Louis C.K. apparently decided that, after Daniel Tosh has been the subject of harsh criticism for saying it would be funny if a feminist heckler got gang raped at his show, Tosh is in need of his support. “Your show makes me laugh every time I watch it,” he tweeted. “And you have pretty eyes.” Given C.K.’s long record of comedy that’s self-reflective about privilege and smart about gender—though I do think he’s fallen down both comedically and politically in his attacks on Sarah Palin, and his episode of Louie where he goes after a heckler played by Megan Hilty can be jarring—this is particularly disappointing. Given the reaction I, and other folks, have gotten from comedians today, and a rash of unfortunate attempts at humor that have devolved into bashing women, I kind of think women who care about comedy need C.K.’s championing them more than Daniel Tosh does. And I’m feeling less disappointed by not pulling the trigger on tickets to see him live on this tour.
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NEWS FLASH
Some Republicans Still Insist That Obamacare Is ‘Unconstitutional’ | The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act last month, but that isn’t stopping Republicans from claiming that the law is unconstitutional. During debate over a GOP bill to repeal the measure on Tuesday evening, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) insisted, “we have the vigor of the American people here and it’s totally unsuitable to be saddled by this unconstitutional takings of American liberty.” Watch it:
Update
Earlier in the debate, Rep. Bill Flores (R-TX) called Obamacare a “violation of our constitutional liberties.”
Anti-Gay Group Plans Google Boycott: ‘This Is Going To Be A Tough One’
Google has launched a new international initiative called Legalize Love to promote safer conditions for gay and lesbian people in countries with anti-gay laws on the books. Naturally, the American Family Association is now considering a boycott of Google products.
On their radio network, the AFA’s Buster Wilson decried Google’s gay rights campaign, which plans to start its focus in Poland and Singapore before expanding to other countries. Right Wing Watch has the video:
If the AFA thought boycotting Oreos was tough, wait until they start trying to avoid all Google products. As Wilson notes, anti-gay boycotters would need to ditch Gmail, Google Calendar, YouTube, their Android phones, and the search engine itself. “It’s going to be a hard one for a lot of us,” Wilson concedes, but it will “test the meat of our convictions.”
AFA will certainly need strong convictions because they are quickly running out of acceptable companies. If they plan to boycott Google, they would also have to add Microsoft, Nike, Time Warner Cable, Levi Strauss, CBS, and Xerox to their list — just a handful of pro-gay U.S. corporations. As more and more businesses realize the economic and social benefits of having inclusive pro-LGBT policies, the AFA’s feeble boycotting of Oreo cookies and Google products looks increasingly silly.
Republican Senator On Romney: ‘It’s Really American To Avoid Paying Taxes’
Though every candidate in the past 30 years has released multiple years of tax returns, Mitt Romney is refusing to do so, reducing surrogates to telling the press to simply “get over it.”
But Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) attempt to defuse the controversy surrounding Romney’s taxes may be a new low for the campaign:
Mitt Romney shouldn’t be criticized for using off-shore tax havens because “it’s really American to avoid paying taxes, legally,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Tuesday. [...]
Graham argued that Congress is responsible for tax avoidance because it has crafted such convoluted rules and said he was fine with Romney’s taking advantage of the loopholes.
“As long as it was legal, I’m OK with it,” Graham said. “I don’t blame anybody for using the tax code to their advantage. I blame us for having it so complicated and confused. Pick a rate and make people pay it.”
A recent report by the California Public Interest Research Group (CALPIRG) found that tax dodging shifts $100 billion onto taxpaying Americans.
Obama Defends Access To Contraception: It’s ‘Not Fair’ For Catholic Institutions To Deny Women Birth Control
Catholic leaders are fighting against a new Obamacare policy requiring insurers and businesses to offer contraception coverage to women, even after the White House announced a compromise to protect religious institutions. Under the measure, a religiously affiliated organization like a Catholic college or hospital does not have to pay for contraception coverage if it objects to offering birth control, but its employees will still have access to birth control.
As President Obama put it during an an interview with a New Orleans TV reporter on Monday, while religious liberty is “critical,” it’s “not fair” for these institutions to deny coverage to non-Catholic employees:
REPORTER: He describes himself as a Catholic voter and wrote ‘What can you say about a healthcare bill that’ll mandate insurance companies to provide birth control, sterilization, etc. to employees of Catholic universities, hospitals and churches since this goes against the Catholic religion?’ We know there is compromising language in place. Some say it doesn’t go far enough and that the real, the much bigger issue is religious liberty, not contraception.
OBAMA: Yeah. Well it’s absolutely true that religious liberty is critical. I mean that’s what our country was founded on. That’s the reason why we exempted churches, we exempted religious institutions, but we did say that big Catholic hospitals or universities who employ a lot of non-Catholics and who receive a lot of federal money, that for them to be in a position to say to a woman who works there you can’t get that from your insurance company even though the institution isn’t paying for it, that that crosses the line where that woman, she suddenly is gonna have to bear the burden and the cost of that. And that’s not fair.
Despite claims that the contraception policy tramples religious liberty and is an “unprecedented attack,” many large Catholic institutions provided contraception coverage even before they were required to do so. For example, Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. and DePaul University in Illinois offer employees the option of receiving contraception, joining other Catholic organizations across the country.
Many religious organizations even agree with Obama’s reasoning. After Wisconsin implemented a contraception equity clause in 2010, the Diocese of Madison indicated that it would comply with the state law, noting that while employees would be given “strong pastoral recommendations against” using the contraception benefit, employees should “use their conscience and do the right thing.”
Republicans Tired Of Climate Change Deniers Launch Initiative For Global Warming Action, Carbon Price
Former GOP Rep. Bob Inglis is “urging conservatives to stop denying that humans are contributing to global warming.”
Inglis, a South Carolina Republican beaten by the Tea Party in 2010, is launching the “Energy and Enterprise Initiative” at George Mason University to push “conservative solutions to America’s energy and climate challenges.”
The National Journal (subs. req’d) reports:
The campaign will push one policy: a new tax on carbon pollution or gasoline consumption, paired with a cut in the income or payroll tax, creating a revenue-neutral, market-driven solution to an environmental problem while cutting taxes that conservatives dislike.
In short, the party of monolithic knee-jerk climate denial turns out to be bilithic. Okay, technically, a bilith is “a prehistoric monument composed of two stones usu. constituting a pillar capped by a slab.”
And it’s true that the national GOP is now prehistoric when it comes to climate science (see National Journal: “The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones”). But as recently as 2008, climate change was not a hyper-politicized issue — the presidential candidates’ position on climate science was a nonissue since both agreed on the science. Republicans today, however, have become synonymous with climate denialism, staying silent as the country bears the hottest 12 months on record.
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What The GOP Doesn’t Want You To Know About Obama’s Tax Plan: The Rich Get A Tax Cut Too
After President Obama announced his plan to extend some of the Bush tax cuts for one year while allowing the cuts on higher incomes to expire yesterday, conservatives quickly revived the “class warfare” talking point they have used faithfully in tax debates before.
These claims, however, rely on a fundamental misunderstanding of America’s progressive tax system and its utilization of marginal tax rates. The Obama plan still maintains a tax cut for every single income earner, regardless of how much he or she makes. Every earner still receives the tax cut on income up to $250,000 — only after it passes that threshold will it be subject to a higher tax rate. Someone who makes $250,001, for instance, will pay the higher rate on exactly $1.
This chart from Citizens for Tax Justice illustrates how eliminating the tax cut for high earners would work under both Obama’s and the GOP’s plans:
The tax system works the same way for the small businesses that conservatives claim will face massive tax hikes under the Obama plan. Only after $250,000 in income will they pay a higher rate, and to truly notice the higher tax rates, a business would have to earn substantially more than $250,000 in a year — meaning it probably isn’t a small business in the first place. All told, the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that only 3 percent of businesses would see an increase under the Obama plan, which actually restores competitive advantages to the nation’s entrepreneurs.
Republican Rep: I Don’t Think Someone Who Is Diagnosed With A Brain Tumor Should Have Health Care Provided
On Monday evening, Rep. David Dreier (R-CA) said that insurance companies should be allowed to discriminate against people with brain tumors during a House Rules Committee debate of the GOP’s bill repealing the Affordable Care Act. The law, which Republicans will vote to eliminate on Wednesday, includes a provision prohibiting insurance companies from turning away sick people.
But Dreier suggested that these individuals would be better off enrolling in state-based “high-risk insurance pools,” that could offer coverage to the individuals who are turned away from the individual health care market because they are too costly to cover:
DREIER: And I believe my state of California has a structure in place to deal with pre-existing conditions. It’s a pooling process, which I think is one worthy of consideration, because while I don’t that think someone who is diagnosed with a massive tumor should the next day be able to have millions and millions and millions of dollars in health care provided, I do believe that there can be a structure to deal with the issue of pre-existing conditions.
Watch it:
The Affordable Care Act already includes a high-risk pool program that acts as a bridge to 2014, when the new regulations prohibiting discrimination go into effect. 67,482 individuals have already benefited from the program, although the high cost of insuring sick people means that it is not sustainable over the long-run.
The California pool that Drier trumpets, for instance, has had a hard time attracting enrollees. A 2008 LA Times article described the California program — which existed prior to the ACA — as “unaffordable, unavailable or ineffective for many of those who most need health insurance.”
Top Romney Surrogate Defends Campaign’s Decision To Withhold Tax Returns, Tells Critics To ‘Get Over It’
Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) with Mitt Romney
Lizza, a panelist on CNN’s Starting Point program, asked Chaffetz to respond to fellow Romney surrogate Haley Barbour’s comment yesterday that he felt Romney should release his tax returns.
LIZZA: What’s your position on that? Should Governor Romney release all those tax returns? Right now he’s in a very unique position for a presidential candidate, he’s only released one year and a summary of 2011.
CHAFFETZ: Governor Romney has paid 100 percent of his taxes that are owed, he’s complied 100 percent what the law requires, um…
LIZZA: No I’m sorry Congressman, I was just asking if you think he should release them, not if he’s complied with the law. Should he release his tax returns?
CHAFFETZ: I think he has released the tax returns.
[Laughter and crosstalk]
LIZZA: Just yes or no, should he release them or not.
CHAFFETZ: No! No, I don’t…He’s been very successful, he’s released everything that he’s required to release, including paying more than 16 percent of his income to charitable givings. I think it’s a diversionary tactic. Most people, they don’t care about this. Governor Romney’s been very successful, get over it. It’s a reality.
Watch it:
Mitt Romney would be the first presidential candidate in over three decades to refuse to release a substantial number of recent tax returns. His campaign released one year of tax returns during the primaries, as fellow Republicans piled on his decision to keep the forms secret. Even Romney’s own father George, who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968, released 12 years of tax returns.
The returns have proved to be yet another wedge issue in the Romney camp. Aside from former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, Newt Grinrich, Rick Santorum and Rick Perry all called on Romney to release his tax returns earlier this year. And as it happens, so did Mitt Romney, who pledged to release his returns in April, after he secured the GOP nomination. “I’ll release my returns in April, and probably for other years as well,” he said during a January primary debate in South Carolina. He has yet to do so.
Wall Street Executives Believe Employees Need To Engage In Illegal Behavior To Succeed
British and U.S. authorities are both now investigating Barclays and other banks for manipulating the London InterBank Offered Rate, an interest rate that is a benchmark for a host of financial products around the world. Regulators charge that the banks rigged the interest rate’s movements in order to profit and to make themselves look healthier during the financial crisis of 2008 than they actually were.
This comes on the heels of JP Morgan losing billions of dollars chasing profits with trades that were meant to reduce risk, and, of course, is just a few years removed from a crisis caused in large part by Wall Street malfeasance. But according to a survey by the whistleblower law firm Labaton Sucharow, Wall Street executives believe this is just part of the financial business. In fact, nearly one quarter of survey respondents said that financial services employees need to be unethical or engage in illegal behavior in order to be successful:
In a survey of 500 senior executives in the United States and the UK, 26 percent of respondents said they had observed or had firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace, while 24 percent said they believed financial services professionals may need to engage in unethical or illegal conduct to be successful.
Sixteen percent of respondents said they would commit insider trading if they could get away with it, according to Labaton Sucharow. And 30 percent said their compensation plans created pressure to compromise ethical standards or violate the law.
Big banks, of course, have continued to fight reforms to the financial regulatory framework, even in the wake of the crash of 2008. But if this survey is any indication, Wall Street needs a mentality change, along with stricter supervision.
