By Lauren Kelley / Alternet / Nov. 23, 2012

“Come January,” reports the New York Times, “more than two-thirds of the states will be under single-party control, raising the prospect that bold partisan agendas.” That’s one way of putting it. In Michigan, where Republicans hold a super-majority in the state legislature, we can see how that may play out in the redder states, as lawmakers toy with the idea of a $160 tax credit for fetuses starting at 12 weeks of gestation.

As The Guardian reports that the bill is designed “to recognize that mothers have additional bills to pay.” I think we can all agree with that, but the rationale is hard to swallow in a state that last year cut tax credits for children — actual breathing, eating kids.   [Read more…]

 By Lynn Stuart Parramore / AlterNet

Trying to convince the public to cut America’s best-loved and most successful program requires a lot of creativity and persistence. Social Security is fiscally fit, prudently managed and does not add to the deficit because by law it must be completely detached from the federal operating budget. Obviously, it is needed more than ever in a time of increasing job insecurity and disappearing pensions. It helps our economy thrive and boosts the productivity of working Americans. And yet the sharks are in a frenzy to shred it in the upcoming “fiscal cliff” discussions.

The most popular red herring Social Security hustlers have unleashed into the waters of public discourse has grown into such a massive whale of a lie that liberals frequently subscribe to it. The idea goes like this: We need to somehow “fix” Social Security because people are living longer – “fix” in this context being code for “cut.”
  [Read more…]

Senator backs down from car tax discussion

by Brian Leubitz/Calitics.com

If you ever wonder about the gaping hole in our budget that we’ve been trying to close for the last decade or so, there is one part of that larger pie that is bigger than the rest. That is the Vehicle License Fee. Back when Arnold Schwarzenegger was running in the recall election, it was dubbed simply the “car tax.”

And give him credit for this, when elected he did, in fact, slash the “car tax.” We were able to backfill with a few years of budgetary “smoke and mirrors” but the hole was stubborn. And when 2007-8’s big recession hit, we were proverbial budgetary roadkill. The cuts just couldn’t come fast enough to match the speed of declining revenue, given that we had already made cuts to cover the loss of the VLF revenue.   [Read more…]

Watching the ongoing freakout and paranoid conspiracy-mongering over the Benghazi attack by numerous Republicans and conservatives, the rest of us over in Planet Reality watching this have been scratching our heads wondering what’s causing this meltdown.

Now, in the cases of John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the diagnosis for their behavior is pretty easy to pinpoint (the latter is terrified of a primary challenge in 2014 and thinks picking a fight with the evil Kenyan Muslim Anti-Christ is the ticket to survival, while the former is an angry, bitter, spiteful old bastard who is lashing out any way he can in the hopes of causing damage to “the One” who stole his precious widdle Presidency).

But what of the other GOPers, the folks like Limbaugh, Hannity, the folks at Fox News (which should be renamed The All-Benghazi Network these days) and the rest? What is their motivation, besides the obvious one of lashing out in anger after Obama’s reelection?   [Read more…]