Friday links! Obliviousnessery edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 0 Comment

We’re in the city!

“Everything that exists without my knowledge,” remarks Judge Holden near the end of Blood Meridian, “exists without my permission.” A whole bunch of stuff that we don’t know about it happening out there, and the more we learn about it, the more we extend our authority. Another way to put that is “the more we extend our responsibility,” and sometimes—as in the photo above—innocence is only possible through ignorance. That doesn’t work once you introduce a third party, of course. Once you know about someone else’s ignorance, their innocence evaporates—but then you’re offering their behavior a Holdeneque permission. It’s a damn thicket, is what it is. Today is Friday, and the internet has made it harder to remain ignorant than ever before. Won’t you expand the scope of your indulgence with me?

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Close Readings: Paul Ryan walks out on local TV reporter

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 1 Comment

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n-pjl0UHaE#!

Paul Ryan and this reporter from Michigan’s WJRT manage to pack an impressive amount of hostility into 90 seconds. My sense of any given Ryan interview is colored by the fear that he is going to lunge forward and drink my blood, but he seems not to have handled this one well. The abrupt end, followed by his staffer’s genius attempt to cover the camera lens with a piece of paper, overshadows what he actually says. But what he says is kind of awful—long quote after the jump.

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We should totally start a national death pact

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 6 Comments

The Richmond Bridge in London: funded with a tontine and has not fallen down. Coincidence?

Yesterday I got to reading Bruce Bartlett’s editorial in the Times, wherein he laments House Republicans’ passage of a bill advocating voluntary taxation. It’s not going to turn into anything; we’re talking about Congress, here. If it were a real law, though, HR 6410 would allow taxpayers to designate a contribution in addition to the liability on their returns for the purposes of deficit reduction. The IRS already has a fund for accepting gifts, so practically this bill that won’t become a law will not have changed anything if it does. It is called The Buffett Rule Act of 2012.

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Harry Reid heard Romney didn’t pay taxes for like 10 years

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 5 Comments

Harry Reid meets with a reporter from the Huffington Post.

The Senate Majority Leader noticed a hole in our politico-media system yesterday, and he exploited the hell out of it. In an interview with the Huffington post, Harry Reid said he had spoken to a former Bain investor who said Mitt Romney “didn’t pay any taxes for 10 years.” Of course, Reid couldn’t say who the investor was or how said investor ran across a decade’s worth of Romney’s tax returns, just as he couldn’t say that the allegation was true. But he could say some other stuff:

He didn’t pay taxes for 10 years! Now, do I know that that’s true? Well, I’m not certain. But obviously he can’t release those tax returns. How would it look? You guys have said his wealth is $250 million. Not a chance in the world. It’s a lot more than that. I mean, you do pretty well if you don’t pay taxes for 10 years when you’re making millions and millions of dollars.

In keeping with its code of ethics, The Huffington Post published that stuff immediately.

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McConnell proposes Faustian bargain

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 6 Comments

Unless stepmother lets us eat all the cake we want?

As the August 3rd deadline to either raise the federal debt ceiling or submit to our Chinese masters nigh approaches, Mitch McConnell has proposed a new solution: Congress could authorize President Obama to increase the borrowing limit himself. The Senate Minority Leader suggested that the President be given the authority to allow an additional $2.4 trillion in debt over the next year, provided he specifies an equal amount in spending cuts. It’s an odd move, given that negotiations have foundered for weeks on Republican demands that the President agree to cuts before the ceiling is raised. Unless you are a Republican, in which case negotiations have foundered on the President’s insistence that 25% of the increase be covered by taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

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