VIDEO: The Mess In Texas — Debunking Rick Perry’s ‘Texas Miracle’

By Jeff Spross on Aug 24, 2011 at 8:00 pm

Having only entered the race last week, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) has already jumped to the top of the GOP presidential field. Fueling his momentum is the so-called “Texas miracle” — the myth that Perry’s governorship has led Texas to weather the recession better than other states, maintaining a healthy economy and brisk job creation. Unfortunately for Perry, these claims are often built on incomplete analysis, or by cherry picking statistics while overlooking other relevant factors that fill in the full picture, which is a much more mixed and middling economic performance than he and his supporters would like you to believe.

ThinkProgress produced a video report. Watch it:

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Alyssa

NASA Gets In The Novel Business

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Aug 24, 2011 at 6:38 pm

The news, via Wired, that NASA is partnering with Tor-Forge on a series of novels is intriguing. The arrangement will pair NASA employees with expertise in engineering, math, science and technology with writers in the Tor stable with the goal of creating stories that will engage young readers on those topics. Projects like this always run the risk of producing spinach rather than dessert with nutrition value, but another project Wired points out, the stories Intel commissioned from a group of writers to explore how science and technology might shape the future, actually provide a pretty good template for how to make the Tor-NASA collaborations engaging rather than dull.

The Intel stories are collected in a volume called The Morrow project, and while a couple of the stories feel like failures, at least one is an unqualified success. “The Mercy Dash,” about a couple racing to provide a blood transfusion for the young woman’s mother while quibbling over the fact that the man’s made his artificial intelligence sound a little too much like his girlfriend, gets lost in gee-whiz descriptions of the technology that lets you do things like convince cops not to give you a speeding ticket because you can show them how much damage has been done to your mother’s spine. “The Last Day of Work” takes a cooler overall concept — a world where increasingly sophisticated robotics have eliminated scarcity and the need for work, as seen from the perspective of the last man with a job on his last day at the office — and again spends too much time explaining how it happened instead of playing with what it means. It’s the kind of thing I’d love to see fleshed out in longer form.

But “The Drop,” by Scarlett Thomas, who I hadn’t known about before but I will look out for now, is just fantastic. Set in a world where everyone lifecasts and makes money off it, where less successful lifecasters have to produce supplemental electricity, and where gameplay’s become a key mode of commerce, the story follows a couple of days in the life of a 33-year-old as she trains for a race and, spurred on by a message from a mysterious man, learns to use a new communications technology she’s been resisting. The story isn’t heavy on scientific explanation — it shows us the implications of new technologies, not their design schema, and we learn about tools along with the character, rather than having the characters stop the action to give us lectures. And it’s set at a moment when the world is different from the one we live in, but not unrecognizable from it. You can see the bridge from now to then. And if you want to get readers engaged in the fields that are involved in a story, that seems critical — they should be inspired to build their way to that world, or to build alternatives to it.

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Economy

GOP Rep. Brady Isn’t Convinced That His $80 Billion Corporate Tax Giveaway Is Actually A Tax Break

By Pat Garofalo on Aug 24, 2011 at 6:10 pm

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX)

Several multinational corporations, under the banner of a campaign known as “WinAmerica” having been pushing Congress to enact a tax repatriation holiday, which would allow corporations to bring money that they have stashed offshore back to the U.S. at a dramatically lower tax rate than the 35 percent that they would usually pay. Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) has obliged these companies by crafting a bill that would grant corporations a 5.25 percent tax rate on repatriated money.

However, Brady doesn’t necessarily see this as a tax break, according to a statement he gave to Reuters:

“As this economy continues to struggle, I think our case gets stronger every day,” said Republican Representative Kevin Brady, author of a repatriation tax holiday bill backed by 15 Republicans and eight Democrats in the House of Representatives.

“Lowering that tax rate for a year to bring those dollars home, people don’t understand why we’re not doing that. Some may view it as a tax break, but others just see these stranded profits that could do a lot of good things,” Brady said.

The rationale behind this particular policy is that corporations will use the money that they repatriate to invest domestically and create jobs. However, as we’ve noted time and again, a repatriation holiday in 2004 was a complete flop on that front: the companies who benefited most from the tax break wound up cutting jobs, and corporations began parking more money offshore in anticipation of future tax holidays.

The corporations pushing for a repatriation holiday already pay extremely low taxes. Adding insult to injury, the companies lobbying hardest for the holiday won’t even disclose how many jobs that have overseas.

According to the Joint Economic Committee, another repatriation holiday would cost about $80 billion. But to Brady, only “some” people think that’s a tax break. Well, count us amongst them.

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Politics

Tea Partier Tells Rep. Lujan, Life-Long American, To ‘Get Out Of Politics And Make Room For An American’

By Travis Waldron on Aug 24, 2011 at 5:45 pm

Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM)

The Tea Party continues to claim that racism, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia are not driving forces in its movement, but the actions of its members continue to belie those claims. Many of the movement’s causes have targeted Latinos — advocating for harsh immigration laws, referring to them as “anchor babies” and “welfare queens,” urging followers to attack Latinos, and fighting to rewrite the 14th amendment to remove its guarantee of birthright citizenship.

Tuesday in New Mexico, the strains of racism and ethnocentrism that exist in the Tea Party movement emerged again. As Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM) prepared to tour a nonprofit organization in Farmington, he was met by a dozen Tea Party protesters, one of whom asserted that Lujan was not an American. The Farmington Daily Times reports:

Darrel Clark of Farmington said he came for “a chance to see the elusive representative.”

“He needs to get out of politics and make room for an American,” Clark said.

Luján is a lifelong New Mexican. Clark later explained that he meant an “American patriot.”

Though Clark did not elaborate on what he meant by “American patriot,” it’s not hard to understand his implication.

Lujan, however, was born in Santa Fe, has lived in the U.S. all his life, and is the son of a public school administrator and the speaker of New Mexico’s state House of Representatives. According to the Daily Times, Lujan took the protests and their insults “in stride.” “It’s important that we get out to visit our constituency,” Luján said. “We think that’s important, and we’ll continue to do that.”

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NEWS FLASH

New FRC Video Describes Homosexuality As Out-Of-Control Flood | Combine cheesy nature shots, stock photos of people of color, allusions to junk “science,” and a healthy dose of hypocrisy, and you get the Family Research Council’s new anti-gay self-promotion video. Ironically, the group simultaneously calls for “strong families” and an end to promiscuity while opposing recognition of same-sex couples’ unions. Only a hate group like FRC could convince itself this video is good PR:

Climate Progress

Climate Progress 5.0: A New Comments System

By Joe Romm on Aug 24, 2011 at 5:36 pm

As Climate Progress approaches its 5th anniversary, we are (slightly) upgrading the website one more time. We are restoring Word Press commenting — and all of CP’s original comments.

The site redesign and merger with Think Progress on May 31 brought a great number of improvements to CP. Our content could be more easily shared and promoted by TP, which gets 10 times our traffic. We got the benefits of some terrific design improvements from CAPAF’s outstanding IT team — including the ability to feature stories at the top of the page as well as the retweet and “like” buttons, which have been a big success.

In the weeks and months since the merger/redesign, however, readers kept raising a number of issues. Most of those concerned the commenting system, which many suggested was non-optimal for sustaining the unique community dialogue — almost a salon — that had grown organically over the past few years.

After much discussion here at CAPAF, we are restoring Word Press commenting for CP — with some new features such as nested comments. You can use HTML. You won’t need an ID to comment. I still prefer non-anonymous commenters, but nom de plumes will be allowed. First-time commenters will have to go through moderation (once). Others won’t, as long as they meet the terms of use (and don’t get tripped up by the spam filter, by, say, trying to post too many links). I still urge people not to come here and try to spread disinformation — there are plenty of sites on the bunkosphere for that.

UPDATE: “Preview” has been enabled!

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Yglesias

The ‘Depravity Of The Poor’

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 24, 2011 at 5:30 pm

David French, writing for National Review Online, explains that there’s nothing wrong with the poor except a bit of old-fashioned depravity:

It is simply a fact that our social problems are increasingly connected to the depravity of the poor. If an American works hard, completes their education, gets married, and stays married, then they will rarely — very rarely — be poor. At the same time, poverty is the handmaiden of illegitimacy, divorce, ignorance, and addiction. As we have poured money into welfare, we’ve done nothing to address the behaviors that lead to poverty while doing all we can to make that poverty more comfortable and sustainable.

It’s worth conceding off the front end that this is, in a sense, true. A two-earner family (“gets married, and stays married”) both of whose adults “work hard” for 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year at minimum wage jobs will earn $29,000 a year. That would put you above the poverty line even with two or three kids. That said . . .

. . . what if dad runs off, leaving mom with the three kids and having trouble working full-time consistent with her child-raising responsibilities? We turn around and say that we need to withdraw your public assistance in to make an example out of you for others?

. . . what if dad is abusive?

. . . what if a pile of misguided Wall Street shenanigans lands the country with a 9 percent unemployment rate and you can’t find work?

. . . what if you didn’t finish school seven years ago and now you’re 24?

. . . what if you got hooked on heroin?

Now I suppose you could argue that the availability of drug treatment programs, battered women’s shelters, and food kitchens creates “moral hazard” and encourages people to become heroin addicts and/or bed down with abusive partners. But I don’t think that this is a very plausible story. People don’t become homeless drug addicts because the downside to being a homeless drug addict isn’t severe enough in the contemporary United States. And affluent parents don’t treat their children in this kind of punitive way. If a prosperous teenager develops an addiction problem, he’ll be given help. Any halfway responsible parent with the means to do so would bail out a daughter whose live-in boyfriend is abusing her. Poor people have, typically, made some mistakes in life and it’s often the case that had they lived lives free of error, they wouldn’t be poor. But it’s not like middle class people are living mistake-free lives. The difference is that middle class people have lives that give them a fair margin for error, whereas people who start out in bad circumstances can be crippled by a bit of misfortune, impulsiveness, or bad decision-making.

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Climate Progress

The Dustbowl Duo: Denier Inhofe Backs Denier Perry as Romney Is ‘a Little Mushy on Environmental Issues’

By Joe Romm on Aug 24, 2011 at 5:27 pm

“I called Rick Perry a year ago and told him, ‘If you’re running for president, I’ll be the first to endorse you,’ ” Inhofe said at a State Chamber of Commerce breakfast at the Tulsa Press Club. “I’m going to be that person on Monday.”

What a duo! Their states are almost entirely under extreme or exceptional drought — drier than the Dust Bowl (and hotter). Their states’ preferred adaptation strategy is prayer.

And, of course, they are hard-core climate deniers who take big bucks from Big Oil and smear climate scientists — and if their do-nothing policies continue to triumph in this country, they will turn their states, and the entire SouthWest, into permanent Dust Bowls. I smell bromance in the air.

Here’s why Inhofe wouldn’t support Romney (or Gingrich):

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Health

Romney Strongly Endorses Mandate: ‘Personal Responsibility Was The Way To Go’

By Igor Volsky on Aug 24, 2011 at 5:26 pm

Mitt Romney reiterated his support for Massachusetts’ 2006 health care reform and the individual requirement to purchase coverage during a town hall in Keene, New Hampshire today, stressing that people should be required to take responsibility for their own health care spending:

Q: Massachusetts health care, you haven’t said it was a mistake?

ROMNEY: I will repeal ObamaCare, but the Massachusetts plan was right for Massachusetts. Personal responsibility was the way to go. People in Massachusetts favor the plan 3 to 1. If they don’t like it they can get rid of it. I like what we did in our state. It won’t work in Mississippi. That’s what’s great about a state plan. Obama is trying to impose on nation. I like personal responsibility and I like freedom. I’m not going to back away from signing that bill.

Since announcing his candidacy for president, Romney has shied away from such direct endorsements of the mandate, a policy he has previously described as the “ultimate conservative idea” and “a Republican way.” “The Republican approach is to say, you know what? Everybody should have insurance. They should pay what they can afford to pay. If they need help, we will be there to help them, but no more free ride,” Romney told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto on April 12, 2006 during a national media tour promoting his groundbreaking 2006 health care reform law.

Following that accomplishment, Romney was asked many times if he thought his plan for expanding coverage by requiring Americans to purchase health insurance should apply to the nation. He repeatedly either hinted or directly stated that it could or should, without raising any constitutional concerns. It’s a position he first adopted in his challenge to Sen. Ted Kennedy in 1994. At that time, Romney said he would support a mandate on a national level if universal coverage could not be achieved through other means (such as providing tax incentives to purchase care) and would have voted for a Republican alternative to the Clinton plan offered by then Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI), which included a national individual mandate. In fact, as recently as December 2007, Romney said if other states adopted the individual mandate, it would be “a terrific idea…we’ll end up with a nation that’s taken a mandate approach,” and endorsed the Wyden-Bennett health care proposal, which also included a national individual mandate.

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Alyssa

The West Memphis Three Industry

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Aug 24, 2011 at 5:23 pm

I wrote last week when they were released that while the release of the three men from West Memphis who were jailed for allegedly murdering three eight-year-olds in a Satanic ritual was good for them, it wasn’t a sign that the American justice system works — in fact, precisely the opposite. It would be good if the sudden spate of projects centered around those three men keeps that in mind.

Just as the death of Osama bin Laden spotlighted extant film projects and inspired several more, a West Memphis Three cottage industry is suddenly highly visible. Atom Egoyan is directing a feature film about the case, which, much like Kathryn Bigelow’s Kill Bin Laden, will have an updated ending. HBO is premiering a third documentary about the case in September, and Sheila Nevins, who heads the documentary division at HBO (which, by the way, should get credit for an astonishingly good slate of movies this summer) has said she could see a fourth movie because “If you’re guilty, how can you be innocent? Something’s wrong with the system. They have to be free because they are innocent. We have to prove that, and I don’t know how we do that. We’ll have to really work on that.”

I really, profoundly hope that if folks are going to turn the West Memphis Three into the focal point for a wide range of stories about criminal justice, that they temper the triumph of their release of a clear-eyed look at what it took to make it happen, and how extraordinarily rare it is. These absolutely have to be systemic stories rather than individual ones. And it would be much more useful to leverage the attention the West Memphis Three got to build interest in other cases, and in broad-based reforms. Winning this case and building a just, workable criminal justice system are not the same things, but it’ll be very, very easy for movies to leave viewers with that impression if they aren’t careful.

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