An interesting video on Instant Runoff Voting. Open Thread below....

On this day in 1973, Gram Parsons- Flying Burrito Brother, Emmylou Harris discoverer, Keith Richards' friend/influencer, member of The Byrds, personal musical hero- died in a motel room in Joshua Tree. Here's one that never ceases to move me.

GP / Grievous Angel
	Artist: Gram Parsons Price: $5.99 (As of 09/19/11 01:54 pm details)

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A Republican tea party candidate running for Ohio's 8th Congressional District declared Monday that House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) was a "socialist."

David Lewis told Fox News' Neil Cavuto that he hopes to defeat Boehner in the Republican primary by running on the tea party platform.

"John Boehner is a socialist," Lewis explained. "I'm not calling him names."

"Socialist!" Cavuto objected. "Now, David, come on. That's a little extreme."

"It's an economic policy. I'm not calling names," Lewis insisted. "Here is someone that refuses to phase out Social Security. What I would do as a U.S. House member is work to phase out Social Security totally. 100 percent. That includes Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps. These are socialist policies."

"Does the tea party have your back?" Cavuto asked.

"I believe so... The tea party is still trying to figure out whether they believe in socialist policies," Lewis replied.

"David, that's a strong term to use. You know, many have been using it about liberals and those in Congress who want bigger and better government and all of that stuff. But you can call John Boehner probably a lot of things, but the socialist thing, don't you think that's a little over the top?" Cavuto wondered.

Last September, Cavuto didn't seem to mind as much when Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus told him that President Barack Obama was a "socialist at heart."

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There are moments where I despair for the fate of this country, because it seems to me that we operate from completely different sets of realities based on the same set of facts. Unfortunately, Jim Cramer exemplifies this kind of "make-your-own-reality" within the media. You'd think he'd have learned after his humiliation on The Daily Show. But no, Jim Cramer unabashedly keeps blurring the lines between business reporting and market advocacy.

Cramer came on Hardball on Friday to insist that Wall Street just hates Obama's guts and they're just waiting for that cuddly Republican to get into office before they unleash all those jobs we all know they have. It's all that taxation and regulations that mean ol' Barack Obama insists on inflicting on Wall Street.

CRAMER: Okay, first, I’m going to agree with you, that the market has been fabulous, which is one of the reasons I’m always so astonished when people tell me that the problem is Obama. I mean, it’s clear Washington can be dysfunctional, but Democrats and Republicans not getting together. But when you get offline with CEOs, it’s not just Wall Street, but Industrial America, what they tend to say is, listen, we want to add, we want to hire, we want to grow in the United States, but everything is so up in the air and when it gets to the point where we’re thinking about what Washington’s going to do, we know we’re going to be the loser if President Obama is making the decision, because President Obama does not favor wealth creation and corporate profits. Not, the profits are huge. People have made a lot of money, but that is the rap that I hear.

MATTHEWS: What is it particularly when a banker or a rich guy, anybody who’s got to make thse big decisions—well, let’s look at some of these numbers first, because I think they’re really informative. When President Obama took office January 20th, 2009, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 7949. Today, it closed at 11, 509, up from yesterday. That’s a 31% increase since Obama’s been president. Well, that alone sould be, wow, this guy’s good. And then there’s corporate profits. The New York Times cites a study by Northeastern University, and economist reports, “since the recovery began in June of 2009, corporate profits captured 88% of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1% of that growth.” This is the stuff that causes revolutions, from the bottom, not from the top.
[..]
CRAMER: Look, I’m telling you that when you get off the desk with them, they really just feel like, look, if we got a Republican in there, we could really do a great thing in this country by hiring a lot of people.

My rage meter at Cramer's gleeful dishonesty is just redlining. CEOs are telling him privately that they're just waiting for a Republican in the White House to hire people while Americans suffer through massive unemployment? Well then NAME NAMES, Cramer, you dishonest jerk, and tell us just which CEOs are telling you this and who are acting so treasonously. Because Chris Matthews--to his credit, since you apparently don't believe in offering up these facts to these business owners--pointed out all the reasons that Obama could hardly be considered anti-business. These asses were bailed out by American taxpayers, posted record profits, pocketed nice little bonuses...but they need a Republican in the White House to pass that largesse back to the Americans? Well to put it bluntly, eff that.

And eff Cramer and his ridiculous advocacy for Republican lies.

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As I've already written about here in my post on Neil Cavuto bringing in a speed reader to attack government regulations, as Media Matters pointed out, Fox News began a week long assault on government regulations in conjunction with the GOP's push to roll those regulations back as well. During their weekly address, Rep. Peter Roskam continued that assault.

Some of the businesses he named off have already been written about at C&L, such as the Gibson guitar case, and the GOP's attempt to gut the NLRB and their union busting in the Boeing case. Roskam also mentioned a business called Chicago White Metal Casting, which is "a third-generation family-owned die casting company employing 250 workers in suburban Chicago", that apparently isn't too happy about the amount of paperwork they're having to do in order to comply with the Clean Air Act and mercury emissions standards.

Fox did some follow up on the numbers being pushed over at Fox "News" on the costs of regulations which I'm sure were fed to them straight from the GOP here -- Fox's Attack On Regulations Relies On Widely Discredited Cost Estimate:

As part of a weeklong series helping to push an anti-regulatory agenda, Fox News is citing a discredited estimate that regulations cost businesses on average $161,000 each year. The estimate, which comes from a report prepared by outside researchers for the Small Business Administration, has been criticized for using a flawed research design, cherry-picking the highest cost estimates, and relying on "crude" data.

Lots more there and I don't want to just copy and paste all of their research here, so just go read the rest. And they also followed with another post this weekend which took a closer look at just what government programs, laws and regulations Fox, and by default the GOP were carping about as "burdensome" to small business owners.

Fox's War On Regulations Takes On Child Labor, Workplace Safety, Civil Rights Laws:

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Credit: Planet Green.com

What a relief for these soldiers and their families! Would it be too much to ask that they get whatever help they need?

​There's no denying it now: Gulf War Syndrome, characterized by memory loss, lack of concentration, neuropathic pain and depression, is a physiological illness, not a psychological one.

A UT Southwestern study, published in the journal Radiology, used a specialized MRI that specifically measures blood flow in the brain and detected marked abnormalities in the brains of those with Gulf War Syndrome. Not only have those abnormalities persisted for 20 years, but in some cases they've worsened.

The findings mark a significant advancement in our understanding of the syndrome, which was for years written off by the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs as a form of combat stress rather than an objectively diagnosable injury.

Dr. Robert Haley, chief epidemiologist at UT Southwestern, and a cadre of clinicians and researchers, have struggled with the government for some 18 years for research funding and to have the syndrome recognized as a legitimate war injury caused by chronic exposure to minimal amounts of sarin gas.

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Credit: Center for American Progress

On Thursday, House Speaker John Boehner peppered his address to the Economic Club of Washington with a dozen mentions of America's so-called "job creators." But in claiming that high taxes and unnecessary regulations have "pummeled" his supposed job producers, Boehner willingly misrepresented the source of and solutions to the nation's economic problems. After all, recent surveys show that regulations and taxes are not killing small business. With corporations flush with cash and the total federal tax burden at a 60 year low, the U.S. instead faces a demand crisis fueled by staggering household debt.

But John Boehner perpetrated the biggest fraud of his address when he declared, "Job creators in America are essentially on strike." If so, they've been on the picket line for a decade. As it turns out, George W. Bush's tax breaks for the wealthy sadly coincided with the worst period of job creation of any president since Herbert Hoover.

Like his lieutenant Eric Cantor, John Boehner has been regurgitating the "job creators" talking point for months. (Arguably, the sound bite dates back to 1993, when Republicans deployed the same "job killing" language against the Clinton upper-income tax increases that preceded the 1990's economic boom.) In May, Boehner served up the "job creators" line seven times in a speech to the Economic Club of New York. Contending that "the mere threat of tax hikes causes uncertainty for job creators -- uncertainty that results in less risk-taking and fewer jobs," Speaker Boehner explained that same month just who his magical job creators are:

"The top one percent of wage earners in the United States...pay forty percent of the income taxes...The people he's [President Obama] is talking about taxing are the very people that we expect to reinvest in our economy."

If so, those expectations were sadly unmet under George W. Bush. After all, the last time the top tax rate was 39.6 percent during the Clinton administration, the United States enjoyed rising incomes, 23 million new jobs and budget surpluses. Under Bush? Not so much.

On January 9, 2009, the Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal summed it up with an article titled simply, "Bush on Jobs: the Worst Track Record on Record." (The Journal's interactive table quantifies his staggering failure relative to every post-World War II president.) The meager one million jobs created under President Bush didn't merely pale in comparison to the 23 million produced during Bill Clinton's tenure. In September 2009, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee charted Bush's job creation disaster, the worst since Hoover:

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Not that this study will make much of an impact anyway, because we all know worry about job growth isn't the real reason the House majority won't extend unemployment benefits. They simply want people to be so desperate, they'll even vote for Republicans:

Generous unemployment benefits have had little effect on the unemployment rate, according to a new study that may help ease concerns that benefits give sidelined Americans a disincentive to hunt for jobs.

Yes, because not being able to pay your mortgage, buy food or put gas in the tank isn't quite disincentive enough. Sometimes I think these economists would get better results if they became voodoo doctors.

Unemployment insurance, which is available for up to 99 weeks in some states, nudged the jobless rate up 0.2 to 0.6 of a percentage point higher than it would have been otherwise, according to a new paper by Jesse Rothstein, a University of California, Berkeley economist and released at the Brookings Institution this week.

“Any negative effects of the recent unemployment insurance extensions on job search are clearly quite small, too small to outweigh the benefits of transfers to people who have been out of work for over a year in conditions where job-finding prospects are bleak,” according to the report.

Economists generally agree that extended jobless benefits increase the unemployment rate. But they disagree on how big the effect is and how damaging that is to the economy.

Generous unemployment insurance can increase joblessness if Americans who are out of work don’t search as hard as they otherwise would have for new jobs. They can also give recipients a reason to hold out for better-paying jobs. Those impacts can be a negative for the economy because it means instead of reentering the job market, sidelined workers are relying on the government for assistance and staying unemployed for longer.

Yes, because as any austerity cheerleader will tell you, it's very important that workers get used to the fact that they're now permanently competing for Third World wages.

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Tea party Rep. John Fleming (R-LA) used himself as an example Monday while arguing against President Barack Obama's plan to make sure millionaires pay about the same tax rate as the people that work for them.

"In my own case, I own LLCs," Fleming told MSNBC's Chris Jansing. "The income flows to my personal tax return and whatever is left over after taxes are paid, I feed my family on the one hand and on the other hand, I reinvest in my business."

"With all due respect, The Wall Street Journal estimated that your businesses, which I believe are Subway sandwich shops and UPS stores -- very successful -- brought you last year, over $6 million," Jansing noted.

"Yeah, that's before you pay 500 employees, you pay rent, you pay equipment and food," Fleming agreed. "Since my net income -- and again, that's the individual rate that I told you about -- the amount that I have to reinvest in my business and feed my family is more like $600,000 of that $6.3 million. And so by the time I feed my family, I have maybe $400,000 left over to invest in new locations, upgrade my locations, buy more equipment."

"You do understand, Congressman, the average person out there making 40, 50, $60,000 a year, when they hear that you have $400,000 left over, it's not exactly a sympathetic position?" Jansing asked.

"Again, class warfares never created a job," Fleming replied. "That's people that will not get jobs. This is all about creating jobs. It's not about attacking people who make certain incomes. You know, in this country, most people feel that being successful in their businesses is a virtue, not a vice. And once we begin to identify it as a vice, this country is going down."

It wasn't clear if the numbers cited by Fleming included his $174,000 congressional salary.

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Dick Cheney is still on his book tour and Sunday he disgraced CBS with an appearance on Face The Nation. Not only has he proclaimed that he was the Decider in Chief of the Bush administration during the 9/11 attacks in his book and the military refused his order to shoot civilian planes down, but he had the audacity to lie about how the Iraq invasion escalated into a full blown civil war after the invasion was over. He responded to Colin Powell's criticisms of the job he did as VP.

COLIN POWELL: "He says that I went out of my way not to present my positions to the President but to take them outside of the administration. That's nonsense. The President knows and I had told him what I thought about every issue of the day. Mister Cheney may forget that I'm the one who said to President Bush 'If you break it, you own it, and you've got to understand that if we have to go to war in Iraq, we've to be prepared for the whole war, not just the first phase.' And Mister Cheney and many of his colleagues were not prepared for what happened after the fall of Baghdad.

Remember, Cheney was the one who kept telling America that the Iraq conflict was in its last throes (as far back as 2005) over and over again as the violence kept escalating. Schieffer actually asked the right question.

SCHIEFFER: Let me just ask you this...was it a mistake to get rid of all the people in the army? To disband the army as they did?

CHENEY: Well, it may have been a mistake. It wasn't as though we had total control over everything. In effect, what happened for a large part of it was they just packed up and went home. They disappeared back into the countryside and went back to their private lives. So they weren't there, it wasn't as though they'd all found a place where they were waiting for us to come in and take command of the army.

What was that? The army's response to being disbanded by the Bush administration immediately destroyed what fragile peace there was and turned the Sunnis Muslims against the Shiite Muslims, leading to a horrifying blood bath.

Probably the single decision that triggered the hostilities was when Paul Bremer was appointed in Iraq and he unceremoniously told Saddam's former army members that they were not allowed to be part of the newly forming government.

Sweeping away remnants of pre-war Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, on Friday dissolved the Iraqi Armed Forces, the ministries of Defense and Information, and other security institutions that supported Saddam Hussein's regime.

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