Catching up on new Rasmussen poll of NM | NMPolitics.net
President Barack Obama leads Republican Rick Santorum 55 percent to 37 percent and Mitt Romney 55 percent to 36 percent in potential head-to-head contests, reports The Santa Fe New Mexican’s Steve Terrell.
Capitalism is a conspiracy: a big stupid clumsy stumbling conspiracy that banks on ignorance quite successfully.
Processed food and coronary capitalism – Opinion – Al Jazeera English [hat tip to dangerousmeta]
Highly processed corn-based food products, with lots of chemical additives, are well known to be a major driver of weight gain, but, from a conventional growth-accounting perspective, they are great stuff. Big agriculture gets paid for growing the corn (often subsidised by the government), and the food processors get paid for adding tonnes of chemicals to create a habit-forming – and thus irresistible – product. Along the way, scientists get paid for finding just the right mix of salt, sugar and chemicals to make the latest instant food maximally addictive; advertisers get paid for peddling it; and, in the end, the healthcare industry makes a fortune treating the disease that inevitably results.
Coronary capitalism is fantastic for the stock market, which includes companies in all of these industries. Highly processed food is also good for jobs, including high-end employment in research, advertising and healthcare.
So, who could complain? Certainly not politicians, who get re-elected when jobs are plentiful and stock prices are up – and get donations from all of the industries that participate in the production of processed food. Indeed, in the US, politicians who dared to talk about the health, environmental, or sustainability implications of processed food would in many cases find themselves starved of campaign funds.
Processed food and coronary capitalism – Opinion – Al Jazeera English
Take Action on SuperPACs and Misleading Advertising
TV and radio stations are required to air political ads from candidates for federal office, Jamieson points out, but that rule doesn’t apply to third-party advertising; station managers run those at their own discretion. Jamieson is calling on regular citizens to encourage their local TV stations to reject misleading political ads. But can conscience defeat cash? Jamieson’s website, Flackcheck.org, makes it easy for users to contact their local station managers.
Watch Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center make her case [at the link].
This graph compares the moderate estimates for each candidates’ debt plan against the president’s. This is all smart guesswork, mind you, but it offers a nonpartisan view of the sort of "deficit reduction" we’re really getting under these proposals. This Y-axis starts at 60, which is the target debt/GDP ratio for CRFB.
Santorum’s defensive debate night – PostPartisan – The Washington Post
And one thing was abundantly clear: The Republican candidates, particularly Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, thought it more important to punish unionized workers than to save the Detroit-based auto industry.
Both sought to defend their opposition to the auto bailout by arguing that the United Auto Workers union was central to the industry’s problems and that bankruptcy was the most desirable outcome because it would have undermined the union. “The UAW would have lost all their advantages,” Gingrich said.
Not a word was said about the sweeping concessions the unions made to save General Motors and Chrysler. And neither faced up to the economic chaos that letting the auto companies go down would have caused throughout the Midwest. No wonder President Obama is ahead by 20 points in Michigan.
Santorum’s defensive debate night – PostPartisan – The Washington Post
Barack Obama, Republicans, and the Campaign for the Middle Class : The New Yorker
“There’s class warfare, all right,” Warren Buffett told the Times, back in 2006, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Barack Obama, Republicans, and the Campaign for the Middle Class : The New Yorker
Ideological hypocrites – The Washington Post EJ Dionne, Jr.
Can conservatives finally face the fact that they actually want quite a lot from government, and that they are simply unwilling to raise taxes to pay for it?
This is why our political system is so broken. Conservatives keep pretending that they can keep anti-government promises that they know perfectly well they are destined to break. We won’t have sensible politics again until our friends on the right bring their rhetorical claims into closer alignment with what they do — and what it takes to make government work. …
Why do they criticize “entitlements” and “big government” while promising today’s senior citizens — an important part of the conservative base — never, ever to cut their Medicare or Social Security? Why do they claim that they want government out of the marketplace while not only rejecting cuts in defense but also lauding large defense contracts that are an enormous intrusion in the operation of the “free market”? …
[S]o many conservative politicians say they’re anti-government but spend long careers in office drawing paychecks from the taxpayers. Also: Why do they bash government largesse while seeking as much of it as they can get for their constituents and friendly interest groups?
