Eight years ago, then Governor George W. Bush revealingly joked about his backers at the 2000 Al Smith Dinner.  "This is an impressive crowd - the haves and the have-mores," Bush said, adding, "Some people call you the elites; I call you my base."  With his own quip Saturday night that "$5 million" is his definition of rich," John McCain made no mistake that he is Bush's natural heir.

I've gotten tired of explaining why supply-side economics -- i.e., voodoo economics -- don't actually work. So I've decided to write up a quick-and-dirty version that I can just link to as necessary. This is not meant to be a definitive statement on the subject. It's not even an air-tight argument of the principles being espoused. It's just me pointing at some pretty fundamental absurdities in voodoo economics and saying, "Hey! Look! Have you even thought about this? It doesn't make any sense!"

There are some items up on News Unfiltered that may interest the community.

McCain has received $1.75 million of Reed's fundraising:

Last night John McCain held a fund-raiser in Atlanta, GA, with help from George W. Bush smear architect and Jack Abramoff crony Ralph Reed, who brags of being a member of McCain's "Victory 2008" team. Although Reed was hastily directed away from attending the McCain fundraiser after a storm of stories exposed Reed's $4.2-million-dollar tie to Abramoff and his lead role in Bush's vicious 2000 smear campaign in South Carolina, McCain's still accepting the $1.75 million Reed helped raise for him. It's more of the same from McCain, whose double-talk on ethics means saying he'll ban lobbyists from his campaign even as he embraces them behind closed doors, on-board the Straight Talk Express, in the front rows of his campaign events, and, as last night in Atlanta, at high-dollar fundraisers.

Read more.

As a Dem and a Liberal one of the things the Dog feel he as to do (and the rest of us too) is spend time breaking the conceptual frames of the Repugs. Think of it as maintenance, sure it is no fun, it does not really advance our goals, but if we don’t do it, it limits the goals we can set and achieve. Part of this is trying not to use the words that represent the larger idea of the frame, things like not saying "gay marriage" but saying "full civil rights for all citizens". That is the most basic of the tactics to combat the frames, but there is another area where we need to work. It does us no good to let the Repugs chase us off of words and ideas that support that core of liberal values, we have to go after their core concepts as well and show them to be the misdirection that they are.

On Saturday at the Saddleback forum, Rick Warren asked a lot questions the candidates would not normally get asked on the campaign trail, one of those was to define wealth. What John McCain said should earn them the title of elitist stupid...!

My niece sent me this email and asked me the following...

Subject: Fw: Taxes...VERY IMPORTANT!!]

Date: Sunday, August 17, 2008, 6:13 PM

Hey Aunt C, Somebody sent this to me and I know you are fantastic at finding the truth, so is this true or some republican trying to change peoples votes. Thanks, (Niece)

INTERESTING DATA JUST RECEIVED ON TAXES
Click here to see "FORWARD" on Snopes

(The Forward Starts with this:)
Spread the word.....This is something you should be Aware of so you don't get blind-sided.This is really going to catch a lot Of families off guard. It should Make you worry.
Proposed changes in taxes after 2008 General election:CAPITAL GAINS TAX

When asked about taxes last night McCain said the following:

"Lets give families a $7000 tax credit for every child they have, and lets give a $5000 tax credit to help them pay for health insurance."

Sounds pretty good, huh?

Yes, except that he is not actually proposing either of these "credits"

More below the fold

If you're a good, right-thinking Republican, you have to at least pay lip service to the idea that there was a Golden Age in America, and it was back before FDR and Social Security and income taxes and gummint bureaucracies. If we could only return to those days, the story goes, our problems would magically dissolve away and we'd be back in some kind of pre-fall Eden. Everyone would work hard and not whine about being exploited victims, and we'd have no need for a socialistic safety net. We'd all be free, free, FREE! to enjoy the fruits of our own labor, and taxes would be really, really low.

Well, we know that this "Golden Age" never really happened, but the myth persists. And many people seem to believe that something like it could happen, if only, as St. Reagan said, the damn government would just get off our backs.

Sadly, it's all a pipe dream, and I can prove it. All it takes is a little simple math. The bottom line? It's the population, stupid.

When we look around for villains, we usually settle on Alfred E. Bush or his buddy, Evil Dick Cheney. Sorry, everybody, we're wrong. Bush and Cheney are not the disease - they're two of the symptoms. Take a look at Barack Obama, the person whom many of us consider the last, best hope of America's moral survival. The outlook isn't as bright as it used to be. We're seeing the same forces that gave us the Contract with America and the borrow-and-spend Reagan Revolution now infiltrating the Change We Can Believe In.

The problem is the system we thought would give us all prosperity, but which turns out to be highly selective in where the prosperity ends up. The Bogus Economist feels we ought to think about it.

Brian Deese, a campaign policy advisor for Barack Obama, returns to rebut the false claims to which John McCain resorts in his latest ad "Taxman".

It's only gotten 600 views so far, make it go viral!

DIGG it.

For months now we've heard all kinds of guilt by association attacks on Obama. Now the old ones are back along with some new ones from the laughably biased book 'The Obama Nation'.

Rather than debunking these associations one by one, I'm going to ask a simple question of anyone who is concerned about Obama's associations (real or imagined):

Can you name ONE policy position or proposal from Obama that is or has been in any way negatively influenced by people like Reverend Wright or William Ayers?

Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee, Obama's economic advisors, writing in the Wall Street Journal today:

But Sen. McCain's plan does include one new proposal that would result in higher taxes on the middle class. As even Sen. McCain's advisers have acknowledged, his health-care plan would impose a $3.6 trillion tax increase over 10 years on workers. Sen. McCain's plan will count the health care you get from your employer as if it were taxable cash income. Even after accounting for Sen. McCain's proposed health-care tax credits, this plan would eventually leave tens of millions of middle-class families paying higher taxes. In addition, as the Congressional Budget Office has shown, this kind of plan would push people into higher tax brackets and increase the taxes people pay as their compensation rises, raising marginal tax rates by even more than if we let the entire Bush tax-cut plan expire tomorrow.

Democrats are constantly lagging behind in defining the issues in a light that benefits them.  They constantly let the "liberal tax raiser" theme go on unchallenged, and they fight back with wordy, hard to comprehend platitudes and arguments.

It's time to fight back HARD.  John McCain is a tax raiser for the middle class!  Compared to Barack Obama, McCain will raise your taxes!!

Source: Washington Post

Bravo! James Ragland, for report on poverty http://www.brookings.edu/...
in Dallas Morning News.

In the midst of Olympic fever it is good to have a journalist call our attention to something of real consequence.

   I went to sign up for school today, it is my second semester at a small community college in central North Carolina. I ran into a little snag with my residencies here in N.C., and they said that I need to pay out of state tuition, which shot my price up from $700 to $3,500. I am realy trying to wrap my head around that jump, why where I live really determines how much I pay?

The AP has a story about a report the Government Accountability Office is expected to release today. It will say that two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes between 1998 and 2005. During  the same time, 68 percent of foreign companies doing business in the U.S. avoided corporate taxes.

The GAO report is based samples of corporate returns obtained from the Internal Revenue Service for the years 1998 through 2005. According to the report, more than 38,000 foreign corporations had no tax liability in 2005 and 1.2 million U.S. companies paid no income tax. The companies had combined revenues of $2.5 trillion. About 25 percent of the U.S. corporations not paying corporate taxes had at least $250 million in assets or $50 million in receipts.

how the founding fathers felt taxes should be handled. And reasons why the government shouldnt get its hands on the economy.

Crossposted from Calitics

In an article that could have been a press release from the Howard Jarvis Association, the San Jose Mercury News has an article by John Woolfolk arguing that tax proposals are inherently bad "in these times." While an analysis of the costs and benefits of tax plans would be a welcome product of the traditional media, Woolfolk's article is instead a hopelessly biased attack on tax plans that rarely mentions the savings the plans would generate.

No wonder California is so hard to govern effectively - with these Republican talking points being passed off as journalism, Californians aren't being given the full information that they deserve.