good evening, people

President Obama has dinner with campaign donors and winners of the “Dinner with Barack” contest at The Liberty Tavern in the Clarendon neighborhood of Arlington, Va.

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MSNBC: Medicare’s basic monthly premium will rise significantly less than expected next year, the government announced Thursday. That could pay political dividends for President Barack Obama and for Democrats struggling to win over seniors in a close election.

…. In a statement accompanying release of the Medicare premiums, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius asserted that seniors have nothing to fear from the new health care law.

“The Affordable Care Act is helping to keep Medicare strong and affordable,” she said. “People with Medicare are seeing higher quality benefits, better health care choices and lower costs.”

Full post here

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Crooks and Liars: …. why in the hell does Pat Buchanan still have a job at MSNBC?

Color of Change would like to know the answer to that and ask for your signature on a petition to MSNBC (you can sign the petition here)

…..There’s no excuse for lending legitimacy and a national platform for such archaic and hateful attitudes. MSNBC has fired others for much less. Pat Buchanan needs to go.

More at Media Matters

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ThinkProgress: Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry released a tax plan this week that he and many media reports called a “20 percent flat tax.” But Perry’s new alternative tax scheme is hardly “flat”.

Leaving aside the fact that it is layered on top of the existing tax code, it establishes not one but two different tax rates: 20 percent for wages, and zero percent for investment income. Because capital gains and dividends would be sheltered from taxes under Perry’s plan, some of the wealthiest Americans would wind up paying nowhere near 20 percent overall.

In fact, billionaire Warren Buffett, who has lamented the fact that he currently pays only 11 percent of his adjusted gross income in federal income taxes, would pay as little as 0.2 percent under Perry’s plan.

Full post here

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Clever Google:

😉

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ABC: Today’s New York Times story … includes an intriguing reference to a staff memo directing those traveling in a car with Mr. Cain, “Do not speak to him unless you are spoken to.”

Could the affable Mr. Cain really have a “don’t-talk-to-me-unless-I-talk-to-you” policy?

Yes. He does. Really.

A top aide to Mr. Cain explains to me why.

“It’s the same policy for any Secretary of Defense or four-star general,” a senior Cain staffer explained to ABC News. “You don’t talk to them unless they talk to you, generally. Sometimes you get guests in the car and they want to talk and talk and talk, and then Mr. Cain wants to prepare for the next interview or the next speech and he’s very engaging, so it can be a distraction. After a while, he gets to the point where he doesn’t want to talk, but wants to prepare for what he’s doing next.”

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More excellent comedy from Dick Halperin today in Time. He magnificently ignored all the polls that show President Obama leading RomPerryCain in swing states, and concluded that if the election was held today he’d lose.

It’d be nice, though, if Halperin had an original thought:

Mark Halperin (today): Is President Obama on the ropes? …. The coalition that helped elect the President …. has been disbanded.

Mark Halperin (December 2010): The coalition that got Barack Obama elected President just two years ago has been shattered ….

🙄

Last year, Alex Pareene of Salon (which I seriously hate linking because it’s become Firebagger Central) did a series on “the worst columnists and cable news commentators America has to offer …. the most predictable, dishonest and just plain stupid pundits in the media.” Halperin had to settle for the runners-up prize, behind Richard Cohen. It’s worth a read again:

Alex Pareene (2010): Mark Halperin – The Drudge-loving political analyst who gets everything wrong …. his belief in the unerring political instincts of Karl Rove and the godlike omniscience of Matt Drudge ….

…. Halperin’s worst quality is actually that he is constantly wrong. He is a professional political analyst, yet he often seems to be completely, 100 percent wrong about even the horse-race aspects of politics that he specializes in. He kept promising, in 2006, that Bush’s approval ratings would once again surge past 50 percent. Remember when John McCain “suspended his campaign” to fix the economy? Mark Halperin said McCain won the week.

The book Halperin wrote …. “The Way to Win,” his preview of “the way to win” the presidential election in 2008. His advice was to emulate Karl Rove and worship Matt Drudge – the key to victory seemed to involve a lot of Matt Drudge – and the 2008 election as it actually happened made the whole book (which he co-wrote with Politico co-founder John Harris!) look utterly ridiculous.

… All we ask for is a little accountability. At the very least, Halperin’s TV chyron should read, “ALWAYS WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING.”

Repeat offenses: Obsequious relationship to power, Drudge-baiting, awfulness, self-promotion, getting everything wrong.

Representative quote: “To see what the future could look like, click here.”

(The link, posted the night before the selection of Joe Biden as Barack Obama’s running mate, led to a photo of Sen. Obama with Sen. Dick Lugar.)

Full article here

When you click that link now, you get:

Oh dear.

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Saintroscoe? I think I love you:

😆

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Marketwatch: With a little more than two trading days left in the month, it is shaping up to be the best October ever for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. And that is saying something, since the Dow has existed since 1896, 115 years ago.

As of mid-day trading on Thursday, the Dow INDU is ahead more than 11% for the month. The previous record for the month of October was held by 1982, when the Dow turned in a 10.7% return. That’s an auspicious historical precedent, since that month came very early in that decade’s spectacular bull market which, arguably, didn’t end until nearly 20 years later.

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Link

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President Barack Obama talks with Mike Froman, Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economic Affairs, in the Oval Office, Oct. 27, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

‘beyond parody’

Steve Benen: … This week, Mike Huckabee launched a new educational company called Learn Our History. As the Fox News personality sees it, mean liberals have destroyed history lessons, and he intends to put things right: “America’s youth aren’t excited about our past because they’re being taught history in a way that minimizes what has made America a beacon of hope around the world for over 200 years.”

….Those who buy Learn Our History’s shameless, nationalistic propaganda lessons will finally get “historically accurate and unbiased education.”

And what, pray tell, does “historically accurate and unbiased education” look like? Apparently, it looks like this.

(If you have a weak stomach, do not click play)

As one wise observer put it, “Zombie Reagan saved America from the blacks, the Disco, the terrorists, the Russians, and maybe in a future chapter the alien invasion.”

It’s true. Knife-wielding black people wearing disco t-shirts were apparently a real problem, right up until January 1981…..

See full post here

john king’s credibility? (if he ever had any). bye bye

At a time when even some Republicans are conceding that Michele Bachmann is bat-shit crazy, King says this:

Yep, “You have taken what I would describe as a reasonable position……”

It gets worse…..

Let’s have a look at that exchange again:

Bachmann: We need to have the fight on Obamacare … I think it is a crime against democracy because Speaker Pelosi and President Obama failed to even tell the members of the House and Senate, much less the American people, that if a member casts a vote for the Obamacare bill they would also be voting to spend $105 billion…..it is my opinion that that money should be given back because it was passed fraudulently, no one knew that money was there…..

King: As you know, a lot of Democrats dispute your numbers on the healthcare bill, but I want to save that one for another day….

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No, no John, it’s not that Democrats dispute her numbers, it’s that every single independent observer has concluded that she was talking complete and utter shit about this “bombshell, hidden $105 billion”. eg:

Washington Post (Fact Checker) …. Bachmann’s main points have been that “this money was broken up, hidden in various parts of the bill” – something akin to a “slush fund” – and that it was done “secretly, unbeknownst to members of Congress.”

This is bordering on ridiculous.

…The Obama administration insisted that the health care bill be “paid for” through various revenue raisers and cost cuts in order to not increase the deficit. In the end, CBO declared that the health care bill would reduce the deficit over the next decade.

… it is disingenuous of Bachmann to talk only about the costs without noting that, in theory, all of this spending is fully funded.

There is a further problem with Bachman’s charge of “hidden” spending … the administration has not tried to hide this money at all; instead, it has trumpeted each dollar spent in a press release.

As for the claim that “this money was broken up, hidden in various parts of the bill,” we think she means that there were different sections in the legislation, depending on the issue. This is common practice for virtually all major bills, and it is not unusual or nefarious at all….

The Pinocchio Test: There is no “bombshell” except Bachmann’s bombast.

She is correct that Congress already has appropriated some spending in future years, but her claim that this money was “hidden” does not have credibility. The money for these programs was clearly described and analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office before the legislation was voted into law…..

Four Pinocchios:

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With Beck’s imminent departure from Fox, you have to wonder if King is looking to fill the gap. He was already a joke, but after suggesting that the racist nutjob that is Bachmann had taken a “reasonable position” on anything … and failing to challenge her on her debunked lies about that ‘fraudulent’ $105 billion …. oh dear, oh dear.

muppet show update

Steve Benen: In case it seemed the freak-show qualities of the GOP field couldn’t get worse, also note that disgraced former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, kicked off the bench for refusing to acknowledge federal law, is also interested in launching a presidential exploratory committee.

WSJ: Remember Judge Roy Moore? He was the Alabama Supreme Court chief justice removed from office over the Ten Commandments monument he erected outside the state courthouse. Now, he’s about to jump into the presidential election in Iowa…

Eight years after a state panel removed him from the bench over the commandments spat, and five years after he lost in the Republican primary in the Alabama governor’s race, the 64-year-old judge is preparing to launch a presidential exploratory committee and enter the Iowa fray, according to multiple Iowa GOP officials.

Judge Moore’s entry in Iowa will only intensify the feverish competition among GOP hopefuls for the state’s large bloc of evangelical voters … the pack this time is likely to include former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, Texas Rep. Ron Paul and former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain. Judge Moore could bring the field to six…