Empty chair 'lynchings'

If not paying income tax makes one a parasite, what do you call someone who tries to make his own income tax rate as low as possible? A parasite in-training? A parasite in the larval form? An egg, hoping to someday make it to full parasitic moocher-hood?

And what if that someone is a corporation? Still a parasite?

And how does someone who is actively trying (and may employ legions of accountants in the effort) to be a parasite to not pay any taxes complain about people who simply don't earn enough to owe any taxes?

Gah.

Nick Drake, take me away...

It turns out that the more breweries a state has per square mile, the more likely it is to have gone for Obama in 2008.

Mitt Romney tells us about the world as he sees it:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Is $100,000 middle income?

MITT ROMNEY: No, middle income is $200,000 to $250,000 and less.

$200,000 is roughly four times the US median household income.

$200,000/yr for a household puts you in the 96^th percentile. $200,000/yr for an individual puts you in the 99^th percentile.

A real man of the people, that Mitt.

But, we shouldn't talk about that, right?

According to Mitt Romney, the nation's growing focus on income inequality is all about envy.

"You know, I think it's about envy. I think it's about class warfare," the leading Republican presidential candidate said Wednesday on The Today Show.

Envy! Class warfare!

Damn that Obama.

When asked if there are any fair questions about wealth distribution, Romney replied, "It's fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms and discussions about tax policy and the like."

I see. So, it's like, not polite or something. Keep that talk to quiet, genteel, rooms.

But that was back in the depths of winter, and the like. Now, that we're getting close to the election, he can talk about it at campaign rallies:

SHAPIRO: This is a moderate part of the country, and Romney abandoned the parts of his speech he's lately used to appeal to the conservative base. He didn't talk about the Pledge of Allegiance or promise to keep God in public life. In fact, he accused President Obama of widening the wealth gap.

MITT ROMNEY: It's led to a larger and larger gap between the wealthier and the rest of America. His policies have not worked.

Envy! Class warfare! And the like!

From his old Governor days:

GOODRIDGE: Governor Romney, tell me - what would you suggest I say to my 8 year-old daughter about why her mommy and her ma can't get married because you, the governor of her state, are going to block our marriage?

ROMNEY: I don't really care what you tell your adopted daughter. Why don't you just tell her the same thing you've been telling her the last eight years.

Doooooooooooosh.

Mrs. points out the awesomeness of the first comment, which is:

The press is all a-twitter over the Romney campaign's recent brazen disregard for facts. Mitt lies, and the press stammers, and Mitt lies again. They've discovered that decades of refusing to point out falsehoods in the context of any controversial issue has lead to a situation where one party has decided to simply run against a fictional candidate that they've named after their opponent, and there's nothing they can do about it.

“Fact checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs, and we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”
-- Romney pollster Neil Newhouse

Way back in January, the New Your Times cautiously asked Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante? People were stunned and furious that the NYT would even have to ask. We'd all been assuming that they were - if not "truth vigilantes" then at least truth security guards - someone who could maybe blow a whistle or yell loudly when someone tried to sneak something past the public. Oh sure, they were never very good at the job, bumbling, afraid of causing a stir, corrupt, but they were at least ostensibly dedicated to policing the truth. Or so we thought. Turns out, as that op-ed let slip, that they thought their real job title was stenographer, and that pointing out lies was some kind of crazy, taking-the-law-into-your-own-hands kind of thing, which no respectable journalist would do. Controversy! Well, they fooled us.

That was in January 2012, and one of the examples in that still-baffling Vigilante piece was another blatant Romney lie: his "Obama is apologizing for America" nonsense. The press didn't know how to react to that, and so they let him slide. And then they let him slide on many other blatant lies. And now? Well now he and his team have learned that the press is nothing but a way to spread lies (err... factual shortcuts!) for free. And the press is standing their with their mouths open, trying to figure out, as Jay Rosen says, "what to do about the truck that just ran their checkpoint, carrying the brain trust of the Romney campaign, who are inside laughing at how easy it all was."

And it's not like Karl Rove didn't tell you what was coming in 2004's classic:

The aide [Rove] said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

He had you all figured out, didn't he?

Heckofa job, liberal media.

Let us take a little trip, to a sunny island paradise: the Northern Marianas Islands.

Ahh...

Now, let's learn a little history!

From a 2006 NPR story:

JOHN YDSTIE, host: Tom DeLay left his seat in Congress last week under a legal cloud. The once powerful Majority Leader has been indicted in Texas for laundering campaign funds. His activities are also under scrutiny in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Two of his former aides have pleaded guilty in that investigation. One of the most interesting connections between DeLay and Abramoff involves a South Pacific island paradise, sweatshops, and Chinese garment manufacturers. The island paradise is the Northern Marianas, a string of islands in the Pacific captured by the U.S. in deadly fighting with the Japanese during World War II.

Ms. WENDY DOROMOL (Human Rights Activist): The islands are very beautiful. Huge breadfruit trees, pristine beaches. It's physically gorgeous and very ugly as far as political corruption.

YDSTIE: Wendy Doromol was a schoolteacher there in the 1980s and '90s, but became a human rights activist fighting sweatshops after guest workers on the islands came to her with tales of abuse.

Ms. DOROMOL: The barbed wire around the factories face inward so that the mostly women couldn't get out. They had quotas that were impossible for these people to reach and if they didn't reach them, they'd have to stay until they finished the quota and they wouldn't be paid for that work. They were hot, the barracks were horrible. A lot of the females were told you work during the day in the garment factory and then at night you can go and work in a club and they'd force them into prostitution at night.

YDSTIE: And they also experienced things like coerced abortion?

Ms. DOROMOL: Yes, if some female got pregnant, they either had to go back to China to give birth or have a forced abortion.

Good times!

Let's continue.

YDSTIE: So you thought that you were going to be going to California or somewhere on the U.S. mainland?

Mr. JAHIDI: Not only me, most of the worker. They were surprised when they see the United States flag and the local island flag and we used the U.S. dollar, we used the U.S. stamp and everything, then people understand that this is only a small island. There is no way that you have the opportunity like what's in the United States.

YDSTIE: Garment manufacturers were attracted to the Marianas, which had become a U.S. commonwealth in 1976, because clothes made there could be labeled made in the U.S.A. and didn't face import quotas or duties. But despite flying the U.S. flag, the islands were exempt from many U.S. labor and immigration standards. As the abuses that Wendy Doromol helped uncover came to light, garment manufacturers there were sanctioned by the U.S. Labor Department. Then in the mid-1990s when it looked like Congress might force the Marianas to adopt U.S. Labor and Immigration laws, the island's government took action. It hired lobbyist Jack Abramoff to protect its special status. Abramoff was paid millions for his work. Here he is in a 1999 NPR story arguing that there were no abuses.

And some boring old Democratic Senator got all indignant about this, back in 98:

Something is fundamentally wrong with a CNMI immigration system that issues entry permits for 12- and 13-year-old girls from the Philippines and other Asian nations, and allows their employers to use them for live sex shows and prostitution. Finally, something is fundamentally wrong when a Chinese construction worker asks if he can sell one of his kidneys for enough money to return to China and escape the deplorable working conditions in the Commonwealth and the immigration system that brought him there.

From Wiki:

Contract laborers arriving from China are usually required to pay their (Chinese National) recruitment agents fees equal to a year's total salary (roughly $3,500) and occasionally as high as two years' salary, though the contracts are only one-year contracts, renewable at the employer's discretion.

Sixty percent of the population of the CNMI [Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands] is contract workers. These workers cannot vote. They are not represented, and can be deported if they lose their jobs. Meanwhile, the minimum wage remains well below that on the U.S. mainland, and abuses of vulnerable workers are commonplace.

So, indentured servitude. Under the US flag.

Anything else?

The activities of TNC [trans-national criminal] gangs includes money laundering and persistent cases of discovery of counterfeit US currency (including the notoriously high quality North Korean made ‘supernotes’). The casino on Tinian [one of the three principal CNMI islands] generates a flow of persons traveling with in excess of US$10,000. While this has long been suspected to be a money laundering activity, lack of proof has meant few seizures, even with an increasing number of suspicious activity reports by local money service businesses since 2000. In common with the other Pacific nations, TNC is present, is embedded in the local economy at all levels, and goes to great lengths to corrupt law enforcement agencies. The Customs Service is their major target. CNMI law enforcement personnel are poorly paid (rarely more than US$2000 per month for junior ranks, and the cost of living is on par with Hawaii). Worse, they receive little post-basic training. They are vulnerable to penetration by Chinese TNC, which is active in the CNMI is trafficking drugs, people and counterfeit goods, while also conducting extortion, money laundering and prostitution. The CNMI are well known as a ‘rest and relaxation base’ for Japanese yakuza and Russian mafia.

Sounds great.

But why is that old interview and the bleatings of some dusty bleeding-heart Hawaiian Senator relevant today? How does this affect your exciting 2012 lifestyle and internet-era concerns? What does a moldy old trade and human-rights issue have to do with this shiny new decade?

From the 2012 GOP platform:

The Pacific territories [which includes the CNMI] should have flexibility to determine the minimum wage, which has seriously restricted progress in the private sector. A stronger private sector can raise wages, reduce dependence on public sector employment, and lead toward local self-sufficiency. All unreasonable economic impediments must be removed, including unreasonable U.S. customs practices.

That right, the GOP has pledged to lower CNMI's regulations even lower than they are now. Now that's a pro-business agenda. And what do you suppose they think an "unreasonable customs practice" is in this context? Whew...

Stay classy, GOP.

The GOP convention is a transparent, shameless, deceptive sales pitch. There was a trivial amount of party bureaucracy to do, five seconds' worth, and it's done. But now... every second of the rest it, every word uttered, every speaker presented, is a prime-time snake-oil infomerical. They get to deliver extended remixes of the jaw-dropping lies they've been dishing out in 30-second teasers for the last 12 months. Other than that... ?

Nothing.

Nominees are chosen months before the conventions, these days, so there is no real reason to have this kind of convention any more - let alone devote so much coverage to it. They're making it crystal clear that they're simply using the media's reluctance to abandon tradition to get a week of free advertising for their guy.

And it is nauseating.

The asshole...

“Big business is doing fine in many places — they get the loans they need, they can deal with all the regulation.”

“They know how to find ways to get through the tax code, save money by putting various things in the places where there are low tax havens around the world for their businesses...”

takes umbrage...

“He said the private sector is doing fine. Is he really that out of touch? I think he’s defining what it means to be detached and out of touch with the American people.”

... at himself.

Well, at least he should...

Who Said It: Paul Ryan or Alex P. Keaton