Sunday Morning Comin' Down

Blue Gal elegantly sums up the weekly Mouse Circus Fail here:


It was just that bad.

It is virtually always that bad.

For example, Pence went on to lie about tax cuts under both Kennedy and Reagan, claiming a simple, cause/effect relationship between cutting taxes and raising revenues, which conveniently omitted the actual facts behind both the Kennedy/Johnson tax cuts (lower top rates and close loopholes to force the wealthy to pay more) and the Reagan Administration (gutting the budget, setting us on the path to the catastrophe we see around us today.)

There were, of course, no follow up questions which may have shed a little light onto Pence's lies. Because while actual facts aren't that hard to unearth (from Thom Hartmann) --

...
Through the 1950s, though, more and more loopholes for the rich were built into the tax code, so much so that JFK observed in his second debate with Richard Nixon that dropping the top tax rate to 70% but tightening up the loopholes would actually be a tax increase.

JFK pushed through that tax increase to take us back toward FDR/Truman/Eisenhower revenue levels, and we continued to build infrastructure in the US, and even put men on the moon. Health care and college were cheap and widely available. Working people could raise a family and have security in their old age. Every billion dollars (a half-week in Iraq) invested in infrastructure in America created 47,000 good-paying jobs as Americans built America.

But the rich fought back, and won big-time in 1980 when Reagan, until then the fringe “Voodoo economics” candidate who was heading into the election trailing far behind Jimmy Carter, was swept into the White House on a wave of public concern of the Iranians taking US hostages. Reagan promptly cut income taxes on the very rich from 70% down to 27%. Corporate tax rates were also cut so severely that they went from representing over 33% of total federal tax receipts in 1951 to less than 9% in 1983 (they’re still in that neighborhood, the lowest in the industrialized world).

The result was devastating. Our government was suddenly so badly awash in red ink that Reagan doubled the tax paid only by people earning less than $40,000/year (FICA), and then began borrowing from the huge surplus this new tax was accumulating in the Social Security Trust Fund. Even with that, Reagan had to borrow more money in his 8 years than the sum total of all presidents from George Washington to Jimmy Carter combined.
...

-- one has to be willing to permit facts into the arena in the first place, which is why there will never be any serious challenges to liars like Pence on Fox, or virtually anyplace else.

Elsewhere, George Will wiped the spilled Ensure-and-pineal-gland cocktail off of his Health Care debate playbook to once again whinge on and on about the length of something (Financial Regulation is 2,500 pages!) FDR (It’s just like that dang Roosevelt! Capital will go on strike which is just what caused the New Deal to fail!) and how the NAACP is "Left Wing McCarthyism!"

Oddly, no one hit him in the face with a pie, which makes me think that the Mouse Circus clowns are starting to forget what they're there for.

Later that day, I understand that Sister Sarah tried her hand at banter:


As always, Sister Sarah's noble spirit

embiggens even the smallest wingnut.

Meanwhile, over in the Better Universe, Sister Sarah is asked the obvious question:

"Kiss Me Katie" Couric: And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what plays or sonnets by the Bard have you read?

Sister Sarah: I’ve read most of them again with a great appreciation for the writings of great Americans like Bill Shakespeare —

"Kiss Me Katie" Couric: But what ones specifically? I’m curious.

Sister Sarah: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.

"Kiss Me Katie" Couric: Can you name any of them?

Sister Sarah: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our plays. Alaska isn't a foreign country, where, it's kind of suggested and it seems like, 'Wow, how could you know about Cesar Romero and Orange Julius, and of course Omelet, and how he killed his father with a melon, a collie and a Danish?' Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.