red is blue and blue is red and we are all together...

  

From: Paul Krugman

The spike in public employment (at month 16) is attributed to the temporary hiring of census workers.

turnkey corporatization

"[...] language virtually identical to Florida’s [Stand Your Ground] law is featured in a template supplied to legislators in other states by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-backed organization that has managed to keep a low profile even as it exerts vast influence (only recently, thanks to yeoman work by the Center for Media and Democracy, has a clear picture of ALEC’s activities emerged). And if there is any silver lining to Trayvon Martin’s killing, it is that it might finally place a spotlight on what ALEC is doing to our society — and our democracy.
     What is ALEC? Despite claims that it’s nonpartisan, it’s very much a movement-conservative organization, funded by the usual suspects: the Kochs, Exxon Mobil, and so on. Unlike other such groups, however, it doesn’t just influence laws, it literally writes them, supplying fully drafted bills to state legislators. In Virginia, for example, more than 50 ALEC-written bills have been introduced, many almost word for word. And these bills often become law."
— Paul Krugman, The New York Times
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"Let’s say you’re a state lawmaker, passionate about charter schools, and you want to turn this passion into laws that create social change. What you need are bills. And you want them fast — ready-made, just add water, written in language that can withstand partisan debate and legal scrutiny.
     There is a place that has just what you want.
     It’s called the American Legislative Exchange Council, a little-known conservative group headquartered in Washington, D.C., and funded by some of the biggest corporations in the United States — most with a business interest in state legislation.
     ALEC has quietly made its mark on the political landscape by providing state governments with mock-up bills that academic and political experts say are, for the most part, tailored to fit a conservative agenda. In recent years, states — particularly those with new Republican governors and legislatures — have been flooded with ALEC’s model bills. Nearly 1,000 of them are introduced every year, and roughly one-fifth of those become law, according to ALEC’s own count. ALEC’s bills are especially attractive because they are written so they can virtually be copied and pasted onto legislative proposals across the land."
— Salvador Rizzo, nj.com
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willard speaks truthiness, willard speaks truthiness

Source images from here and here

"I mean, is there anything at all in Romney’s stump speech that’s true? It’s all based on attacking Obama for apologizing for America, which he didn’t, on making deep cuts in defense, which he also didn’t, and on being a radical redistributionist who wants equality of outcomes, which he isn’t. When the issue turns to jobs, Romney makes false assertions both about Obama’s record and about his own. I can’t find a single true assertion anywhere."
— Paul Krugman
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"Politicians repeat the same messages endlessly (even when it has nothing to do with the question they've been asked). Journalists repeat the same opinions day after day.
     Can all this repetition really be persuasive?
     It seems too simplistic that just repeating a persuasive message should increase its effect, but that's exactly what psychological research finds (again and again). Repetition is one of the easiest and most widespread methods of persuasion. In fact it's so obvious that we sometimes forget how powerful it is.
     People rate statements that have been repeated just once as more valid or true than things they've heard for the first time. They even rate statements as truer when the person saying them has been repeatedly lying (Begg et al., 1992).
     And when we think something is more true, we also tend to be more persuaded by it. Several studies have shown that people are more swayed when they hear statements of opinion and persuasive messages more than once."
— PSYBLOG
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Around 4 p.m. on Oct. 17, 2005, Stephen Colbert was searching for a word. Not just any word, but one that would fit the blowhard persona that he was presenting that night on the premiere episode of Comedy Central’s 'Colbert Report.' He once described his faux-pundit character as a 'well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot,' and the word he was looking for had to be sublimely idiotic.
     During the rehearsal, Colbert was stuck on what term to feature for the inaugural segment of 'The Word,' a spoof of Bill O’Reilly’s 'Talking Points.' Originally, he and the writers selected the word truth, as distinguished from those pesky facts. But as Colbert told me in a recent interview (refreshingly, he spoke to me as the real Colbert and not his alter ego), truth just wasn’t 'dumb enough.'  'I wanted a silly word that would feel wrong in your mouth,' he said.
     What he was driving at wasn’t truth anyway, but a mere approximation of it — something truthish or truthy, unburdened by the factual. And so, in a flash of inspiration, truthiness was born."
— Ben Zimmer, The New York Times Magazine
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if corporations are people, Romney should be charged with manslaughter

From: Reanimation Library

"Responding to a question from an audience member as to why Social Security should be included in deficit talks when it doesn’t add to the deficit, Romney drifted into a defense of corporate rights.
'Corporations are people, my friend,' he said. 'Of course they are.'"
— Benjy Sarlin, TPM

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"Corporate personhood is the status conferred upon corporations under the law, which allows corporations to have rights and responsibilities similar to those of a natural person."
— Wikipedia
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"The Los Angeles Times recently surveyed the record of Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney ran from 1984 to 1999. As the report notes, Romney made a lot of money over those years, both for himself and for his investors. But he did so in ways that often hurt ordinary workers.
     Bain specialized in leveraged buyouts, buying control of companies with borrowed money, pledged against those companies' earnings or assets. The idea was to increase the acquired companies' profits, then resell them. [...]
     One recent analysis of 'private equity transactions' — the kind of buyouts and takeovers Bain specialized in — noted that business in general is always both creating and destroying jobs, and that this is also true of companies that were buyout or takeover targets.
     However, job creation at the target firms is no greater than in similar firms that aren't targets, while 'gross job destruction is substantially higher.'
     So Romney made his fortune in a business that is, on balance, about job destruction rather than job creation. And because job destruction hurts workers even as it increases profits and the incomes of top executives, leveraged buyout firms have contributed to the combination of stagnant wages and soaring incomes at the top that has characterized America since 1980.
     Now I've just said that the leveraged buyout industry as a whole has been a job destroyer, but what about Bain in particular?
     Well, by at least one criterion, Bain during the Romney years seems to have been especially hard on workers, since four of its top 10 targets by dollar value ended up going bankrupt. (Bain, nonetheless, made money on three of those deals.) That's a much higher rate of failure than is typical even of companies going through leveraged buyouts — and when the companies went under, many workers ended up losing their jobs, their pensions, or both."
— Paul Krugman, The Modesto Bee
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“'Mitt Romney as he runs for President has decided to make job creation a big piece of it,' [Randy] Johnson tells me. 'And if he’s going to make a big piece of it he has to be accountable for what he’s done.'
     He recounts his now familiar story: in 1992, Bain took over a company, Ampad, which in turn bought the Marion factory where Johnson worked. Under new management, he and his fellow workers returned from their July 4 holiday to find they had been fired en masse and had to reapply for their old jobs. Those who came back were greeted with lower wages and stingier health and pension benefits. As conditions worsened, workers rebelled against their treatment and went on strike. Johnson took their story public and Democrats used it to go after Romney in his 1994 Senate run.
     Johnson’s efforts may have helped stop Romney from defeating Ted Kennedy that year, but things only got worse after the campaign ended. Within months, the company shut down the factory entirely, leaving all of its employees out of a job, and Ampad eventually went bankrupt in 2000. But despite its disastrous arc, Bain made huge profits off the company — as much as $100 million — thanks to revenue from management fees and selling off shares of its stock, which they took public in 1996."—Benjy Sarlin, TPM
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