Nov 20, 2012
Republicans continue to believe they lost the election because they weren't conservative enough, so Marco Rubio declares he has no clue how old the Earth is. And why would he? It's only in the science books! And you know you can't get the Republican nomination for president if you read those! Greg Dworkin stopped by to discuss that very subject today, and the impact of the competing schools of Republican Crazy that threaten to pull their already shrinking coalition apart. That's not the same thing as the demise of the Republican Party, mind you. Just a routine headache of coalition politics, really. But if you don't believe in any kind of science, it's hard to even figure out a way to cure your own headache. We also reviewed a lost gem of the Internet, a 2001 Heritage Foundation analysis of the Bush tax cuts, and guess what? They promised a wonderful future, complete with gigantic job growth and the elimination by 2010 of the national debt! All thanks to "dynamic scoring!" Well, neither of those things appear to have worked out very well. But probably only because they weren't conservative enough, or something like that. Finally, we took a look at the Hostess situation, reading an excellent diary from Daily Kos by bluebarnstormer, describing the givebacks already extracted from the unions during the 2005 bankruptcy as context for the new concessions demanded from management, even as that same management votes themselves enormous rasies. Shocking, but not surprising, since the company has been in the process of being devoured from the inside by Bain-style locust capitalism for the past few years. Close call on that whole Mitt Romney thing, people!