This has a wonderfully old-school 70′s feel to it, and while it’s one of the great f-you songs I’ve heard in a long time, I don’t know why they went all Mr. and Mrs. Smith for this video.

I love discovering new bloggy places. Today, I point you to This Ruthless World, which is not only well written, but shares the bulk of my biases.

Here are some nuggets from the post that sucked me in (12 Things I Want Every Politically Opinionated Person To Take To Heart):

2. Don’t beat yourself in the chest about how much you love the Constitution unless you actually know and understand what it says. The Constitution is not like Jesus. Your duty as a good citizen isn’t to believe in it, or to love it. Your duty is to know and understand it, and thus be aware of how it impacts your life and the life of this country. The Constitution is a law, and law isn’t based on faith; it’s based on reason, experience and wisdom, or at least should be. In light of these facts, please, pretty please, read the damned thing. Then read the commentaries. Then read case law. Make sure you really understand it, especially as applied to facts. I am not saying you have to agree with every interpretation ever made. I am not saying people have to agree on which interpretations are good and which are bad. But please, respect the Constitution by familiarizing yourself with it in-depth, and when you dissent from someone’s interpretation, make sure your opinion is an informed one. Don’t just waive the Constitution around like it’s a crucifix or a string of garlic. It’s not magic.

3. “Limited government” does not mean small, underfunded or impotent government. Once you familiarize yourself with the Constitution, this will become clear. The Constitution limits the reach of the Federal government by enumerating its powers. To translate this into lay, it’s a “glass half-empty is glass half-full”-type situation: the Federal government does not have the general police power (that’s reserved to the States), but the Constitution does explicitly grant the Federal government certain specific and very important powers. Attempting to curtail those powers in the name of “limited government” makes no sense and betrays a profound lack of understanding of the Constitution.

[snip]

6. The differences between conservatives and liberals have nothing to do with the size of government. People who want the police to investigate every miscarriage as a possible homicide do not argue in good faith when they claim that they want “the government out of our business”. People who want to amend the Constitution to define “marriage” — despite the fact that domestic relations have NEVER been the province of federal law — do not argue in good faith when they claim that they want to stop the federal government’s encroachment on state power. Here is the real distinction between liberals and conservatives: Liberals want the government to extensively police commerce, but not to police private, consensual conduct, artistic expression or scientific inquiry. Conservatives want the government to police private consensual conduct, artistic expression and scientific inquiry, but to leave commerce alone. Both sides are more than willing to have the government spend oodles of money getting all up in people’s business, depending on what kind of business it is. An excess of anything is bad, but if I had to choose the lesser of two evils, I would say that we as a society have less to fear from an excess of liberalism than from an excess of conservatism. I don’t expect everyone to agree, but I really wish more people would appreciate the real distinction here.

There are more (of course – there are twelve, and I quoted three). Head over and check it out.

Hide the children: there’s yet another GOP debate tonight – this time in Jacksonville, Florida.  I look forward to questions about whom Newt would appoint as our Lunar Colonial overseer.

I’ll be on the road, so any nuggets will have to wait until next week. But I’ve found that Richard Adam’s Guardian liveblog is highly entertaining. You should be able to find it on this page. Or you can go with Sully.

Meanwhile, the esteemed pundit Fidel Castro sums up the primary contest of this once proud party succinctly: “…[it] is is — and I mean this seriously — the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.”

I’m guessing he hasn’t trolled some of our local contests, but his point is well taken.

This:

I have no illusions about what last night’s speech was. It was a campaign speech, full of plans and promises that don’t have a sick wife’s chance with Newt Gingrich of ever being passed into law. This is dispiriting, but, considering that Congress has managed to achieve an approval rating that’s barely hovering in single-digits, and considering that it’s an election year and not much would’ve gotten done even if the current Congress wasn’t full of ignorant vandals and politically recalcitrant cementheads, that was completely to be expected. And the plans and promises were surprisingly bold, considering the source. Some of the president’s base is not going to be happy with a lot of the speech; I’m not overjoyed with the saber-rattling over Iran, or the notion that the American political system is basically supposed to be Seal Team 6. (Eric Cantor is supposed to have the president’s back? The president’s supposed to have his? What planet are we on here?) But there are unmistakable signs in the speech that the president’s re-election campaign is going to place the consequences of a rigged economy squarely in the middle of the debate and, coming on the day on which we got a look at the details of Willard Romney’s Most Excellent Life, that is to be applauded more than mildly.

“…a sick wife’s chance with Newt Gingrich…”  Is there a Pulitzer for stuff like that?

Sullivan brings us these thoughts from Will Wilkinson about how making a lot of money isn’t more immoral than making less money.

Wilkinson begins by quoting Michael Kinsley, who notes that he has “…a friend, a banker, who voted for Obama in 2008 but senses that he is being picked on unfairly. Which he is.”

Well, unless he’s Bernie Madoff, he’s not being picked on in any meaningful way at all, except that the President has (rightly) noted that the peculiar incentives of Wall Street, combined with a lack of regulation and, um, morality (my word) led to the collapse of the global financial system, and lots of people had to bail Wall Street out.  Kinsley’s friend may not have caused the crisis, but neither did I, and yet Republicans in this country seem to be saying that the only people who SHOULDN’T have to chip in to knock down the deficits that came out of that collapse, two wars that were bought on credit, a Medicare benefit that was charged as well, and tax cuts that disproportionately benefitted the top tier of earners in this country is…that same top tier.

Quite frankly, I fucking feel picked on when Paul Ryan suggests that there be no Medicare for me, because I’m 3 years too young to get the system that actually covers something (and yes, I know it’s got problems, but vouchers that don’t keep up with costs? Please), and  people who are subsisting on poverty level wages might be angry when they’re told they don’t pay enough taxes.

And then there’s this:

…most complaints about the American 1% are not grounded on the view that the global political economy is a comprehensive web of exploitation. It’s based on the supposition that the domestic 1% is guilty of something or other the domestic 10 or 30 or 50% isn’t, and therefore deserves to be a target of scorn in a way the 10 or 30 or 50% does not. But, however you slice it, it’s going to be true that a lot of people in the top 1% got there in pretty much the same way a lot of people in the top 30 or 50% got there.

Except…No, dammit. That’s not it.

In short, Mr. and Mrs. 1%, when the President of the United States says that you should pay more taxes, he’s not doing it because he doesn’t like you (although, if your name rhymes with Flit Promney, he might not like you that much), or you’re somehow a crook: he’s saying it because everyone else in this country is being asked to pony up, and why not you, too?

So: the notion that asking the rich to pay more taxes is the same as attacking them is, shall we say, false. If you’re rich, and you want to know when people are attacking you, keep an eye pealed for the torches and pitchforks.

That’s not to say there isn’t a moral scale to wages. I think we can say that robbing banks is less moral than, say, digging ditches, and robbing old ladies on the street is less moral than that.  And there are legal ways in which people acquire wealth that seems…less moral.

I’d argue that the Private Equity model is less moral than Venture Capital.  Venture Capital takes risks to build something pretty much from scratch, and if they’re successful, they make a lot of money, and if they’re not, they don’t.

Private Equity enters into an existing company, collects significant management fees, takes actions that may or may not benefit the company in the long term in order to make it more attractive to sell, and then sells.  Private equity makes money off the gain on the sale and the fees it gets, which means that they can fail at the task of strengthening a business (keeping in mind that making a business stronger is not their charge), watch it go under, and make money, leading to layoffs for hundreds of people whose only sin was working for a company acquired by private equity.

Too many people conflate private equity with venture capital. They are not the same thing.

I’d suggest that a system that allows rich people to profit from their failure in a way not available to everyone else is unfair, and I think Mitt Romney ought to have to answer questions about that for as long as he’s running for President.

And one more thing: the Bain Staples investment looks a lot more like a venture capital deal to me than a traditional private equity deal. Funny how that’s Romney’s favorite job-creation example.

P.S. See also this Krugman post, which has this nugget:

[Larry] Summers and [Andrei] Shleifer argued back in 1988 that buyouts are often aimed at “value redistribution” rather than “value creation”; specifically, a lot of the gains to the buyout specialists come from breaking implicit contracts with “workers, suppliers, and other corporate stakeholders.”

They make one especially keen point: if it were really about adding efficiency, why do the same people lead takeovers in many industries, instead of people with specific expertise in each industry doing the job? Their answer is that these specialists are specialists in deal-breaking, not value creation.

Amen.

Boring, but effective.

Also, what Drum said:

I’m a Democrat and a fan of the president, but even I found this speech formulaic, devoid of interesting ideas, and built almost solely for applause lines. Presumably this means that it’s going to poll through the roof. Joe and Jane Sixpack will love it. And with that, Campaign 2012 has officially gotten underway.

In short, it doesn’t matter that he wasn’t talking to me.

Lots of little things…

• Newt walloped Mitt in South Carolina. But you knew that. Meanwhile, Mitt released two years of his tax returns – and don’t expect any more, by golly – and his effective tax rate is barely more than a self-employed individuals payroll taxes.
• Mitt’s campaign released a lovely collection of some of Newt’s most self-aggandizing quotes after the loss, not realizing that, to lots of his supporters, those are a feature, not a bug.
• Almost simultaneously, Gingrich released one of his contracts with Freddie Mac – you know, that $25,000-a-month historian gig that so many academics took advantage of. The other years? Short answer: we’re looking for them.
• James Suroweicki at The New Yorker looks at private equity firms, and points out that they quite often rely on- gasp! – government subsidies. And Joe Klein notes that the nature of private equity deals leads them to make short-term decisions that end up costing the firms in the long term.
• There’s one Republican who is concerned about downtrodden public employees. It’s Scott Brown (R-MA) [Corrected from D-MA], and he’s concerned about the teachers, cops, and firefighters who might be dinged if the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy are allowed to expire.  Not, you know, about the ones whose pay & benefits Republicans around the country seem hell-bent on cutting.
• And Rick Santorum (icky link here) is really a despicable human being.

The guys got some pipes.

Full version from Al Green here.

1. Mitt, you’re a smart guy. Figure out this whole tax return thing. [It would help if you had 1/10th the character of your father, but, as Rick Perlstein points out, you learned the wrong lesson from George Romney's failures.]

2. Newt, God bless you, you certainly know how to crank up the base by playing the “vicious left wing media card.” I assume you realize that no one takes you seriously when you talk about the sanctity of marriage:

Cartoon by Matt Davies via GoComics.com

Also, too? Your position on question of this sort has, shall we say, evolved…

1. Unable to hit Mitt Romney with a canned flip-flopper soundbite in a debate.

2. Unable to remember which Cabinet departments he doesn’t understand should be eliminated.

3.  Um…ooops.

So Perry’s gone. Actually, he was doing just great, until the merciless demands of the campaign forced him to open his mouth.