Romney cries foul for attacking his strength

In an interview with NBC, Romney said “[O]ur campaign would be-- helped immensely if we had an agreement between both campaigns that we were only going to talk about issues and that attacks based upon-- business or family or taxes or things of that nature.”   NBC rightly asks "Is Romney really saying that scrutinizing his business record -- which he has held up as one of his chief qualifications to be president -- is personal?"

Romney can't run on his record as governor.  He can't run on political skill or rhetorical brilliance.  His business record is all he's got, so it's legitimate for all sides to discuss.

Fox News lies again

A recent Fox News article discusses the executive order issued by Obama a couple months ago that stops deportation of young illegal immigrants in some circumstances.  While the order contains no pathway to citizenship, the Fox News article states "Under the DREAM Act-style guidelines now being followed by the Obama administration, an illegal immigrant in her position can stay while following a path to citizenship."

This is completely and utterly false.  A complete lie presumably done to whip up the conservative base, or something...

Repeal the 22nd Amendment, save the 17th

The 17th Amendment lets voters elect US Senators directly.  Prior to that, state legislatures decided who goes to the Senate.  Some conservatives and libertarians have advocated repealing the 17th Amendment in order to increase the power of states.  If Senators knew they had to go back every few years and have state legislators vote to send them back, they wouldn't want to piss off the states by expanding the national government's powers.  It actually makes sense as a method of preserving states' rights.  But I have a better method!

If you've got enough voters to make repeal happen, you've got enough voters to elect politicians who support states' rights and can do so directly, without all the problems that come with introducing a Constitutionally-required electoral middle-man.  This 51% of voters can vote out politicians who don't properly respect states' rights, rather than depending on 51% of legislatures to do the same.

Term limits can be decided similarly.  Instead of slapping a hard limit of 8 years on a Presidency, voters can decide when new blood is required.  I'm all for an argument about whether Obama should be elected for a third term, but voters should at least have the option.  If enough of us think Obama needs to go, whether it's because we believe that two terms is enough or that he's a anti-colonial Marxist, he goes.  If a majority think he should get another term, the nation isn't deprived of four years of what that majority thinks is the way to go.

Why should we let people in 1951 strip us of the right to vote for four more years of Reagan or Clinton (or Bush, I guess...)?  What tremendous insight into the effects of eight versus twelve years in the White House in the 21st century did they possess then that we can't trust 51% of us to recognize now?

Let the voters decide.

Romney attacks Obama's expansion of states' rights

Republicans talk all the time about states' rights.  Romney's entire defense of his health care plan is that states should be free to tailor programs to the peculiarities of each state, as Romney explained in an interview on Fox News, saying:

What we did in Massachusetts was right for Massachusetts. I've said that time and time again, that people of the state continue to support it by about 3-1, but it's also designed for Massachusetts, not for the nation, and at the time our bill was passed, and that was brought forward as an issue, there were people who said, is this something you'd like to have the entire nation do? I said no. This is not a federal plan, it's a state plan. And under the constitution, states should be able to craft their own plans.

One person who would agree with absolutely everything Romney says here is President Obama.  Obama shows his agreement by offering states waivers from Obamacare if they come up with a solution that might be better.  He also recently gave states the right to apply for a waiver from "welfare to work" rules if they demonstrated an approach that would more effectively get people on welfare back to work.  Despite this mutual recognition of the power of allowing states to experiment, as well as Romney's past request for a similar waiver when governor of Massachusetts,  Romney chose to attack Obama for instituting the new welfare policy.

I continue to be impressed by the ability of Republicans to portray Obama as a radical even as he institutes their own policies.

Priebus drops a bomb

In news sure to reverberate around schoolyards across the nation, Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus busted out the rare "triple down".  He was driven to such an extreme action after Harry Reid discussed on more than one occasion his accusation that Romney didn't pay taxes for 10 years, leading to multiple reports that Harry Reid "doubled down" on the accusation.  Although Reid never actually used the phrase himself, and the link of the phrase to Reid is the result only of its journalistic convenience for headline writers, Priebus felt it appropriate to adopt the time-honored one-upsmanship of who can say the highest number.

No word yet if Reid will respond with the dreaded "quad", but Ron Paul warns this loose "down" policy will inevitably lead to a Maury Povich-like hellscape of people saying higher and higher but still completely meaningless numbers.

Reasons to stay up late/get up early

Early tomorrow morning, at 1:31 Eastern, a NASA rover called Curiosity will attempt to land on Mars.  It is much larger than Spirit and Opportunity, being twice as long, five times as massive, and carrying 10 times more scientific equipment.  It also cost $2.5 billion, so let's hope it's successful.

Next week, the annual Perseid meteor shower will peak, delivering around 60 meteors an hour.  These occur when our orbit takes us through the debris left behind by a comet.  The best time to view is before dawn, as that's when you're at the location on the Earth that is facing "forward" relative to our motion around the sun, so that's when your section of sky smashes into the most stuff.

This is no way to have an election

In 2008, Ohio allowed voters to vote, in person, for weeks before the election.  They called it "in person absentee voting", and tens of thousands of Ohioans used that option.  Perhaps they had to work on Tuesday and weren't able to get off.  Ohio, to its credit, was able to accommodate these people.  Democratic organizations were more ready to get their people to vote on these days.  It's not surprising, then, that when Republicans took power in 2010, they moved to eliminate in-person absentee voting in the three days before the election.  Civilians are allowed to vote early in person prior to 6pm on the Friday before they election, but after that, they can't.  Republicans did carve out an exception for military members, who would continue to be allowed to vote in the last three days.

As there is no good reason not to allow any eligible citizen to vote on those days, since workers have to be there anyway to let the military vote, the Obama campaign sued to reinstate civilian voters' right to vote on those three days too.  The campaign is in no way advocating that we don't allow soldiers to vote on those days.

Of course, Republicans blew up, claiming that "Obama campaign sues to restrict military voting in Ohio".  On Fox News, a "news" presenter said “If President Obama gets his way, the special voting rights of some of America’s finest will be eliminated.  The campaign is suing to keep members of the military from having extra time to cast their ballots in one key battlegound state.”  Even Romney himself released a statement saying:

"President Obama's lawsuit claiming it is unconstitutional for Ohio to allow servicemen and women extended early voting privileges during the state's early voting period is an outrage.  The brave men and women of our military make tremendous sacrifices to protect and defend our freedoms, and we should do everything we can to protect their fundamental right to vote. I stand with the fifteen military groups that are defending the rights of military voters, and if I'm entrusted to be the commander-in-chief, I'll work to protect the voting rights of our military, not undermine them."

Romney's statement is willfully ignorant of the true goal of Obama's suit, which would in no way affect soldiers' ability to vote.  Romney dishonestly implies that Obama is trying to undermine that ability.

Making them get specific

The Republican approach to taxes sounds great on its surface.  Cutting the tax rates and making up the difference by ending some tax deductions/credits/loopholes seems like a reasonable, fair way to simplify the tax code.  While it sounds great in theory, there can be tremendous shifts in the tax  burden with such proposals, depending on the magnitude of the changes to rates and deductions.  For an example of a plan which does a poor job of fairly introducing cuts, let's look at the tax plan proposed by Mitt Romney, as well as an analysis (.pdf) of that plan by the Tax Policy Center.  By taking the tax debate out of the realm of hand-waving, general discussions which sound good and into actual, specific policy, the deception at the heart of Romney's policy is laid bare.

Romney proposes cutting the tax rate at every income bracket by 20%, dropping the top rate from 35% to 28% and the lowest rate from 10% to 8%.  He would make up the lost revenue by getting rid of tax deductions and credits.  He has not as yet been specific about which deductions and credits would go, but given where the money is when it comes to deductions/credits, he'd have to end some fairly popular things like the child tax credit, health insurance deductions, or Medicare benefits not counting as income.  He had been hoping that he could continue promising the good things without anyone asking about where they come from.

The study by the Tax Policy Center looks at the actual effects of Romney's plan.  It accepts Romney's premise that the plan would not result in lower revenues for the government.  It assumes that certain tax benefits would be untouchable, such as the capital gains tax rate, which Romney has said he will not raise, or the tax-exempt status of veterans benefits.  They then pursue the effects of Romney's proposals on people from different income brackets to test Romney's claim that everyone will still pay a similar share to what they pay now.  Their conclusion is that even if every single tax benefit (that's not on the untouchable list) for people making over $200,000 a year, it is mathematically impossible to arrive at a situation where the rich don't get a big cut while taxes go up on people making less than $200,000.

Let's consider a gazillionaire whose tax bill would drop by a few million dollars as a result of the cut of the top rate from 35% to 28%.  While things like the child tax credit are significant for an average family, our gazillionaire doesn't give a shit if the credit goes away.  The drop from 35% to 28% overwhelms any effects the loss of a measly few credits.  According to the TPC, people making $200k to $500k would see a drop in their tax bill of $1,800, and the benefits only go up from there.  Meanwhile, for a family of four that actually cares about the child tax credit, their taxes would go up by $2,000.

The authors go on to make every assumption they reasonably can to help Romney's case.  They assume economic growth according to models developed by W's chief economist.  They assume every tax deduction is entirely eliminated for anyone making $200k+, to squeeze every penny out of them they can before taking away the middle class's benefits.

In response to the study's release, the Romney campaign has responded with ad hominem attacks against the authors and claims that massive economic growth would fix everything.  But they don't show their work.  They don't say "we think the economy will grow by X%, with Y thousand new jobs a month, so then everyone's taxes change by this much, and that's how it works!"  Why wouldn't they release the math behind their claims?  Could it be that the math just doesn't exist?  The TPC study indicates it's impossible that it ever could.

Finger ink catching on

My "Iraqi finger ink" proposal is catching on.

Working on a math post about Romney's tax proposals.  Relates to the Tax Policy Center study (.pdf) which shows that Romney's tax proposal amounts to a huge giveaway to the rich.

Diagnostic tests and the Republican assault on voting rights

Try to contain your excitement about another thrilling dive into the fascinating world of clinical pathology.  If you want to skip ahead to the bomb-throwing, my conclusion will be that just about all the Republican legislators of Pennsylvania are scoundrels who should be removed from office as quickly as possible.

We've discussed previously the concept of establishing a cutoff for a diagnostic test, such as "what blood sugar level means you have diabetes" or "what defines 'kidney failure'".  Click on that link and read the 2nd paragraph, the one under the graph image, for a refresher if needed.

So, with this concept of designing a diagnostic test in mind, we need to discuss the completely unacceptable revelation this week by Pennsylvania's chief voting officer, Carol Aichele, regarding the number of Pennsylvanians without the ID required to vote in the upcoming election, as a result of a GOP-passed bill.  She states that there was no significant effort made to estimate how many people would be denied their vote as a result of the bill.  To apply the diagnostic testing metaphor, the people who would be wrongly denied their voting rights would be the "false positives", who are incorrectly marked as fraudsters.

Aichele revealed that the state expected 100,000 people do not have ID.  This conflicts with earlier testimony by other officials who reported that there are around 889,000 names on the voting rolls in Pennsylvania that don't match a name on PennDOT's list of who has ID, along with 574,630 with expired ID.  That works out to something like 15% of people registered to vote without the most common forms of ID.  It's true that other forms of ID would work, like military IDs or student IDs, so a pollster (who, fair warning, was hired by opponents of the law) conducted a survey which put the number at 12.7% of registered voters without any valid ID.

Now, especially given the qualification above, I would be perfectly willing to accept an argument which shows how the Republican proponents of the bill arrived at their estimate of the number of "false positives".  If anyone were capable of mounting such an argument, one would think it would be the Republican in charge of voting in Pennsylvania, Ms. Aichele.  But when confronted with the higher projections above, she simply responded "I disagree".  She also admitted that an earlier Department of State estimate of 759,000 people without ID was calculated in less than a day by a single staffer who was told to come up with a number.  She later admitted she didn't know how many people don't have ID.

Ms. Aichele specifically, and the Republican-dominated Pennsylvania government generally, are responsible for protecting Pennsylvanians' voting rights, but they show such callous disregard for those rights that they have no idea just how many hundreds of thousands of voters will lose their ballots.  By Aichele's own admission, they were signing away voting rights for (by their numbers) 100,000 of their citizens, and they decided that was only worth one day of one staffer's time.  This is unacceptable in a democracy.

The unavoidable conclusion to all of this is that the Pennsylvania Republican legislators just don't see 100,000-1,400,000 of their citizens losing their right to vote as a bad thing.  I wonder how they would approach the issue if those hundreds of thousands were more likely to vote Republican.