3% GDP growth last quarter

That's very good.  But there still are concerns that the slowdown in Europe may bring us back down. Read the rest of this post...

Goldman Sachs and their partnership with Romney

While it's not surprising that a high earner like Romney has deep personal links to Goldman, it's still a concern and something to watch out for in the future. He has a lot to personally gain - blind trust or not - by making life easy for Goldman Sachs. NY Times:

DealBook perked up when it saw that many of the assets described in Mr. Romney’s returns were held in blind trusts managed by Goldman Sachs. As beneficiaries of a blind trust, Mr. Romney and his wife, Ann, would not have picked the individual stocks contained in their trusts’ portfolios. But by examining the trusts’ 2010 returns, a picture emerges of how the Romneys have benefited from – and been hurt by – Goldman’s investment decisions. In that year, two Romney trusts – the Ann and Mitt Romney 1995 Family Trust and the W. Mitt Romney Blind Trust – made nearly $2.8 million in combined capital gains from their Goldman investments, according to the trusts’ filings. Almost all of those gains, nearly $2.7 million, were long-term gains made by selling securities that the trusts had owned for more than a year.

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Newt's Contract "scam"—How Contract with America co-opted Perot voters into advancing the MoveCon project

Rick Perlstein has started writing columns again, this time for Rolling Stone, and the results have been excellent. His most recent piece is on Newt Gingrich and the Contract for America "scam." It makes fascinating reading.

He starts (my emphasis & paragraphing; we have narrower columns here at the casa):

Newton Leroy Gingrich is one wily mothertrucker. He's calling his presidential platform this year a "21st Century Contract With America."

It's a wingnutpalooza, naturally, endorsing such “timeless American values” as seeking to "establish English as the official language of government," and reducing the corporate tax rate to 12.5 percent and the capital gains rate to zero; and featuring such "Day One Executive Orders" as the cancellation of all "immigration-related lawsuits against states" and a renewal of "President Ronald Reagan's policy ... to stop taxpayer dollars from being used to fund or promote abortions in foreign country." . . .

The title, of course, refers to the Contract With America, which 367 Republican congressional candidates signed on the Capitol steps in September of 1994. When, two months later, the GOP took over Congress for the first time since 1952, making its architect, Newt Gingtrich, the Speaker of the House, all the world proclaimed that the electorate had just delivered a historic mandate for conservatism.

Well, not really. The Contract With America was a hustle from start to finish. It never really was about conservatism at all – practically the opposite.

Perlstein walks through the process that Gingrich used to focus-group, co-opt, and strip clean all the Perot-voter-issues he could use, in order to repackage himself and his posse as their next-gen faux-non-partisan saviors.

And it worked. Remember, Perot got 16% of the popular vote in 1992. That's a huge pile of voters; rube-ify them and they're yours. The article shows, in laser-like fashion, how he did just that.

The piece is a well-told tale, a nice cohesive story, so I'll add just one more morsel, the part where the rug got pulled (again, my reparagraphing):

An extraordinary but obscure political science monograph by Ronald Rapoport and Walter Stone, Three's a Crowd: The Dynamics of Third Parties, Ross Perot, and Republican Resurgence, reconstructed through interviews, surveys, and documents how Gingrich devised a document micro-tailored to turn at least 70 percent of Perot voters, however fleetingly, into Republicans in time for November of 1994.

"Republicans knew," Stone and Rapoport write, "that the traditional Republican congressional campaign" – which is to say, conservatism – "would be insufficient to get this support." This realization was the genesis of the Contract for America. ... The final product comprised 44 percent "reform" issues, almost identical to the 41 percent in Perot United We Stand checklist (they had made up only 14 percent of the 1992 Republican platform).

Then, Contract in hand, the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee got to work identifying Perot voters in districts where he had done well in 1992, blitzing them with direct mail, phone calls, and door-knocking.

Once Newt gained office, the carefully worded outsider "reformist" document was rebranded the Republican Contract With America ...

... as a straight-up electoral endorsement of conservatism – "the third leg of the conservative revolution in post-World War II America" that began with Barry Goldwater and the Heritage Foundation, which had been in on the planning all along.

I guess that makes us all rubes — the nation's been buying the Republican co-option of Perotian dissent ever since. (Most of us, in fact, have forgotten Perot — wasn't he from Argentina or something?)

A personal note — I called this the MoveCon (Movement Conservative) "project" in the headline, but it's really the Movement Conservative coup, isn't it.

It starts, in modern times, with people like journalist Edith Efron, Justice Lewis Powell, and Nixon Treasury secretary William Simon; plus documents like the Lewis Powell memo (same link; search on "Powell's contribution"). You may remember Powell. He was one of the Yes votes on Buckley v Valeo, which Midas-like turned money into speech.

There's a straight line from Nixon's rise and fall, through the mislabeled Reagan "revolution" (actually counter-revolution) to Bush II and his dream of permanent Republican rule.

The "Movement Conservative project" — power they never give up. Wonder if the national Republicans are watching the Republican War in the States ... or that cute little coup in Hungary.

Perlstein now writes regularly for Rolling Stone. Well worth checking out.

As for you, Newt — your place is secure.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Romney falsely claimed he didn’t know he profited from mortgage crisis

Romney claimed against at last night's debate that he had no idea his "blind trust" had invested in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and made a tidy sum of money from the mortgage lenders as they were foreclosing on Americans across the country. In other words, Romney profited from the mortgage crisis. National Journal did the fact check, and found out Romney wasn't telling the truth.  I won't quote it because it's not very long, go read it for yourself.  Bottom line: Romney claimed the investments were in a blind trust (something he's criticized before) and they weren't. Read the rest of this post...

Unemployment in Spain hits 15 year high at 22.9%

And yes, it will get worse in Spain.

Spain’s unemployment rate rose to 22.9 percent, the highest in 15 years, increasing pressure on Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to change labor rules and deliver on his election pledge to create jobs in a shrinking economy. The unemployment rate rose in the fourth quarter from 21.5 percent in the previous three months, the National Statistics Institute in Madrid said today. That’s more than twice the euro- region average and exceeds the median estimate of 22.2 percent in a Bloomberg survey of seven analysts. Spain is home to a third of the euro region’s unemployed, according to the European Union’s statistics office, which estimates that half of young Spaniards are out of work. The People’s Party government, which won the Nov. 20 election after a campaign focused on jobs, has promised to overhaul labor and wage rules in the next two weeks to prompt companies to hire.

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Newt’s SuperPAC launches another video going after Romney titled "Blood Money"

Blood money!  Get the popcorn.

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Video: Finnair celebrates India’s "Republic Day" on flight to Delhi

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While we’re waiting for the GOP debate to end, there’s... Dogs Against Romney

http://www.dogsagainstromney.com Read the rest of this post...

Video: French prankster arrested for pretending to automatic radar gun on highway

I'm not even sure how to describe this video. It's cute. Especially when he targets the French cops right at the end of the video, and they arrest him.



PS There's yet another GOP debate at 8pm on CNN. I'll be watching and tweeting about it. You might prefer this French comedian though. Read the rest of this post...

Flip-flop Romney now defender of "life" and "marriage"

Mind you, he was pro-choice and more pro-gay than Ted Kennedy.  But I guess that was inconvenient when running for the head of a party that's gone a tad nuts.  So now Romney is the great defender of the unborn and the great chastiser of the gay. From RightWingWatch:

Romney: I think he is detached from reality when he says that he wants to ‘reclaim American values.’ There has been in my view an assault on American values since the beginning of his administration. Clearly from the beginning the assault on life with his abandonment of the Mexico City Policy and with the Vice President being sent to China and saying we understand the one-child policy there and of course the abuses associated with that policy are alarming and disturbing, and then on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade just a couple of days ago he said that the wonderful thing about Roe v. Wade is that it provides an equal opportunity for girls to equal boys, meaning that they don’t have to have a child anymore, if they become pregnant they can get rid of the child and therefore have an equal opportunity. The disregard for the sanctity of human life is absolutely appalling.

Then of course there’s the assault on religion. I think a lot of people were surprised that he felt that the government should be able to determine who is and who is not a minister and fortunately the Supreme Court disagreed with him on that, but now he’s gone forward and said that religious institutions, universities, hospitals and so forth, religious institutions have to provide free contraceptives to all their employees, even if that religious institution is opposed to the use of contraception, as in the case of the Catholic Church. Even in that regard, fighting to eliminate the conscience clause for health care workers who wish not to provide abortion services or contraceptives in their workplace, in their hospital for instance. It’s an assault on religion unlike anything we have seen.

There’s been an assault on marriage. I think he is very aggressively trying to pave the path to same-sex marriage. I would unlike this president defend the Defense of Marriage Act. I would also propose and promote once again an amendment to the constitution to define marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman.

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