proselytism

[rone]

I am throwing my support behind Wesley Clark (not merely because of this, that is, but it's a good quote).

"If [Republican strategist] Karl Rove is watching today, Karl, I want you to hear me loud and clear: I am going to provide tax cuts to ease the burdens for 31 million American families -- and lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty -- by raising the taxes on 0.1 percent of families -- those who make more than $1,000,000 a year. You don't have to read my lips, I'm saying it," Clark said.

Comments

[ratphooey.livejournal.com]

I like Clark, too.

[jeff2001.livejournal.com]

Clark's been my (admittedly uninformed) choice for a year now. I pride myself on being able to spot the face of the next president, and for me, his is it. It's been seeming Dean had all the heat, but he makes me itch. Like Steve Forbes did.

[merde.livejournal.com]

i also like clark. i think dean is a little too dorky and lefty to actually get elected. clark seems more... to state the obvious... presidential. and i like everything i've heard him say about the economy so far.

go clark!

[denshi.livejournal.com]

DEAN IS NOT LEFTIST!!

Dean's record is consistently to the right of Clinton's and the rest of the DLC.

Research!

(this seething brought to you by hearing that same damn line since July)

[dreamcarnival.livejournal.com]

Weren't there some military people trying to say Clark had done some things that showed a lack of integrity when he was leading some military campaign he eventually left or was dismissed from? There was quite a bit of smearing done when he first announced as a candidate. I can't tell fact from slander. Character assassination is an annoying side of politics.. As for Clark, I wonder if he'd have the military industrial complex's interests high up in his priorities. I have a lot of studying to do to know who is best. If Clark were elected, I wonder who people think would be best as VP.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

As i said elsewhere, i suspect the "Dean is too liberal" catchphrase was inserted by Rove in order to confuse people.

[merde.livejournal.com]

to be honest, part of what makes me nervous about dean is how defensive his supporters get when you say anything unflattering about him. i'm just sayin'.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I think that's to be expected when the nerd constituency is one of your biggest supporters.

[kodi]

Hm. I thought "Dean is not leftist" was something his detractors said. Hell, I gave up on figuring out what was going on with this campaign when Sharpton was the candidate who most consistently said things I agreed with. I don't know if it's me or the campaign, but something's definitely gone screwy.

[merde.livejournal.com]

my personal feeling is that anyone who 1) isn't a cokehead who thinks he's fighting a holy war and 2) can get elected is better than bush, and i'll worry about whether they have ties to the military-industrial complex later. and if the guy who can get elected also happens to agree with almost all of my few but strong political opinions, says sensible things about the economy, and is a strong public speaker, well, i'm sold.

and yes, i really am, for the first time in my entire life, so afraid for my country that i'm seriously willing to go the "anyone-but" route.

[merde.livejournal.com]

well, you know, i'm a nerd. all my life, most of my friends have been nerds. i know nerds. and, well, i hate to say it, but... i don't want a nerd to be my president. i want someone who's not only smart and knowledgable, but who's able to moderate his opinions with common sense and is capable of high-level diplomacy.

and speaking as a nerd, i'm pretty comfortable saying most nerds i've met aren't up to those challenges. i know i'm not.

i should probably step out of this discussion entirely before i end up in a flamewar i haven't got the patience to finish.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't object to a nerd president, but Dean's definitely not a nerd. He's not much of anything, except a wannabe, in my view. That's pretty much why i won't support him, although seeing the other Democrats dogpile on him would make me normally want to cheer him on. There's just something wrong with him.

[denshi.livejournal.com]

I'm just annoyed that we're debating a candidate in terms set by Karl Rove.

[wisn.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen significant differences between Dean and Clark, excepting campaign style. I'm inclined to back Dean largely because of the quality of the campaign behind him, but I haven't read policy statements from either yet so I'm not putting a foot in any camp.

While I'm writing this, a two-hour debate hosted by NPR is wrapping up. Clark didn't appear because he's not campaigning in Iowa (where the debate is being held). Dean spent most of his time fending off attacks by Lieberman, Kerry and Gephart, all of whom are hell-bent on being the anti-Dean. Kucinich brought visual aids, so he's jumped the shark. Carol Moseley Braun made the best show, but only because she wasn't part of the four-way tussle and was left to state her positions rather than attack or defend the other candidates.

I think it's already down to a Clark/Dean face-off. A Dean-Clark or Clark-Dean ticket in the fall would be a Democrat dream, but whether it happens will depend too much on how much blood is spilled in the primary.

[huaman.livejournal.com]

Yes indeed, add me to the list of people endorsing Clark, and not just because of the odd sound-byte.

And on the random "good quotes from Clark" tip, I liked the one where when he was asked how it was possible for a general to be running as a Democrat instead of a Republican, he said, "Well, you know, I might have tried being a Republican, except Karl Rove wouldn't return any of my phone calls." Haha.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Kucinich has said a fair amount of things that i've agreed with, too. It's definitely Bizarro World in some respects.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I, too, have changed my tune on the "anyone-but" route, so much that i will very likely register as a Democrat for the first time so i can vote in the primary (i fear i will be inundated with postal spam, though).

[huaman.livejournal.com]

And unsolicited fucking phone calls from recordings, too, the pigfuckers.

[tongodeon.livejournal.com]

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

It looks Photoshopped... but it's still scary.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The most funny/sad detail about that was that the White House immediately went through its phone logs to prove that Clark hadn't actually called Rove, and conservative pundit folk spent days arguing that Clark wasn't joking, but was either a big liar like Al Gore or an insane crazy man (the latter being the standard anti-Clark line from the RNC).

Which led to the obvious question as to why it wasn't possible to search the same phone logs to get to the bottom of the Valerie Plame business, but that is another story.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

My impression is that neither Clark/Dean ticket is going to happen, because these guys both have excessively large egos and there's been too much friction between the campaigns over it already. But who knows; I'd have said the same thing about Reagan/Bush in 1980.

Government-wise (as opposed to politics-wise), the best thing might be for either one to have a cabinet-level post in the other's administration; say Clark as Secretary of Defense, State or national security advisor, or Dean as Secretary of HHS.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

By the way, the rumor-mill buzz has been that Dean's likely to pick Bob Graham as a running mate if nominated. It makes a kind of sense.

Other people have been urging him to pick Jesse Jackson Jr., but I don't think that's gonna happen.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

From what I gather, there are people in the military who look down upon political ambition in military officers, because allegedly this indicates they're in it for themselves, less so for the soldiers, sailors, and Marines. I suspect that's the sort of thing that makes sense in the gut, but isn't necessarily true in any particular case. But if you're hearing this from officers who know Clark, but don't necessarily compete with him, then you might give it some clout.

[lots42.livejournal.com]

Well, Clark just lost my vote. I'm not for punishing the rich.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Punish the rich, or punish the poor. People say it's not a zero-sum game, but they are essentially lying. If rich people pay less taxes, and you are not rich, you will pay more sooner or later. That's how it works.

Rich people were arguably being punished by the tax structure that existed prior to the Reagan administration. The pendulum has swung absurdly far in the other direction since then, and conservatives unabashedly speak now of wanting poor people to get soaked even more, ostensibly with the idea that they'll advocate smaller government then. (The favored rhetorical trick is to point out that destitute "lucky duckies" don't pay any income tax, as if that were the only kind of tax.)

Somehow this method of shrinking the government is better than, you know, actually just shrinking the government, probably because the shrinking part takes place in some unspecified future in which somebody else makes the hard decisions. Kind of like how the Republicans used to want to balance the budget by passing a constitutional amendment requiring people to magically balance the budget. Strange how you don't hear much about that any more.

Those who call this kind of talk "class warfare" are just trying to prevent retaliation for first strikes.

And that is my liberal soapbox speech for the week.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

If that's how you want to see it, then i doubt i can convince you otherwise.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Matt. The "lucky duckies" rhetoric is especially condescending and insulting, and the "class warfare" crap is reaching the same level.

"Something dee oh oh economics?" You really ought to read Al Franken's "Lies", lots42. Feel free to skip over the humor and head straight to the parts where he explains how the poor get taxed.

[wisn.livejournal.com]

There are aspects of the tax code that inadvertently punish people attempting to improve their lot - escalating your income just slightly can nudge you into a higher tax bracket and the tax increase is greater than the income increase. But on the large scale, the principle of 'punishing the wealthy' is only valid if the wealthy must suffer deprivations or cease to be wealthy because of taxation. While I could argue I'm being punished at my income level - I could buy a car with what I paid in income taxes in 2003, and I can really use a car right now, as a professional necessity, not a luxury - there are no equivalent deprivations for people in the top income brackets, and there have probably never been in this country.

I can't generate any sympathy for the problems of the wealthy. None whatsoever. Go ahead, make me wealthy, and I'll tell you how much I suffer. If it sucked so much, so many people wouldn't be aspiring to it.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That's not how tax brackets work, at least not with federal taxes; unless I'm mistaken, when you pass a bracket threshold the higher rate applies only to income above the threshold, so that your take-home pay still increases monotonically, just at a lower rate. The discontinuity is in the first derivative, in other words.

That said, the tax code is not perfect and there are things in it that create perverse incentives. A good example is the Alternative Minimum Tax. This was a well-intentioned means of closing some loopholes that allowed millionaire CEOs to avoid paying most of their income tax by being compensated in creative ways. But an unintended side effect is to make it dangerous to hold onto stock obtained as a result of exercising employee stock options, because if the value goes down you can end up being taxed under the AMT on money you never actually had, something that can really wipe you out if you're not prepared for it. The result is that people almost always dump the stock immediately, and options no longer function as a means of encouraging employees to invest in their own companies, which is something the tax code generally tries to promote.