Daniel Radcliffe On Being Gay

Well, it’s not like people in the Bible Belt are going to listen to what a heretical wizard has to say anyway!

Mitt Romney: A 100 Percent Ruling Class Jerk

The Article: A 100 percent ruling class jerk by Danny Katch in Socialist Worker.

The Text: THERE ARE many delicious ironies to savor from Mitt Romney’s now infamous remarks at a private fundraiser in May that were secretly recorded and released to the public by Mother Jones magazine.

If hypocrisy is your thing, you can feast, as Jon Stewart did, on the image of a room full of millionaires with offshore tax havens getting offended by people too poor to qualify for even the lowest tax bracket.

Personally, I like this part:

What I have to do is convince the 5 percent to 10 percent in the center that are independents, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon, in some cases, emotion–whether they like the guy or not.

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Deciding The Debate

Not sure how effective that tactic is, but the innovation is certainly commendable.

Capturing The Real Romney

The Article: The Real Romney Captured on Tape Turns Out to Be a Sneering Plutocrat by Jonathan Chait in NY Mag.

The Text: Presidential campaigns wallow so tediously in pseudo-events and manufactured outrage that our senses can be numbed to the appearance of something genuinely momentous. Mitt Romney’s secretly recorded comments at a fund-raiser are such an event — they reveal something vital about Romney, and they disqualify his claim to the presidency.

To think of Romney’s leaked discourse as a “gaffe” grossly misdescribes its importance. Indeed the comments’ direct impact on the outcome of the election will probably be small. Romney repeated the wildly misleading but increasingly popular conservative talking point that 47 percent of Americans pay no income taxes. The federal income tax is, by design, one of the most progressive elements of the American tax system, but well over 80 percent of non-retired adults pay federal taxes. But most people hear “income taxes” and think “taxes,” which is why the trick of using one phrase to make audiences think of the other is a standard GOP trick when discussing taxes. For that very reason, it won’t strike many voters as an insult: Most people who don’t pay income taxes do pay other taxes, and fail to distinguish between them, and thus don’t consider themselves among the 47 percent scorned by Romney.

Instead the video exposes an authentic Romney as a far more sinister character than I had imagined. Here is the sneering plutocrat, fully in thrall to a series of pernicious myths that are at the heart of the mania that has seized his party. He believes that market incomes in the United States are a perfect reflection of merit. Far from seeing his own privileged upbringing as the private-school educated son of an auto executive-turned-governor as an obvious refutation of that belief, Romney cites his own life, preposterously, as a confirmation of it. (“I have inherited nothing. Everything I earned I earned the old fashioned way.”)

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Defining A Developed Country

Tell THAT to someone driving an Escalade.