Jambalaya, Cornfish Pie, Filé Gumbo

• U.S. District Court Judge overrules ballot suppression tactic.

  [Michigan secretary of state Ruth] Johnson keeps claiming that there are thousands of noncitizens on the Michigan voting rolls, but hasn’t provided actual evidence to back that up. Her claims that illegal votes have been cast in previous elections are contradicted by her own Bureau of Elections. The “need” for that citizenship checkbox is a fabrication, which makes the motives for it suspect. [Emphasis added.]

  Via Mercury Rising.
  
• From the daily howler:  Debates past and present, with lies, corrections, omissions, and ignorance on the part of the media.  Mr. Bush and Mr. Romney lied, but the latter is actually getting called on it in real time.  
• Yankees play Orioles, Tigers play Athletics, the Reds play the Giants, and Washington plays St. Louis.  Best of luck in your best-of-seven!
• Originally from Salon, in AlterNet, via skippy:  Ten ideas for taking America back from the 1%.  I like reregulating Wall Street and fixing the tax system, but the other ideas are good, too.
• Also from AlterNet:  Bill Clinton was Right.  With graphs.

  Some observers will want to focus on Obama’s record. Here’s what we found on that score (using, as noted, the most recent available numbers for Obama). Based on all three of our measures, Obama’s manufacturing jobs record is currently better than eight of the nine Republican presidential terms. President Ronald Reagan’s second term does slightly better than Obama’s incomplete first term, but the numbers are close enough that this may change once we have all the numbers. An interesting question is what Obama’s manufacturing jobs record might have been had he not intervened to save General Motors and Chrysler.

• Some more from AlterNet:  Noam Chomsky (yes.  That Noam Chomsky) on climate change/global warming/your euphemism of choice:

  [...] Previous estimates had summer ice disappearing by 2050. “But governments have not responded to the change with any greater urgency about limiting greenhouse emissions,” Gillis writes. “To the contrary, their main response has been to plan for exploitation of newly accessible minerals in the Arctic, including drilling for more oil” – that is, to accelerate the catastrophe. This reaction demonstrates an extraordinary willingness to sacrifice the lives of our children and grandchildren for short-term gain. Or, perhaps, an equally remarkable willingness to shut our eyes so as not to see the impending peril. That’s hardly all. A new study from the Climate Vulnerability Monitor has found that “climate change caused by global warming is slowing down world economic output by 1.6 percent a year and will lead to a doubling of costs in the next two decades.” The study was widely reported elsewhere but Americans have been spared the disturbing news. The official Democratic and Republican platforms on climate matters are reviewed in Science magazine’s Sept. 14 issue. In a rare instance of bipartisanship, both parties demand that we make the problem worse. [...]

I think AlterNet has to go on the blogroll.

Also, I need to remember to link to items before hitting Publish.

Post-Season Off the Starboard Bow!

Washington Nationals are not only the Eastern Division Champions, they have the best record in the league.  In both leagues.  Not bad for an expansion team.  The Wild Card playoff will be between Atlanta and St. Louis.  Mwahahahahaha.  The winner of that probably plays the Western Division Champs, and Washington gets to play Cincinnati.  (The actual schedule is probably different.)

Texas, meanwhile, gets to play either Baltimore or the Yankees, depending on who loses today's game.  And then Oakland and Detroit will mix it up.

I can hardly wait.

Afternoon Delight

So the first debate is tonight and it's soaking up a lot of the oxygen in the blogosphere; Driftglass has a training video for new judges plus some standards for evaluating debate.  (If you do not care for Mr. Romney, you might find this amusing.)

Meanwhile, Jurassicpork spotted an open letter from a manufacturer on craigslist and responded with a few of the realities of jobhunting in the twenty-first century.  (All that stuff one might suggest he try?  He's tried it already.)  Most unemployed people would prefer working, but employers are shutting out as many as they can through interlocking (and unrealistic) requirements.  Also, they're still discriminating.

Bipartisan banker pampering, or Wall Street might someday get the traditional wet-noodle lashing.  Maybe.  Power and disillusionment and Mr. Biden.  One of the very few areas where it is true that "both sides do it."  (Senator Feinstein isn't really all that liberal, though she must seem so to the rightward-leaning.)

And according to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Tucker Carlson is flogging a video that he already reported on in 2007.  ETA:  Jesse Curtis is On the Case:

I'm glad to see a video like this. I sure hope Obama was angry, and I hope he's still angry. If you're not angry about racial injustice, I have trouble trusting you. If you're not angry, I'm not sure how to relate to you. I understand that many of us have not had the experiences necessary to open our eyes. I can respect that. But these men take it upon themselves to explain the truth to millions of people. They have audiences of millions, and as such their responsibility is heavy. Yet all they know to do is demand that everyone see the world exactly as they do. These men are not necessarily bad, nor are they necessarily stupid, but they have to be one or the other.

The conservative pundits keep promising the Bogeyman, but all they seem to produce is mouse corpses.

Also,

A judge upheld the contraception mandate.

Guess what?  Employees have religious freedom too.

Withholding the benefit is a violation of the employee’s religious liberty and since the benefit is part of a compensation package, trying to control how the employee spends it on religious grounds is really no different than telling the employee she can’t spend her money on birth control because you sign her paychecks.

[...]

Because this is about female sexuality and there’s all these sex-phobic and misogynist arguments being thrown around, the basic issue has gotten somewhat obscured, which is that your boss is not actually your master. Also, your compensation is not your allowance, and they don’t get to dock your pay because they think you’re being naughty on your own time. Conservatives would generally like to give employers more control over their employees, so anyone who supports the plantiffs in these lawsuits because they’re pissed that women are having sex without including them is being an utter fool, as well as an asshole. If the door is opened to allowing employers to control how you use your compensation after you’ve earned it, god only knows what other kinds of restrictions on how you spend your money they’re going to start angling for.

Brief Quote About Distrust of Polls from The Economist

It is, of course, possible that pollsters are all collaborating in an effort to re-elect Barack Obama, just as it is possible that pollsters are all members of the Order of the Knights Templar who are conspiring to effect the return of the Emperor Barbarossa and reinstate the Holy Roman Empire.

It's actually calling for less fanaticism when citing polls.

Mr. Romney just does not endear. Mr. Romney's not much fun with beer. Mr. Romney's written off my tribe. Mr. Romney has that robot vibe.  It's that simple.

Exactly Like Shooting Fish in a Barrel

but necessary.

In other words, Driftglass whacks the expired equine that is David Brooks.

And Melissa McEwan of Shakesville looks at another reason people might not vote for Romney:

Gee, it's almost as if staking out the position that women should have no control over their reproduction, and defending that position with narratives like "women are lying bitchez about rape, anyway," as if women are a dispensable voting bloc and not 52% of the population, is a bad idea. Huh. Who knew.

Y'know, grandfather clauses sound harmless enough if you don't know the history.

Via giandujakiss, voter suppression in Ohio.

From the first article (L.A. Times):

The racial dimension of the 2012 clash over weekend voting burst into the open last month when one of Ohio's most powerful Republicans, Franklin County GOP Chairman Doug Preisse, told the Columbus Dispatch, "We shouldn't contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African American — voter-turnout machine."

Some Democrats see the developments in Ohio as part of a national drive by Obama's opponents to minimize turnout of his supporters, one that includes efforts elsewhere to impose new voter ID rules.

"Too much of this is going on for this not to be a coordinated effort," said Tim Burke, chairman of the Hamilton County Democratic Party in the tea party stronghold of southwestern Ohio.

The Rev. Rousseau A. O'Neal, one of a group of black ministers from Cincinnati who provided buses to take African Americans to the polls in 2008 and plan to do so again in November, described the tea party project and the curtailment of weekend voting as "bigotry of the highest order."

"Who ever thought we'd be fighting for the right to vote in 2012?" he asked.

The tea party groups, scattered around the state, have joined forces under the banner of the Ohio Voter Integrity Project. It is an offshoot of True the Vote, a Texas organization that has recruited volunteers nationwide to challenge voter rosters and work as poll watchers.

[...]

In Ohio, election records show, one of the project's top priorities has been to remove college students from the voter rolls for failure to specify dorm room numbers. (As a group, college students are strongly in Obama's camp.)

Voters challenged include 284 students at the Ohio State University campus in Columbus, 110 at Oberlin College, 88 at College of Wooster, 38 at Kent State — and dozens more from the University of Cincinnati, Miami University, Lake Erie College, Walsh University, Hiram College, John Carroll University and Telshe Yeshiva, a rabbinical college near Cleveland.

So far, every county election board that has reviewed the dorm challenges found them invalid.

From the second (Slate):

At issue are potentially thousands of Ohio ballots that the state will not count solely because of poll worker error. Here’s the problem: A number of the state’s polling places, especially in cities, cover more than one voting precinct, and in order to cast a valid vote, a voter has to be given the correct precinct ballot. Poll workers, however, often hand voters the wrong precinct ballot mistakenly. In earlier litigation involving a disputed 2010 juvenile judge race in Hamilton County, Ohio, a poll worker testified to sending a voter whose address started with the numbers “798” to vote in the precinct for voters with odd-numbered addresses because the poll worker believed “798” was an odd number. This “right church, wrong pew” problem with precinct ballots was a big problem in 2008, when over 14,000 such ballots were cast.

Ohio law says wrong precinct ballots cannot be counted, even for the races for which a person is eligible to vote (including president), and the Ohio Supreme Court confirmed this point in 2011, in the dispute over the juvenile judge race. Astonishingly, under Ohio law a voter can be disenfranchised not through some nefarious plan but through the simple incompetence of poll workers.

In the SEIU case, voters are arguing that the failure to count wrong precinct ballots caused by poll worker error violates the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection and due process. A federal district court in Ohio agreed, and issued a preliminary injunction requiring the state to count these ballots (and some other provisional ballots as well). Ohio has appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit—that’s the hearing today.

Ohio, remember, is a swing state; there was some dispute about the results in 2004.

ETA:  Judge in Pennsylvania stops voter ID requirement from going into effect.  This year.

The Hard Stuff

In which people analyze things by way of other things and what I ignore is many other folks' fascination.  Or something like that.

• Mark Evanier looks at U.S. businesses and their practices:

  The thing I was asked to be an expert about — and I wasn't, which was one reason I said no — was about executive compensation. A senior exec was hired away from another firm. He did almost nothing at the new firm — and what he did do was by his own admission, wrong. They fired him and he left with a $20 million Golden Parachute. (I told them I could make bad decisions for them for less than half that salary.) The suit was about that he thought he deserved more.

• Via Cofax7's linkspam, the problems with political polling (the article is actually titled "The.  Polls.  Have.  Stopped.  Making.  Any.  Sense." but as you know I am rather an agnostic about polls and surveys anyway so my bias is confirmed; your bias may vary) in this election.  Yes, it is six pages.  They're still not allowed to make robocalls to cell phones.  Yet.
• Doghouse Riley on Mr. Romney as fact-checker.

  So to recap: the President a) refuses to acknowledge that insurance-paid contraception is actually abortion; b) refuses to admit that for-profit operations which receive federal funds but are owned by a particular cult are, in fact, churches, because 1) Karl Rove and 2) the Constitution clearly say so. And that c) this qualifies as "unprecedented", despite the fact that the identical thing has occurred in  American history, and occurs today with some of those same institutions under state law, and has actually been topped, unquestionably, by other restrictions on religious expression (notably the anti-Mormon laws that preceded Utah statehood).

Can I do a Rip van Winkle now?

There is also (you can Google it; I need a hot shower with a loofah) a new right-wing smear asserting that Mr. Obama was fathered by someone other than his father (which would mean Mr. Obama is neither Kenyan nor Muslim; I don't suppose that bunch is smart enough to figure that that invalidates their original lie).  The proper, Archie-comic level response is "Puh-leeeeeeeeeze!"  Yeah, they got nothin' (technical term) if that's the best they can do.

In better news, Washington has clinched the Eastern Division title; Atlanta has clinched the wild card.  Washington and Cincinnati are tied for best record in the NL.  Detroit gets the Central Division title (White Sox eliminated); Yankees, Baltimore, Texas, and Oakland have playoff slots.  St. Louis is likely to be the other NL wild card team.  We shall see.

In Memoriam

1. Eric Hobsbawm, historian.
   
   I have one of his books around here.  Somewhere.
2. Dr. Barry Commoner, scientist.

The Billionaires Cower

They're calling themselves victims.

No, really.

Oooops!

Tampa Bay eliminated, Yankees and Baltimore tied for first/wild card, and the season is in its last week.

It's baseball, guys.

One-Stop Hoop-Jumping

Requirements for registering and voting in the 50 states.

Just following Mr. Scalzi's advice.

Why I Call It Republican Satanic Panic

Via Mercury Rising, Truthout reports on actual voter fraud.  Now, don't be surprised.

And, earlier this year, in 2012, the Sacramento Republican Party was found to have hired Momentum Political Services, a firm headed up by a woman described as a "professional con-artist". The group allegedly turned in thousands of fraudulent voter registrations as part of a $50,000 bounty scheme seeking Republican registrations, as paid for by the GOP in the district of Republican Congressman Dan Lungren.
All the while, Republicans were loudly accusing Democrats of committing "voter fraud" requiring polling place Photo ID restrictions to stop it, even though there are just 10 known cases of in-person impersonation --- the only type of voter fraud that can possibly be deterred by Photo ID --- out of hundreds of millions of votes cast in all 50 states since 2000, according to a recent exhaustive report by the non-partisan investigative news consortium, News21.

Brad Friedman, author of this article, has an earlier story on higher-level fraud.

Mmmmmm-hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Mr. Scalzi's Homework for US Voters

It’s important that you make sure you are registered to vote and that you know the laws of your state regarding what you need to identify yourself when you come in to vote (here’s what you need for the state of Ohio, for example). The longer you put this off, the more chance you have to be unpleasantly surprised by requirements you did not know about.


Yes, there’s an entire conversation to have about “voter fraud” and laws being passed to “combat” it, and yes, those scare quotes are there for a very good reason. However, that’s an argument to have some other time. Right now, what I want you to focus on as as a prospective voter is this: Don’t be surprised, do know what hoops your state is going to make you jump through on election day, and jump through those hoops. Don’t go to the polls unaware.

I'm Onyx Lynx, and I approve Mr. Scalzi's message.

(Driftglass has a pic of Harlan Ellison with a Photoshopped beard.  Surprisingly handsome.)

47% Is Lowballing

More like 96%.  Because some government aid is disguised.

In other words, a lot of Republicans get benefits and then live in denial. Not surprising, really. It’s the same reason that a lot of Republicans use contraception, but nonetheless think that it’s just fine and dandy to claim Sandra Fluke is the Biggest Ho Ever because she uses contraception.

P.S. Libertarians, too.

Fun With Plutocracy

Austerity, Greeks, the general strike, and suicide.

Austerity is killing Greece’s economy, and taking Greek citizens down with it. Forty percent of Greece’s GDP comes from the public sector — represented by the workers going on strike this week. Cuts to the public sector must eventually impact the private sector negatively, as more people are out of work, and can’t or don’t pay bills.

Terrance of Republic of T reports.

Turning, Spinning, Catherine-Wheeling

Southern Beale over at First Draft notes the peculiar parameters that Mr. Romney must operate within and the nature of conservatism:

Isn't that just typical? Whenever reality contradicts conservative ideology, it's always the reality that's wrong, and the conservative solution is always to create their own version of whatever so-called "liberal" thing vexes them at the moment. It must be exhausting creating your own alternate reality: your own news network, your own Bible, your own science and history, and on, and on. Expensive, too. But there you have it.

[...]

Anything deemed "liberal" by conservatives now has its right-wing counterpart, catering exclusively to right-wingers. The results have been predictable: a core group of intractable true believers increasingly cut off from the rest of the electorate.

Conservapedia doesn't get mentioned, but it was my first thought.

Also in the Slow Death of Newspapers, Maariv is in bad shape.

Remember 2004?

It's not just voter suppression/intimidation; Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman question electronic voting and unverifiable results:

Would this batch of swing state Republicans do that for Romney.

We don’t know.

COULD they do it?

Absolutely.

Would you be able to find definitive, legally admissable proof that they did it?

No.

Would the courts overturn such a tainted victory?

Not likely.

What could ultimately be done about it?

In the short term: ....nothing.

In the long-term, only a bottom-up remaking of how we cast and count ballots ballots can guarantee this nation anything resembling a true democracy. It is, to put it mildly, a reality worth fighting for.

The Smirking Chimp, sounding a warning.  Also, they're fundraising, so if you have spare cash, you might want to slip them some.

Indisputably Disreputable History

• I believe the group True the Vote was mentioned previously--this is who they are and what they do.  Voter suppression/intimidation has a long history:

  Conservative anti–voter fraud fervor first arose around the same time as two turning points in American politics. The first was John F. Kennedy’s narrow presidential win in 1960, which many Republicans attributed to voter fraud in Illinois and Texas. The second was the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which, by banning discriminatory voting practices, stoked fear in some quarters about the rising power of black voters. During the run-up to the 1964 presidential election, the Republican National Committee launched Operation Eagle Eye, the nation’s first large-scale anti–voter fraud campaign. As part of the program, the RNC recruited tens of thousands of volunteers to show up at polling places, mostly in inner cites, and challenge voters’ eligibility using a host of tools and tactics, including cameras, two-way radios, and calls to Republican-friendly sheriffs.

• Mr. Coates has a post, mostly referring to the article excerpted above, but referring to Lincoln's assassin.

Run in the Shadows

• Job creation--Democrats are better at it, according to this article.
• I seem to have missed the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation (150 years ago!  Who'dathunkit?), but Doctor Science at Obsidian Wings didn't. And I didn't know that Lincoln approved a code of war!
• Via Mercury Rising, Richard Wolff's article on faulting government for the mistakes of capital.
• The former owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates came out.
• Kansas City is out of contention.

Ahem.

San Francisco and Cincinnati have clinched division titles.

Dodgers and Cardinals eliminated.

Speaking of the Election

The NY Times has discovered voter harassment, then and now.

In The Times on Monday, Stephanie Saul described how the plan works. True the Vote grew out of a Tea Party group in Texas, the King Street Patriots, with the assistance of Americans for Prosperity, a group founded by the Koch brothers that works to elect conservative Republicans. It has developed its own software to check voter registration lists against driver’s license and property records. Those kinds of database matches are notoriously unreliable because names and addresses are often slightly different in various databases, but the group uses this technique to challenge more voters.

Also, Sarah Silverman has a video encouraging getting necessary ID.  In, of course, her own inimitable style.  Not safe for work, around conservatives, or people who don't like her humor.

B Cool...

Arizona is eliminated.  Don't everyone cheer at once.

Why American Women Should Vote

Couple of turns through websites (I think I started with The Sideshow, but it turns out that I actually bookmarked the Guardian [aka the Grauniad] a while back) brought me to this editorial/commentary in the Guardian laying out reasons that the votes of women in the US elections this year are important.

This year, though, Belle's exhortations to her friends have become less about simply exercising the right to suffrage and more about preserving other hard-won rights. She believes that regardless of who they vote for, all women should vote – but, she tells her friends, we should vote for the party that will do most for women. There's a great deal to be done to ensure that women have all the same opportunities as men, and she knows that the Republicans won't do it.

What with all the disenfranchisement efforts going around (see the label "You don't want me to vote." [which I need to relabel, stupid Blogger] for instances of attempts to suppress the electorate, using Republican Satanic panic "voter fraud" as the excuse) it makes sense to a) MAKE SURE YOU CAN VOTE and b) VOTE.  No, I don't want to hear about how boring it is.  No, I don't want to hear about how all the candidates are alike.  You're an adult.   Deal.

And Then...

Driftglass takes Ted Koppel to the woodshed task for the failure of mainstream media.  With bonus Hunter S. Thompson.

Also, one gets more "positive" results when drug companies sponsor trials of their product than when, say, the government sponsors those trials.  (Gee...wonder why?)

ETA:  The two parts of the Great Depression.  Witness and researcher.

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

• Washington clinched!  (Playoff berth so far.)  Those of you of a certain age remember when the Nats (which used to be short for "Senators" and is now short for "Nationals") would be considered lucky to be out of last place.  They wouldn't have a young phenom named Joe Hardy on the team, would they?  (Apparently not, but they do have Kurt Suzuki and Gio Gonzalez.)
  
  The last time the Washington team went to the post season (they didn't have playoffs unless there was a tie for first back then) was 1933.
• Naked Capitalism publishes Project S.H.A.M.E.'s exposé of Megan McArdle as a stealth libertarian conservative writer.  (Project S.H.A.M.E.'s investigations of other media lights are here.)  Mercury Rising links and has short quotes.
• Street preachers on a university campus.

  This generation wants to hear the rest of the biblical message, that faith without works is dead, do not look down on anybody, the only thing that matters is faith expressing itself through love, judgment is based on how you treat the most needy people.
  
  These things, the heart of Christian living it seems to me, have not been traditionally emphasized. Instead it's like, "Repent, adopt Victorian Era sexual norms and be saved from hell!" That's not a particularly appealing message. Don't get me wrong, our culture's sexual norms are sinful. But we should not expect people who do not accept, or necessarily understand, the Gospel message to abide by Christian moral standards. Why should they? There are good reasons I waited to have sex until I got married. But we cannot make sense of that choice, which looks so silly on the surface, until we've explored all the more important stuff from which it stems: the grace of God, faith expressing itself in love, caring for the needy, etc.

• Foreclosure is taking too long, so fees are getting imposed on some mortgages.
• Conservative Conor Friedersdorf diagnoses the right wing:

  The right needs to value robust argument more highly. And to denigrate those who subvert it more forcefully. For public discourse is all it has to test ideas and formulate an evolving agenda.
  
  If Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager reflect on why they conduct themselves with more integrity [...], even though they needn't do so to succeed in talk radio; if the most intellectually honest scholars at the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation think about why they hold themselves to a higher standard than the most hackish of their colleagues; if all the people who know better reflect on the reasons for their own behavior, they'd perhaps better appreciate why it is vital to stop staying silent when prominent co-ideologues fall short of the most minimal standards.

  [I removed a pair of names tht do not sully my space voluntarily.]
• Republic of T picks up some more reactions to Mr. Romney's remarks.
• Voting Expert (from Brookings Institute) explains extreme rarity of Republican Satanic panic voter fraud to Faux News host Shepard Smith.  Mr. Smith is still sitting on the floor with fingers in his ears screaming "Lalalalala I can't hear you.."
• A different reaction to Mr. Romney's remarks.

Not Going to the Dance

Toronto, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and San Diego get to watch the post season from their well-appointed homes.

Also, Cincinnati Reds have clinched!

Old Template Gone

Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrhhh!

(I forgot to Talk Like a Pirate today.)

Other Vices, Other Grooms

• Via The Sideshow, Chris Hedges:

  Last week, round one in the battle to strike down the onerous provision [§1021(b)(2) of the NDAA], one that saw me joined by six other plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg, ended in an unqualified victory for the public. U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest, who accepted every one of our challenges to the law, made her temporary injunction of the section permanent. In short, she declared the law unconstitutional.

• Also via The Sideshow, Mark Karlin interviews Greg Palast on the upcoming election heist in which the Democrats are apparently accomplices before the fact.
• Speaking of election heists, Minnesota Republicans are preparing to panic:

  It apparently doesn’t faze Minnesota Republicans one bit when it’s pointed out that the ALEC-inspired "Voter ID" amendment legislation — legislation which by the way won’t stop the sort of voter fraud Republicans say it was meant to stop — will make it harder for many nonwhite Minnesotans to vote. For the leaders of the Grand Old Party, which has used the Southern Strategy as its operational platform for so long its members have forgot they were once the Party of Lincoln, Jim Crow racism isn’t a bug but a feature — they figure that the more their fan base hears this, the better.
  
  But when the fact that it stands to ruin the budgets of dozens of Minnesota counties gets publicly aired by a growing number of local media outlets, that’s when the Republicans get worried.

  Phoenix Woman at -- yes -- Daily Kos, via Mercury Rising.  (Bluestem Prairie has done a lot to expose the financial aspect of Republican Satanic panic voter ID.)
• Oh, by the way...the IRS has apparently been ignoring violations of its own rules.  (As always, double underlines=ads.  It's naked capitalism, yo.)
• Jesse Curtis doesn't like arrogance.
• Enough bake sales were conducted to film Atlas Shrugged II:  The Indifference.  It opens Columbus Day.  Also opening that day:  Something called Seven Psychopaths.  With Christopher Walken.  No contest.  
• What, isn't that enough?
• ETA:  Mr. Romney is not showing his competent side, is he?  Also, I know Hollywood had a hard time giving up the Russian villain character, but this is ridiculous.

While Mr. Romney Dines on Shoe Sandwich

...let's have a look at a graph and figures detailing this "pay no taxes" deal.

The first thing one notices is that sizable chunk of "Paid payroll taxes."  That would be what we call "withholding."  For the benefit of Mr. Romney:  That means that the money is deducted from the paycheck and sent to the IRS by the employer, who then issues the lovely W-2 form showing how much was paid.  One then communes with one of the 1040 family of tax return forms to determine the amount actually owed.  On occasion money has been over-withheld, and those people are sent the excess as a refund.  (Occasionally, money is under-withheld, and these people must send a check covering the amount, but I doubt Mr. Romney counts them because not for the full amount.)  This is a system meant to be as painless as possible.  They are still paying Federal (and probably state) tax.  They're working and middle class people, and frankly, they've worked harder than Mr. Romney ever will.

Elderly, ie recipients of Social Security, are not taxed unless they make over an amount determined by law.  They've also put many years' worth of earnings into the system.  People who make less than a certain amount (in the graph and figures, $20,000, but there's the standard deduction and exemptions to take into account) do not have to pay, although they have to file.

The less-than-1% (funny, that) not otherwise accounted for would seem to include...millionaires.

But it isn’t just low-income households that pay no federal income taxes, Williams said. He estimated that 1,400 millionaires didn’t pay federal income taxes in 2009, with many likely taking advantage of foreign tax credits or charitable donations to lower their tax liability.

In other words, Mr. Romney should have queried his figures before slinging numbers around.