I would call fair characterizations of Obama's policies that others may disagree with and dubbed them "false". He then listed a few claims from Ryan's speech that he called "misleading," but only one of these (that “President Obama has added more debt than any other president before him.”) was truly misleading. (The National Debt has grown by $5.4 trillion under President Obama--a greater increase than other any one president in U.S. history--but Obama is not solely responsible for this.) The other two--about the Simpson-Bowles debt commission report and S & P's downgrade of our credit rating--were true and not even misleading. (Matthews strained credulity by asserting that these statements in Ryan's speech "impl[ied]" things that no reasonable person would have interpreted the congressman as saying.)

You would think a responsible editor would have caught at least one of these slights and rebuked Dylan Matthews for his sloppy work and lack of journalistic integrity, but Klein himself admitted that, before posting Matthews's piece, he re-read Paul Ryan's speech, "this time with the explicit purpose of finding claims we could add to the 'true' category. And I did find one." One?!? I wasn't sure how Ezra Klein defines the word "true," but then he told us:

I want to stop here and say that even the definition of “true” that we’re using is loose. “Legitimate” might be a better word. The search wasn’t for arguments that were ironclad. It was just for arguments — for claims about Obama’s record — that were based on a reasonable reading of the facts, and that weren’t missing obviously key context.

Yet, in spite of that supposedly lax standard, Klein would have us believe that, after reading Ryan’s speech in an advance text, watching it on television, then reading it over again twice more, he "simply couldn’t find any other major claims or criticisms that were true." (Perhaps he should have told us what he considered "major claims or criticisms," though as we can see from Matthews's post, Ezra seems to have no problem labelling as "false" claims that are plainly true.)

According to his profile on Wonkblog, Dylan Matthews has written for The New Republic, Salon, Slate and The American Prospect, all left-wing rags (except for Slate), so perhaps the blatant mistakes in his Wonkblog post weren't mistakes at all but deliberate attempts to deceive readers. I wanted to know, so I read his post entitled "Fact-checking Bill Clinton on the economy" the following week. I myself noticed no fewer than seven obvious lies Clinton told in his convention speech, as well as other statements I suspected were false but couldn’t be sure of at the time. Yet, Matthews branded only one of the statements he examined from Clinton’s speech “false,” and it wasn’t one of the seven I noted while watching the speech. (Four of those seven, however, had to do with Medicare, and Matthews did acknowledge that this particular post of his didn’t cover the former president’s statements about Medicare; those were dealt with in a separate post, which I also examined.) He actually did address two of the statements I recognized as lies as soon as I heard them, but his "fact check" of the statements left a lot to be desired:

1. “...the Senate Republican leader said, in a remarkable moment of candor, two full years before the election, their number-one priority was not to put America back to work. It was to put the president out of work!” Not only did I know this was false, but Matthews actually used the same thing that proves this statement false to explain why it's "TRUE". Here is the video--which Dylan Matthews embedded in his Wonkblog post--of what Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, said:

As you can see/hear, Senator McConnell clearly said that "our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term." Now, the difference beween "top" and "number-one" is de minimis, as is the difference between denying President Obama a second term and putting him out of work; I'll not fault the Big Dog for that, but there is a hugely significant difference between one's top priority and top political priority. (If you don't think the Democrats' top political priority this election cycle is to get President Obama re-elected, then you are in such a deep state of oblivion that I don't see any point in continuing.) Furthermore, there's a big difference between saying what something "is" and saying what it "should be". (We know President Clinton has been unsure of the definition of the word "is" in years past; it seems Dylan Matthews was as well.) Even if McConnell thought the GOP's top priority and top political priority were one and the same, that's not what he said. Clinton's statement was false.

2. “The Recovery Act ... cut taxes for 95% of the American people.” I interpreted this as a reference to the stimulus, and apparently Matthews did, too, so let's just go with that. This statement is also clearly false, as the percentage of Americans who pay federal taxes is far less than 95%, unless you take into account how the people who pay the taxes pass them on to others, but that's so tenuous and not supported by the context. Dylan labelled this statement "TRUE" and offered only this one sentence as support:

The “Make Work Pay” tax credit in the stimulus helped 94.3 percent of Americans.

I clicked on the link because I was willing to spot Slick Willie 0.7% if his claim otherwise held up. Matthews's source for the 94.3% claim was Politifact, which as I've demonstrated ad nauseum has some serious credibility issues. Nevertheless, even if you take them at their word in this instance, the piece Matthews linked to doesn't support his claim, nor does it entirely validate Clinton's. According to Politifact:  

The stimulus included tax cuts for many Americans, including a broad cut known as "Making Work Pay" intended to offset payroll taxes, which are automatically taken out of most workers’ paychecks and are not refundable.

Because of the stimulus, single workers collected a $400 tax credit, and working couples got $800. The credit didn’t come in the form of a check; it worked out so that most workers had about $400 less in federal income taxes withheld from their paychecks.

This raises the issue of what you consider a "tax cut"; most people think of tax cuts as cuts in tax rates, but I think it's fair to interpret Clinton's use of the term "cut taxes" to include reducing the tax burden or simply "reduced taxes". Still, that leaves the issue of the 95(or 94.3)% number. Whence did that come? Says Politifact:

Ahead of the 2008 election, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center analyzed the effects of Obama’s tax proposals for workers. The center determined about 95 percent -- more precisely, 94.3 percent -- of tax filers would receive a tax cut under Obama's plan based on the tax credit to offset payroll taxes.

That data certainly deserves consideration, but the problem is that neither Politifact nor Dylan Matthews pointed to an analysis of the actual stimulus, so we don't know how many people actually received a credit as a result of the "Make Work Pay" tax credit. Further, concluding that President Clinton's statement was true requires the additional assumption that, by "the American people," he meant "American tax filers" or "taxpayers" or some other term that's not synonymous with "people". (Indeed, Politifact said that "Clinton left out an important qualifier: It’s a tax cut for 95 percent of working families.")

Matthews didn't fact-check the other lie I noticed--that “This Republican narrative, this alternative universe, says that...every one of us in this room who amounts to anything, we’re all completely self-made.” Not only have I never seen/heard any Republican say any such thing; this statement goes way beyond a permissible paraphrasing or reasonable interpretation of anything Repbulicans have actually said. As for Wonkblog's "fact check" of Clinton's Medicare claims, I think that Sarah Kliff deserves some credit for a basically good job; she caught three of the four lies about Medicare I heard Clinton say and even exposed a couple more. I don't know why she didn't mention the other obvious lie Clinton told on this topic--that Republicans’ plan to block grant Medicaid will “end Medicare as we know it”--but I'll not fault her for that. If this one post is any indication, then Messers. Klein and Matthews can learn a lot from Ms. Kliff about how to do a proper fact check.

Now, then, on to "The Fact Checker" himself, Glenn Kessler. I've previously faulted Glenn for what I deemed an unfair analysis of Mitt Romney's claims about how many jobs he created through his work at Bain, but I've noticed that he also does some good work, too. Kessler assigns claims that are anything short of true anywhere from one to four pinnochios; four-pinnochio ratings are reserved for what he calls "whoppers". My one big riff on his "fact checking" is that he and Josh Hicks seem to apply their ratings indiscriminately and arbitrarily. I'll give you an example: Remember that awful Priorities USA ad featuring the "steelworker" whose wife "died of cancer"? Well, Kessler analyzed the claims (many of which were downright false) made by the man in the ad, a Mr. Joe Soptic, and appropriately gave the ad "four pinnochios", concluding, "Soptic is welcome to his opinion on possible reasons for his wife’s death, but that does not mean Obama supporters should exploit it. On just every level, this ad stretches the bounds of common sense and decency."

That's very charitable; I think a fairer and more honest reaction would be that this man, Joe Soptic, is a horrible person who was trying to deceive people. Regardless, the Priorities USA ad clearly deserved four pinnochios, but according to Kessler, so did the Romney campaign's ad attaking President Obama for his "plan to gut welfare reform." Kessler called this ad "over-the-top", but as Robert Rector, who helped draft the work requirements in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (a.k.a. Welfare Reform), has explained, "The law has indeed been gutted." The ad does bend the truth by saying that, under President Obama's plan, "you wouldn't have to work and wouldn't have to train for a job. They'd just send you your welfare check...." Reasonable people might interpret that as saying that unemployed people would receive welfare payments without having to work or look for a job, and that's not the case. This ad deserved one or two pinnochios, but none of the statements in it compare to the utter mendacity of the Priorities USA ad. Nevertheless, Kessler apparently thought the two spots were equally dishonest, writing that "the Romney campaign is asserting an extreme interpretation of what might happen under these rules, but it is certainly not based on any specific 'Obama plan.'"

Hmm...a campaign asserting an extreme interpretation of what might happen if their opponent's policy proposals are enacted? That sounds exactly like what the Obama campaign did with this ad: 

This ad is full of lies and deceptions. The voice-over says "chances are, you pay a higher tax rate than [Mitt Romney]," and "Mitt Romney made $20 million in 2010 but paid only 14% in taxes, probably less than you." I'm not sure who this ad is speaking to when it says "you", but "chances are" not good that you pay a lower tax rate than Mitt Romney. First, notice that they're only using one year to reference Romney's effective tax rate. (The candidate reportedly paid 15.4% of his income in federal taxes in 2011.) We don't have data from the I.R.S. for 2010 indicating what percentile a 13.9% tax burden would place Mitt Romney in, but even counting just the people who filed returns, 14% is higher than most Americans' federal tax rate in 2009. As Kessler himself has explained: 

For all the rhetoric about high taxes in the United States, most Americans pay a relatively small percentage of their income in taxes. Romney had an effective rate of 13.9 percent in 2010 and 15.4 percent in 2011. That gives him a higher rate than 80 percent of taxpayers if only taxes on a tax return are counted and puts him just about in the middle of all taxpayers if payroll taxes paid by employers are included.

So we can agree that, at the very least, the Obama ad contains some shading of the truth. That should earn it at least one Pinnochio, right? Not according to Kessler, who called the commercial "[a] tough new Obama ad that — surprise! — is accurate." That's quite an about-face from the man who less than a month earlier had given the president's campaign team three Pinnochios for tweeting, “FACT: In 2010 and 2011, Romney paid less than 15% in taxes on $42.5 million in income—much less than what many middle-class families pay.” Kessler alluded to that fact check in this analysis but distinguished the two claims, saying "the language in this ad is much more accurate." (More accurate, possibly, but still dishonest.) He also found ways to justify the ad's mendacious assertions that Romney "has a plan that would give millionaires another tax break and raises taxes on middle class families by up to $2,000 a year." (Notice the use of the qualifier "up to"; I could say that Obama has cheated on his wife Michelle up to 100 times, and even if the actual number of such adulterous trysts was zero, I'd technically be telling the truth.) This claim is based on a single study that exemplifies shoddy analysis, but aside from that, the ad misleads people by saying that Romney's plan "would give millionaires another tax break", even though Romney has been quite clear that his plan would not result in a net tax cut for people at the high end of the income spectrum. However, he has proposed lowering the top federal income tax rate to 28% and eliminating or reducing deductions and tax credits. The Tax Foundation piled assumption upon assumption and inference upon inference to reach the conclusion that "a revenue-neutral individual income tax change that incorporates the features Governor Romney has proposed ... would provide large tax cuts to high-income households, and increase the tax burdens on middle- and/or lower-income taxpayers." Also, the Tax Foundation qualified their "study" by acknowledging, "We do not score Governor Romney’s plan directly, as certain components of his plan are not specified in sufficient detail, nor do we make assumptions regarding what those components might be." (emphasis added) So, when the Obama campaign says Governor Romney "has a plan that would give millionaires another tax break and raises taxes on middle class families by up to $2,000 a year," they are simply lying.

Kessler didn't seem to think so. He wrote that "the Obama ad correctly describes the key findings of a study by a highly credible organization." (I don't disagree with the "key findings" part of that statement, but "highly credible" is his opinion of the Tax Foundation, not an established fact, and to say the ad "correctly" described the study's conclusions is just laughable.) In an untenable act of...I don't even know what to call it...Kessler gave the ad the Fact Checker's first "Geppetto Checkmark" of this election cycle. (According to Kessler, the Geppetto checkmark is reserved for “[s]tatements and claims that contain ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’.”)

This ad--entitled "Stretch"--may have contained some true statements (such as Barack Obama saying "I'm Barack Obama...."), but it certainly wasn't the whole truth, and it contained a lot more than the truth. Glenn Kessler should be ashamed of himself.

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not rebuke Josh Hicks for this atrocious piece he did on some comments Rudy Giuliani made while campaigning for Mitt Romney in Florida. The post actually combined two "fact checks" in one, focusing on two series of statements America's mayor made in the Sunshine State in July. My beef is with Hicks's analysis of the first series, to-wit:  

“Remember Joe the Plumber? Joe the Plumber asked [then-Sen. Barack Obama]: ‘Would you raise taxes even if it didn’t bring any more money to the government? Like the capital gains tax. If you raise the capital gains tax — the government did this once 20 years ago — if you raise the capital gains tax, you actually make less money for the government, because people stop doing investments, or they’ll do investments overseas.’ He [Obama] said, ‘Well I would do it anyway because it’s only fair.’ ”

— Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani during a pro-Mitt Romney speech at the Florida GOP headquarters in Tampa, July 26, 2012

Hicks quoted an excerpt from then-Senator Obama’s exchange with Joe the Plumber and declared, “This shows that Obama did indeed talk about tax fairness with Wurzelbacher. But Giuliani suggested that the president was talking about fairness at the expense of greater revenue, which is not the case.” Nowhere in his “Fact Checker” piece did he mention Obama’s statements in a debate with Hillary Clinton in April 2008, in which the candidate said he "would look at raising the capital-gains tax"--even if it resulted in the government taking in less revenue—“for purposes of fairness.” Giuliani said that Obama claimed he was willing to raise the tax even if it cost the government revenue “because it’s only fair.” A permissible paraphrasing? You bet. A propos? Absolutely, but conspicuously absent from an analysis by what purported to be an objective fact-checker.

These are just some of the many, many "fact checks" conducted and published by these individuals on the Washington Post's web site. I've seen other analyses that contained no obvious errors or misstatements, but as you can see, there have been multiple instances--just in the past couple months--of these so-called fact-checkers getting their facts wrong and making overt analytical errors that any competent journalist interested in discerning what's true and what's false should have caught. I suppose it would be crass of me to castigate these men without suggesting I could do a better job, so I'll close with this: if the Washington Post decides to bring in some more diligent fact-checkers, then my services stand at the ready to help them. Until then, we'll just have to see if any of these "fact-checkers" get their act together.