Dawn: “I think Mitt Romney’s really out of touch with the average woman’s health issues…”
Alex: “This is not the 1950s. Contraception is so important to women…it’s about a woman being able to make decisions…”
Dawn “I don’t remember anyone as extreme as Romney.”
Mitt Romney: “I’ll cut off funding to Planned Parenthood.”
Alex: “I don’t think Mitt Romney can even understand the mindset of someone who has to go to Planned Parenthood.”
Mitt Romney: “Planned Parenthood. We’re going to get rid of that.”
Dawn: “I think Romney would definitely drag us back.”

Given the statistics of contraceptive usage, you wonder what fraction can be siding with Romney on this issue. Women, at least, would have to be deluding themselves to believe Romney is on their side. I have no doubt that a lot of delusion is going on.

I just have to post a link to the blog post Why Are Small Countries Better at Economics? by Ryan Louis Cooper.

My liking of the post started with a great statement about famed physicist Richard Feynman.

Yet today the Fed announced that though not only are they missing their employment target and their inflation target, they’re still not going to do anything. It’s as if we put Richard Feynman in charge of NASA, and he started talking about creationism and homeopathy. Barring mental illness, clearly something else is at work.

The point of the blog post is:

This rough inverse correlation between size of economic unit and quality of outcome (USA, Eurozone = failures; Sweden, Australia, Canada, Israel = successes) suggests that this is about power and money. In smaller countries, where banks don’t have the kind of money and sheer size to command the complete attention of the world media when they get in trouble, the power gap between them and the regulators is small.

But, he finally gets to the heart of the matter as to why this is true:

All incumbent creditors will act to keep inflation as low as possible, it seems. If that means years of depression, so be it.

All the troubles with underwater mortgages and foreclosures would be helped by a little inflation that would slowly get the value of the houses to be greater than the money owed on them.  That would save the home owners.  Of course, if the home owners repaid their loans with money that was lower in value, that would eat into the profits of the banks.

So it is not a question of whether or not it is possible to get the economy going again.  It is a question of how we share the pain.  If we put all the burden on the borrowers and none of it on the lenders, then we are in for a long slog.  Even the lenders could go under, too, trying to protect the value of their loans, but they would rather take their chances that they might not.  Are the banks being realistic to ever think they will get all of their principle back in uninflated dollars?  Can you get blood out of a stone?

Even Jon Stewart goes after Harry Reid in the segment You, Harry Reid, Are Terrible.

 Senate majority leader Harry Reid speculates that Mitt Romney hasn’t paid taxes in ten years, and that his dead father George Romney would be ashamed.

If the above embedded video does not play, here is the direct link.

I think the real payoff to this video comes from the montage at the end.

Yesterday, I read the story Porn star Jenna Jameson endorses Mitt Romney.

Porn star Jenna Jameson chose a familiar stage to make her endorsement for the 2012 presidential election Thursday night. At a San Francisco strip club, the former adult actress and stage performer said she was ready for a Romney presidency.

Today, I found The New Yorker story Jenna Jameson Clarifies Her Endorsement of Romney.

Concerned that her endorsement of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney for President would lead to “cheap, easy jokes and innuendo,” porn star Jenna Jameson held a press conference today to explain her headline-making decision.

I just thought it was important to publish this clarification.

The Royal Treatment – Private jet.

Don’t blame me for this. RichardH made me do it.

Greg Palast’s web site has the article Fracking: New Dangers.

I haven’t posted anything from Greg Palast in a while. Here is an interview from the above article. The interview takes place in Dublin, Ireland where he is investigating and speaking about the dangers of proposed fracking in Ireland. The implications for the United States are just as frightening.

Is there a safe way to frack? Probably: but not profitably; and certainly not within the geology of a little emerald isle. I am weary of appearing at scenes of death and destruction when cement fails, pipes crack and tremors spew poisons only to hear a gas or oil company executive’s PR flack issue an apology. I doubt those apologies will sound better in Gaelic.

All that natural gas that has been found in the United States and that will make us energy independent will come at a horrendous ecological cost.

Here is the President’s speech that he gave a few moments ago at noon on August 3, 2012. There is also an article Extending Middle Class Tax Cuts for 98% of Americans and 97% of Small Businesses.

Rebuilding our economy starts with strengthening the middle class. Extending tax breaks on 98 percent of families now would give hard working Americans the security and confidence they need.

He noted something that I have been sharing ever since I saw the comment on the web. The tax cut on the first $250,000 of income is for everyone, not just the middle-class. That means you can make considerably more than $250,000 and your tax bill would still be lower than it would if we let all the Bush tax cuts expire.

The President failed to point out that tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy to invest in non-productive financial derivatives actually hurts the economy. Some of these people would be job creators during more normal times. With the middle-class under financial pressure, there is no reason for the wealthy to create jobs now. There aren’t enough customers for the people who already have jobs.

It is anticipation or the actual appearance of more customers in the economy that drives job creation. Otherwise the “job creators” just park their money in these financial derivatives until they see an uptick in the economy. It is middle-class behavior that spurs the “job creators” to create the jobs.

At the moment, it is not high taxes and it is not regulation that keeps jobs from being created. At the moment it is solely a lack of demand from the middle-class.

This is to say that at some other moment in the future, the factors that the Republicans keep harping on may be relevant. We should only be so lucky. We will never get to that happy moment when taxes and regulation are holding back the economy if we never get the economy moving in the first place. I say that will be a happy moment, because high taxes and over-regulation are problems that the Congress has the power to solve.

If you want to know more about what ALEC does, this cartoon may help.

“ALEC Rock”
Produced by Mark Fiore (http://www.markfiore.com) and the Center for Media and Democracy (http://www.prwatch.org), which is the creator of ALECexposed (http://www.alecexposed.org), and co-produced by the Alliance for a Better Utah (http://betterutah.org) to help expose ALEC.

The Orlando Business Journal has the article Obama weighs in on tax cuts, reducing deficit at Rollins College visit .

I’m not going to pay for a massive tax cut for folks who don’t need it by gutting the investments that have always kept us at the forefront and have always kept our middle class strong.”

I like this way of stating the consequences of giving tax cuts to people who do not need them and who won’t put them to work stimulating the economy.  It wouldn’t hurt to emphasize my second point.  Besides the issue of fairness, it just would not be good for the economy to keep taxes low on the top 2% so that they can invest the money in non-productive financial derivatives.

The bottom 98% will spend a larger fraction of their tax cut on consumption which will spur job growth to meet the demand of this increased consumption.  To get an even larger fraction of the money into economic stimulus would require direct government spending.  This better path to economic recovery has gone through such an onslaught of negative propaganda, that maybe the President thinks it would be too tough a sell in this election year.

The Real News has a multi-part series called What a Single Payer Health Insurance Plan Looks Like. I will post the two videos that are available right now.  You can check the above link for more parts as they become available.

Part 1: What a Single Payer Health Insurance Plan Looks Like

The above video explains why the insurance companies make more profit if they drive some customers away. Once you think about the explanation, you realize that it is something you already knew, but may not have thought about it quite so vividly.

Part 2: What a Single Payer Health Insurance Plan Looks Like