GOP: 'We Built This!' live from government funded convention center

By Paddy Ryan

This Tuesday, Republicans are hosting their “We Built This” night, live from the Tampa Bay Times Forum arena. Tuesday night's theme, and the list of speakers, will be used to celebrate the American entrepreneurial spirit and to attack the President's comments which were made in July, and have since been taken way out-of-context.

Government built 62 % of this!

Kelly Ayotte, John Kasich, and Bob McDonnell will bash the President's comments, and describe how business is successful without any government help whatsoever. These GOP speakers will proudly take the stage at the Tampa Bay Times Forum arena, declaring to the world that government isn't responsible for the success of the private sector.

There's one problem though. The Tampa Bay Times Forum arena wouldn't have been built without government help. The arena was funded and built primarily with government money. In fact, 62 percent of the building project was financed with government money.

"The Tampa Bay Times Forum arena, which houses the Tampa Bay Lightning, was built in 1996 as the 'Ice Palace' with 62% government funds. The total budget for the project was $139 million, of which public money accounted for $86 million and team money accounted for $53 million."

Maybe the GOP should think about renaming Tuesday's session, the “we only built 38 percent of this” night.

We're All Subsidizing Free Lunches for America's CEOs

It's time to close the tax loopholes that subsidize runaway executive compensation.

by Scott Klinger and Sam Pizzigati from CommonDreams

republished by Paddy Ryan

A generation ago, on National Secretary's Day, America's top corporate executives used to take their prized office assistants out to lunch.

Times change, and National Secretary's Day has become Administrative Professionals' Day. But something else has changed. These days, CEOs are getting the free lunches. Secretaries and all the rest of us are picking up the tab. And not at Burger King either.

Our current tax code has everyone in America essentially subsidizing the pay of millionaire and billionaire CEOs. Deductions, tax credits, and other executive-compensation loopholes total $14.4 billion annually, the equivalent of $46 for each of America's 311 million citizens.

That figure appears in "The CEO Hands in Uncle Sam's Pocket," a new report we helped write for the Institute for Policy Studies. Our research team dug deep into the tax code's weeds and pulled out one glaring example after another of tax code provisions enriching our already rich — at the expense of average Americans.

Our tax code, for instance, lets corporations deduct all "reasonable" costs of doing business. But what's "reasonable"? Over the years, corporate chiefs have stretched that definition beyond all reason. Years ago, they even claimed three-martini lunches as "reasonable" business expenses.

Congress eventually cracked down on that unpopular giveaway. Back in 1993, amid rising public outrage over sky-high executive compensation, lawmakers also tried to crack down on tax deductions for CEO pay. Under a new rule, corporations could only deduct up to $1 million on their tax returns for any individual executive's annual pay.

Unfortunately, this new rule came with a built-in loophole. Any executive pay over $1 million linked to "performance" could still be deducted. You can guess what happened next: an explosion of "performance-based" CEO compensation.

Corporate titans soon started landing annual performance pay deals worth tens of millions. Last year, Larry Ellison pocketed $76 million in "performance-based pay" for running Oracle, the giant business software company. That ploy saved Oracle $26 million in taxes. Overall, unlimited tax deductions on CEO pay cost U.S. taxpayers nearly $10 billion a year.

CEOs regularly partake in a variety of other tax-avoiding games that all share one element in common: CEOs always win, the rest of us always lose.

How outrageous have these CEO victories become? Try visualizing this: The IRS offers you a refund on all the taxes you've previously paid and then informs you that you also won't have to pay taxes on your future income for years to come. Sweet deal. Corporations get it all the time — by paying their executives in stock options.

That's just what Facebook did in a move that saved the company an estimated $5.6 billion, including an approximately $500 million return of previously paid taxes. But let's not pick on Facebook. Apple used this loophole to save $260 million on its 2011 taxes alone, and hundreds of other corporations have played this same game.

Add up all the Facebooks and Apples out there, compute the cost of the tax giveaways they use to stuff the pockets of their top executives, and you end up with corporate tax bills over $14 billion a year less than they should be. With this $14 billion, our nation could provide health care for 7.3 million low-income kids or rehire over 200,000 laid-off public school teachers.

Warren Buffett famously quipped that he has a lower tax rate than his secretary. But that's an understatement. The secretaries of America's CEOs are actually subsidizing their bosses' pay.

Let's end this free lunch for CEOs. It's time to close the tax loopholes that subsidize runaway CEO pay.

5 Reasons The Romney-Ryan Economic Plan Would Be a Disaster

By Diane Sweet from Crooks and Liars

republished by Paddy Ryan

Robert Reich breaks down the Romney-Ryan economic plan into 5 measures that all spell disaster for America.

1. More unemployment through austerity measures.

2. Taking from the poor to give to the rich. Higher federal taxes on lower income taxpayers, slashing medicaid, food stamps, and children's health care in order to give up to a $500k tax cut to millionaires and billionaires.

3. Turns Medicare into vouchers that won't keep up with the rising cost of health care and shifting the burden onto seniors, ending their guaranteed health care, and leaving them at the mercy of private insurers. By contrast, Obama's Affordable Care Act saves money on Medicare by reducing payments to providers such as hospitals and drug companies.

4. Add money to defense spending. The plan would add money to defense spending while cutting spending on education, infrastructure, and basic research and development.

5. Debt: The Romney-Ryan budget doesn't even reduce the federal budget deficit. While adding to military spending, giving tax cuts to the rich, and stifling economic growth by cutting spending too early, the plan would push public debt to over 175% by 2050.

No wonder Mitt Romney doesn't want to talk about his budget until after the election!

Human Rights Campaign: Family Research Council is a hate group

By Eric W. Dolan from The Raw Story

republished by Paddy Ryan

The president of the Human Rights Campaign has refused stop labeling the Family Research Council as a hate group, even after a LGBT activist was charged with shooting a security guard at the organization’s Washington headquarters.

Family Research Council still a hate group

“Designating the Family Research Council a hate group has nothing to do with disagreements about marriage equality, nondiscrimination laws or any other policy debate,” HRC President Chad Griffin wrote in an op-ed piece for the Washington Post. “The real issue is the Family Research Council’s well-documented and continuous pattern of hateful rhetoric.”

Following the shooting, the Southern Poverty Law Center and LGBT rights groups faced criticism from conservatives for labeling the FRC as a hate group.

The Southern Poverty Law Center had labeled the organization a hate group since 2010 “because of its dissemination of false and demonizing propaganda about gays and lesbians.”

National Organization for Marriage president Brian Brown called on the Southern Poverty Law Center and LGBT rights groups to withdraw the “harmful and dangerous labels.” The Christian Broadcasting Network wondered “Did ‘hate group’ label stir FRC shooting?” FRC President Tony Perkins accused the Southern Poverty Law Center of giving the shooter a “license” to commit the act.

“The logic that the Southern Poverty Law Center or LGBT organizations are to blame is preposterous, outrageous and irresponsible,” Griffin wrote. “No matter one’s political views, we can all agree that acts of violence are never justified and should always be condemned.”

Griffin noted that Perkins had claimed that pedophilia was a “homosexual problem.” Other people associated with the FRC have called for deporting gay people from the U.S. and making homosexuality a crime, Griffin said.

HRC is the largest LGBT advocacy group in the nation.

Romney's religious cult, his “most important treasure”

By Paddy Ryan

Mitt Romney's Mormon faith is a major issue. It raises red flags about his fundamental beliefs. Since President Obama's faith is fair game, then I think Mitt Romney's faith, which was founded on trickery and con-artistry, should be fair game too.

Mitt Romney, who is a certified bishop in the Mormon church, has built his entire life around the Mormon faith. In a little-known commencement speech to his prep school alma-mater, Mitt Romney described his Mormon faith as “one of the most important treasures of my life.”

A religion, started less than 200 years ago by a con-man, a religion that has been exposed as a cult (by all sides of the political spectrum), is Mitt Romney's “most important treasure”. Comforting.

Here are some wacky, out-of-this-world beliefs that Romney and his fellow Mormon's hold:

- God is a man, made of flesh and blood, and he lives on the planet Kolob.

- There is no hell, but there are three heavens.

- The punishment for being a bad Mormon is that you don’t get to reach the third heaven, where God dwells.

- Lucifer was Jesus’ brother, back on the original earth, where God and Jesus dwelled.

- The biblical characters Adam and Eve once lived in America, which is where the Garden of Eden was really located.

- We were all spirit children together with God in the 'pre-existence'.

- People of African descent are "cursed with a skin of blackness” and the curse was based on their performance in the pre-existence.

- Baptism happens for children at age 8 and at age 12 they are allowed to go to the temple and do baptisms for the dead, these posthumous "blessings" are intended to "save" ancestors and others who weren't baptized in life or were baptized "without proper authority."

- There will be a literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes, Zion (the New Jerusalem) will be built upon the American continent.

- Christ will reign personally upon the earth, and the earth will be renewed and receive its 'paradisiacal glory'.

Although most of Romney's religious beliefs are strange, I think that one of his strangest is the belief in secretive posthumous baptisms. This issue fascinates me.

"A Mormon may propose the baptism of another person posthumously. Church members have performed the ritual on Buddha, Catholic popes, 9/11 hijackers, William Shakespeare, Joan of Arc, Elvis Presley, President Obama's mother and even reportedly Jesus Christ. In 2002, the managing director of the Mormon's family and church history department told The New Yorker magazine that as many as 200 million dead people had been baptized as Mormons.

In 1994, an Israeli genealogist researching her family in the Mormons' computerized International Genealogical Index made a startling discovery. Her grandfather, a religiously observant Jew killed in the Holocaust, had been posthumously baptized as a Mormon. Distraught, she alerted other Jewish genealogists who soon learned that some 380,000 Holocaust victims, including Anne Frank, had been baptized. Plus, Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, and scientist Albert Einstein had received this treatment."

Wow. If that doesn't sound like some shady medicine man, rainmaker, voodoo-magic wizardry, than I don't know what does. How can any sane, rational, intelligent minded person, like Mitt Romney, ever take these beliefs to heart?

Last Monday, top Romney advisor Kevin Madden said,

“The governor’s faith is part of who he is, … It’s informed how he’s raised his family, it’s informed how he’s had a strong marriage.”

I am not a religious person. I understand that all different religious beliefs can sound a little outrageous, but Mormons are definitely in the major leagues when it comes to sounding ridiculous.

Call me crazy but, I'm not comfortable with a President who believes that God is a flesh and blood man living on the planet Kolob, a President who believes that Zion will be built upon the American continent and believes that people of African descent are "cursed with a skin of blackness” based on performance in some fairytale 'pre-existence'. I don't feel comfortable with a President who refers to his faith, which includes these fundamental pillars of Mormonism, as his “most important treasure”.

BREAKING: Todd Akin stays in Missouri Senate race

By Paddy Ryan

Instead of withdrawing from his Senate race and removing himself from the limelight, Todd Akin announced today that he would not be withdrawing from the Missouri Senate race between himself and Claire McCaskill.

The support of the religious-right turned out to be enough to keep Todd Akin from dropping out. Akin just confirmed on the radio that he would be staying in the race, and disagreed with fellow Republicans who have called for a new candidate.

On Sunday, Akin took to the airwaves making offensive suggestions about what qualified as 'legitimate rape'.

"First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare," Akin said in an interview with KTVI-TV. "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

Yesterday, Karl Rove's Super PAC - Crossroads GPS - announced that it would be pulling all funds from the Missouri Senate race.

But Akin has decided to stay in, so the firestorm continues.

Romney camp admits Medicare cuts will hit current seniors

By Joan McCarter from the Dailykos
republished by Paddy Ryan

That cynical ploy of the Romney/Ryan plan to gut Medicare, but to keep the senior vote by putting those cuts off on the next batch of retirees, is looking increasingly empty. That's because their plan to repeal Obamacare, and to "restore" the $716 billion in provider cuts, means that Romney/Ryan will either have to make up those funds with revenues or with cuts to current seniors, because without that money, Medicare becomes insolvent by 2016. The Republican allergy to new revenue pretty much determines they'll squeeze that money out of seniors, and Romney advisers are admitting it.

Romney campaign adviser Ed Gillespie was the first to admit they'd target current seniors by raising the eligibility age for Medicare. And now another adviser is admitting that benefits cuts are definitely on the table.

Avik Roy, an outside health care adviser to the Romney campaign, admits that committing to billions of dollars in higher Medicare spending in the near-term will make it difficult for Romney to achieve its separate goal of reducing overall federal spending to modern lows. But he notes that Romney could make up the difference elsewhere in the budget or, by “mak[ing] other changes to the Medicare program, such as increased means-testing, that don’t alter the program’s basic structure.”

Means testing would apply to people on Medicare now, and it would be a cut to benefits, benefits that retirees earned through years of work and contributing to the system.

That's not the only thing seniors would be losing under Romney/Ryan. If the Affordable Care Act is repealed, with it goes the $4.1 billion seniors and disabled people have saved on prescription drugs. That amounts to an average of $768 in annual savings for Medicare patients, a significant chunk of money for anyone on a fixed income. Also gone with repeal are the free cancer screenings, mammograms and other preventive services.

Romney and Ryan are lying, no surprise, when they say that anyone on Medicare now won't see a change in their benefits. They're playing a shell game with American seniors.