There has been a controversy on Roger Goun’s Facebook page about whether or not the Romney ads about the welfare work rules changes are truthful or not.  Coincidentally that dependable commie, pinko, left-wing mouth piece, The Boston Globe has an editorial on the subject. (I thought I would put in the adjectives before some right-wing nut job did 🙂

The 1996 reform was intended to guide welfare recipients into the workforce. But Ron Haskins, the Newt Gingrich policy aide who worked on the legislation , has said the program was always meant to adapt during a downturn, when needs rise and the number of jobs available shrinks. Unfortunately, it hasn’t. Over the past four years, temporary assistance enrollment has barely increased, even as unemployment grew. People who need help aren’t getting it.

Part of the problem is the program’s rigid work rules, which might make sense when the economy is humming but are counterproductive now. Currently, a state must have a sufficient percentage of its welfare recipients working in order to qualify for federal funds. When jobs are few, as in the current economic climate, that means states have a perverse incentive to cut otherwise deserving recipients off assistance in order to reach the work-participation threshold. In Ohio, officials have slashed temporary-assistance rolls by a third since last year in order to avoid losing aid. That’s a sign of inflexible rules, not a sudden increase in employment.

Tweaking the rules to account for the lack of jobs in the private market is consistent with the aims of welfare reform. It would allow states to use different approaches, for instance by extending a private-sector jobs programs subsidized by President Obama’s 2009 stimulus. In the program, HHS provided stimulus dollars to states that subsidized the hiring of temporary assistance recipients by private companies. The program was a wild success; for less than 1 percent of the cost of the $787 billion stimulus, it created 260,000 jobs in 39 states. Even states with very conservative Republican governors, including Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Rick Perry of Texas, took part in the program before it ran out two years ago.

When this legislation passed in the 1990’s, I thought, “Fine for putting in these rules when the economy is booming, but what is going to happen in the next recession?”  I didn’t know that there was adaptability written into the law to cover the situation I worried about.

Of course, now that we are at the stage were we believe nothing we read, or hear, or see, I suppose it is almost pointless for me to read anything or write anything on the matter.

The Real News Network has the article Wilkerson on GOP Convention.

Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired United States Army soldier and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson is an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary where he teaches courses on US national security. He also instructs a senior seminar in the Honors Department at the George Washington University entitled “National Security Decision Making.”

JAY: And I don’t think you could find it in most undeveloped countries.

WILKERSON: No way. This is part of the American mystique, it is part of our heritage, to from time to time become, essentially, speared on our own devices. We use religion, we use finance and economics. You ask about the division in the Republican Party. If I were the Koch brothers, if I were some guy making billions of dollars off a hedge fund and paying absolutely no taxes or very little taxes, I’d go after Romney, too; I wouldn’t vote for Obama. Obama at least looks like he might be slightly interested about the vast majority of poor people in this country. He looks as if he might slightly be interested in revenues through taxes. He might slightly be interested in things that impact the majority of people in America. Romney’s interested in the richest people in the country. And so if I were they, I would be out there like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers and others; I’d be funneling that money out there for Romney; I want an idiot in there who believes in predatory capitalism the way I do, so that I can continue to rape the world.

It is interesting how the word “rape” comes up in so many different contexts when talking about Republicans. Maybe this is why Republicans have such a fixation on sex. They think about and dream about it, but don’t have much scientific or practical knowledge about its affects on society.

This is another of the articles recommended to me by RichardH. The Last Bipartisan by Bill Keller about Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon.

I once asked a Wyden aide whether the senator ever showed signs of despair at the increasingly toxic climate. “You know,” the aide replied, “I’ve been trying to figure the guy out for about six years now and I honestly think that while the stuff that goes on here makes the rest of us tired, angry and cynical, it just makes him that much more determined to find a way to fix it. Seriously, after taking a three-year beating trying to push bipartisan health reform, he walks into my office and says, ‘Great, now we’re going to do bipartisan tax reform.’ I admire the hell out of him for it, but sometimes I want to throw things at him.”

As a resident of Oregon from 1994 to 2006, I voted for Ron Wyden a number of times.  So I have been trying to figure him out for more than just 6 years.  As his aide says, “but sometimes I want to throw things at him.”

Ron Wyden wants to win some minor battles while slowly giving up enough territory to lose the war.  It didn’t take President Obama quite as long to figure out (I think he might have figured it out), that giving an inch to the opposition is a losing strategy.  It is not even a winning tactic anymore.

For Ron Wyden to come up with a bill that he and Paul Ryan could agree on required Wyden to accept the false Ryan premise that the problem is in the level of social benefits and not in the tax and regulation give-aways to the wealthy.  If you start with the wrong premise, you will inevitably lose the war.

RichardH has been sending me links to articles from The New York Times.  Here is the first one The Comeback Skid by Paul Krugman.

But as I said, Mr. Christie talks a good (and very loud) game about his willingness to make tough choices, making big claims about spending cuts — claims, by the way, that PolitiFact has unequivocally declared false. And for the past year he has been touting what he claims is the result of those tough choices: the “Jersey comeback,” the supposed recovery of his state’s economy.

Strange to say, however, Mr. Christie has told reporters that he won’t use the term “Jersey comeback” in his keynote address. And it’s not hard to see why: the comeback, such as it was, has hit the skids. Indeed, the latest figures show his state with the fourth-highest unemployment rate in the nation. Strikingly, New Jersey’s 9.8 percent unemployment rate is now significantly higher than the unemployment rate in long-suffering Michigan, which has had a true comeback thanks to the G.O.P.-opposed auto bailout.

Why does reality seem to have a liberal bias?

The Washington Post has the opinion piece Extremism in defense of Gilded Age privilege by Katrina vanden Heuvel.

Romney has sought to distance himself from the Republican extremes on abortion. But he is the leading advocate of the other aspect of new age Republican extremism: its Gilded Age economic policies.

For all the zealotry of the Christian Coalition or the tea party, the Romney-Ryan ticket is most notable for its fierce defense of privilege. Consider:

At a time when the top 1 percent of Americans captured a staggering 93 percent of national income growth in 2010, Romney advocates both extending the extra Bush tax cuts for the rich and another round of tax cuts that would offer those making a million or more another $175,000 annual tax break.
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“Extremism in defense of liberty,” conservative icon Barry Goldwater once said, “is no vice.” But extremism in defense of privilege is no virtue. In Tampa, the tea party gets its anti-government, anti-immigrant planks in the platform, and the Christian Coalition its war on women; but the big money is pouring in to support the praetorian guard of privilege at the top of the ticket.

It is amazing that 50% of the voters still don’t get it.

Motherboard has the article Congress’s Science Committee Doesn’t Get Science.

According to its charter, the Science committee holds “Legislative jurisdiction and general oversight and investigative authority on all matters relating to science policy and science education.” Created in 1958, after the launch of Sputnik, the committee was responsible for launching NASA and laying the foundation for the U.S. space program. While science-related legislation can come from anywhere, whether it’s the president or a congressman under the sway of drug company lobbying, the science committee, like other committees, is meant to filter and rule on that legislation.

Its credentials wouldn’t bowl over many scientists. Rep. Akin has a degree from Worcester Polytech in Engineering Management and worked for IBM as an engineer, while Rep. Paul Broun is an M.D., with a background in chemistry. On the Democrat side, Rep. Paul Tonko is a mechanical engineer by training and helped lead New York’s energy R&D authority. Roscoe Barlett of Maryland was once director of a Space Life Sciences research group at the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and Donna Edwards of Maryland once worked for Lockheed Corporation at the Goddard Space Flight Center during the Spacelab program. But many have no scientific expertise at all.

Is this kind of governance what you expect when you vote Republican? No matter what you expect, this is what you get. We didn’t surpass the Russians in space exploration in the 1960s with this kind of science. We are dependent on the Russians in space now that we do have this kind of science. As I have said before, the Republican motto ought to be, “Government does not work. Elect us, and we will show you what we mean.”

Thanks to RogerG for giving me a clue as to where to find this article.

This is from the Democratic National Committee Rapid Response Team. It isn’t rapid, but it is a good response.

Mitt Romney’s reinvention convention is starting with the theme “We Built It.” Mitt Romney will try to sell himself to the American people as a “Mr. Fix It” who knows how to turn a business around. Of course, once you examine his record, it’s clear Mitt Romney knows less about turning businesses around and more about running them into the ground.

Mitt Romney made millions of dollars bankrupting companies, shuttering factories, offshoring jobs and putting profits before people. The theme of the Republican National Convention paints a rosy picture, but the theme of Mitt Romney’s time as a corporate raider is less flattering. Mitt Romney didn’t build that — he destroyed it.

“Mitt Romney: You Didn’t Build That — You Destroyed It”

Truth Out has the article Romney Pledges a Fed That Will Screw Workers.

The much more important policy decisions that allow people like Mitt Romney to be incredibly wealthy and the rest of the country to be struggling are totally off the media’s radar screen.

Romney’s statement about the Fed fits in the latter category because he said that he would pick a chair who supports a “strong dollar.” The implication is that he wants the Fed to run policies that keep the dollar overvalued relative to other currencies, making US goods uncompetitive in international markets.

The arithmetic on this is fairly simple. If the dollar is 20 percent above its proper value, then it means that prices of goods produced in the United States are effectively 20 percent higher relative to the goods produced in other countries. This strong dollar effectively makes imports 20 percent cheaper relative to goods produced in the United States. That naturally means that we will purchase more goods produced in Mexico, China, and other countries and fewer goods produced in the United States.

On the flip side, this strong dollar means that our exports are 20 percent more expensive to people in other countries than would otherwise be the case. This is equivalent to putting a 20 percent tariff on everything that we export. Needless to say, this will seriously depress our exports to the rest of the world.

Of course few sources other than Truth-out and my blog put the issue so simply.  If the workers could see the simple arithmetic above, they would stop slavishly following Ron Paul, hating Bernanke, and thinking of voting for Mitt Romney.

A strong dollar seems like such a good idea to people when the Republicans don’t explain its implications.  If the Republicans would just explain that a strong dollar is good for people who have money to lend, but not good for people who need to borrow money, maybe some people would by able figure out which category they belong to.

Ultimately, if the people who have to borrow money cannot pay it back, then this policy is really not good for the people who have it and lend it.  A properly valued dollar would mean the lenders have to take a bit of a haircut, but that has to be better than getting your head cut-off (let alone completely shaved).

Here is a preview of the Romney/Ryan acceptance speech at the Republican Convention later this week.

Remember, if this turns out to be accurate, you saw it here first.

In this new ad, Elizabeth Warren asks some very good questions.

Why do women have to fight the same old battles? Women still don’t get equal pay for equal work – Republicans blocked that, and even pushed a law that could have denied insurance coverage for birth control. We’re still fighting to protect a woman’s right to choose nearly 40 years after Roe v. Wade, and we could be just one Supreme Court justice away from losing it. How could this be happening in 2012?

She just left out the part that sending her to Washington as U.S. Senator from Massachusetts is part of the process of not backing down.