Eli's Simple Plan

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Monday December 31, 2012 · 6:00 PM PST

2012/12/31 · 18:00

One of the bones of contention in the recent ongoing unpleasantness is the rate for capital gains. Since capital gains involve investing today and taking profit later, the best argument for a lower rate is that inflation accounts for a considerable part of the capital gain.

Eli says, use the chained CPI to inflate the basis so that the difference between the profit and the investment takes inflation into account

That is all

And, oh yes, vote in Eli's climate change story of the year poll

Obama and the Democrats. A test of faith

EliRabett

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Monday November 12, 2012 · 4:10 PM PST

2012/11/12 · 16:10

Even the usual suspects are admitting that the database and data mining technology developed by the Obama campaign define the state of the art,

How on earth did Barack Obama, the community organizer, harness the power of data in the 2012 election like a Bain Capital numbers-cruncher, while Mitt Romney’s data-mining effort crashed and burned like, well, Solyndra?

but we don't hear anything about who inherits it after Tuesday. Certainly the computer programmers and engineers who put it together will be in high demand, but the Democratic party needs access NOW to prepare for 2014 (yes bunnies, the infrastructure work needs to start immediately) and ways to access the databases on state legislature and congressional levels as well need to be developed.

This is Obama's first test. If he fails this, he deserves no support. Line in the sand time.

Obama, the Democratic Party and office holders need to commit to a fifty state strategy that must be maintained past 2018 in order to even think about undoing the gerrymandered regime we find ourselves in today.

Bring a Chair

EliRabett

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Friday November 09, 2012 · 4:50 AM PST

2012/11/09 · 04:50

Eli is going to break a personal rule, send the bunnies over to the dark side, but this has to be shared.

Various of the Romney information technology people are looking for their next job and bragging on something called Project ORCA. They have sold a a number of journalists on this super spiffy thing, but the reality, the reality is to fall on the floor laughing and never to be able to arise.

From the Ace of Spades(Eli prefers the Ace of Cakes) a report from ground level. Go over there and read the whole thing and the comments, but make sure you have no liquids or solids in your mouth lest you need a new screen

What is Project Orca? Well, this is what they told us:

Project ORCA is a massive undertaking – the Republican Party’s newest, unprecedented and most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 presidential election.
Pretty much everything in that sentence is false. The "massive undertaking" is true, however. It would take a lot of planning, training and coordination to be done successfully (oh, we'll get to that in a second). This wasn't really the GOP'seffort, it was Team Romney's. And perhaps "unprecedented" would fit if we're discussing failure.

continuing. . .

From the very start there were warning signs. After signing up, you were invited to take part in nightly conference calls. The calls were more of the slick marketing speech type than helpful training sessions. There was a lot of "rah-rahs" and lofty talk about how this would change the ballgame.

Remember, Mitt was the closer, the glad hand brought on at the end of the negotiation to seal the deal.

On one of the last conference calls (I believe it was on Saturday night), they told us that our packets would be arriving shortly. Now, there seemed to be a fair amount of confusion about what they meant by "packet". Some people on Twitter were wondering if that meant a packet in the mail or a pdf or what. Finally, my packet arrived at 4PM on Monday afternoon as an emailed 60 page pdf. Nothing came in the mail. Because I was out most of the day, I only got around to seeing it at around 10PM Monday night. So, I sat down and cursed as I would have to print out 60+ pages of instructions and voter rolls on my home printer. Naturally, for reasons I can't begin to comprehend, my printer would not print in black and white with an empty magenta cartridge (No HP, I will never buy another one of your products ever again).

Having had this experience Eli commiserates.

So, at this point I became panicked. I was expected to be at the polls at 6:45AM and nothing was open. I was thankfully able to find a Kinko's open until 11PM that was able to print it out and bind it for me, but this is not something I should have had to do. They expected 75-80 year old veteran volunteers to print out 60+ pages on their home computers? The night before election day? From what I hear, other people had similar experiences. In fact, many volunteers never received their packets at
all.

It went downhill from there

The NFL Challenge Rule for Voting Challenges

EliRabett

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Friday November 09, 2012 · 4:48 AM PST

2012/11/09 · 04:48

Obviously we are all concerned with the manipulation of voting challenges started in the 1970s, but being ramped up by the Tea Party and others. Frank Pasquale at Balkinization points to an editorial in the NYTimes, and, of course there are many other links one could find. A common thread is that the lists and challenges are characterized by a zillion false claims.

Elizabeth Drew at the New York Review of Books put some numbers on this

Iowa, Florida, and Colorado tried to purge the voting rolls of suspected unqualified voters, but their lists turned out to be wildly inaccurate. Florida officials compiled a list of 180,000 people whose qualifications were questioned, but after voting registrars checked (some protesting the unfairness of the purge) only 207, or .0002 percent of the state’s registered voters, were found to be unqualified to vote.

Thus Eli's simple rule to shut the assholes down. For every challenged name, the challenger has to deposit $10 to cover the cost of investigation of the claim. If the claim fails, they forfeit the money. If it is correct they get the money back. If you challenge someone at a polling place and they show (even later) that they are legit, they get the challenge money ].

McConnell's Chalice

EliRabett

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Wednesday November 07, 2012 · 5:24 AM PST

2012/11/07 · 05:24

Harry Reid should offer Mitch McConnell a choice. Approve all pending nominations in the next month or wave goodbye to the filibuster in January.

It is time the Republicans paid a price for intransigence.

It could even be a graded choice. Do nothing and no filibuster, do somethings and there is a whole menu of modifications, but the status quo ante is no longer on the table for organizing the next Senate.

What's Going On With The Polls

EliRabett

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Thursday November 01, 2012 · 8:23 AM PDT

2012/11/01 · 08:23

You've heard the whole Nate Silver is gay and wrong, Joe Scarborough has a gut feeling thing, so Eli will tell you why there is a divergence between the national and state level polls

EliRabett

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Friday October 26, 2012 · 7:35 PM PDT

2012/10/26 · 19:35

So Eli turns on NPR to hear Mother Rehm and the three Republicans explain the news, and there is the Politico hack. Why, you ask does Eli do this to himself, why to be reminded never to donate a cent to those clowns and he won't until the bookers look Markos' phone number and get him on. Can you imagine Markos and Duncan Black double teaming the Republican of the day on NPR?

Well you can't can you, because they would never do it, but they look for donations primarily from sappy progressives

So who else will take the pledge (and call the NPR station and tell them why).

They who forget history are doomed to repeat it

EliRabett

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Tuesday October 23, 2012 · 9:13 AM PDT

2012/10/23 · 09:13

Is an old saw from George Santayana, but if you want to know the roots of President Obama's foreign policy all you have to do is go back to his 2002 speech about the rush to war in Iraq

Obama laid out his foreign policy principles back in 2002 talking about the rush to war in Iraq

-------------------

I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all
circumstances.
The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union and drive the scourge of slavery from our soil. . . .

I don't oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war.

What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from
a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

---------------
and here are the conclusions he drew which explain our policy towards the Arab Spring and energy
-------------

You want a fight, President Bush?
Let's fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.

You want a fight, President Bush?

Let's fight to wean ourselves off Middle East oil through an energy policy that doesn't simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil.

It's all there, you may like or not like it, but remarkably consistent from that day to this

What you are playing for

EliRabett

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Monday August 20, 2012 · 6:04 PM PDT

2012/08/20 · 18:04

Barry Brook's update of Eileen O'Shaunghnessy's, (Eric Blair's wife, look it up bunnies) poem End of the Century-1984

"...Hansen's bones are quiet at last,
...No science disturbs the lucid line,
For sun-scorched Earthers tune their thought
To Offword Station 'Holocene-1'
From where they know just what they ought,
...memories of times past that should be banished
Only relics, philosophies and a parched wasteland lie below..."

Watching his language (Romney on taxes)

EliRabett

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Thursday August 16, 2012 · 6:44 PM PDT

2012/08/16 · 18:44

Romney said taxes, not Federal Income Taxes or Federal Taxes. Looking at his returns for 2010, one sees that in 2008 he paid $787,455 in foreign taxes.

In 2010 he paid $672,444 in state taxes, and $226,356 in real estate taxes.

Given that there must have been heavy investment losses in 2008 (and 2009), and that his Bain income probably decreased, why yes, it is possible that he paid no Federal Income Tax and still paid ~13% of his (lower 2008/9) income in overall taxes.

The pattern of his foreign taxes is also interesting

    Passive    General
2000    $31,838
2001    $25,771
2002    $28,875
2003    $11,173
2004    $87,550
2005    $333,149
2006    $276,386
2007    $275,488    $148,510
2008    $151,015    $636,440
2009    $81,461    $56,891
2010    $67,173    $690

Passive income refers to income from interest and dividends, general would include selling of stocks or bonds and from the pattern it looks like Mitt cashed out in 2008, maybe at the top of the market before it crashed.

his 2008 and 2009 returns are obviously key and we need to see them.

Starting the Guillotine Moving

EliRabett

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Tuesday August 14, 2012 · 2:14 PM PDT

2012/08/14 · 14:14

A few weeks ago, before Joe Paterno's statue was removed, Eli wrote in a post entitled Death Penalty

Eli, as some have noted, is an ancient professor, an academic if you will. He has followed the collapse of governance at Penn State with the interest of a bunny watching a disaster unveiled, and recently saw much back and forth about the NCAA (the folks who profit from and do the pompous on intercollegiate athletics in the US) imposing the death penalty on football at PSU.

Folks, that ain't the death penalty Penn State has to worry about. Accreditation at US institutions of higher learning runs through cooperative associations of colleges and universities, who certify to the US Department of Education. That ain't whiffle ball because all federal funding, student loans, research grants and more depend on that certification.

Today Middle States, Penn State's accrediting agency, started the guillotine moving. They notified Rodney Erikson, the President of Penn State, that

. . . . its accreditation is in jeopardy based on information contained in the institutionally commissioned Report of the Special Investigative Counsel (Freeh, Sporkin & Sullivan, LLP, July 12, 2012) and the Binding Consent Decree Imposed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association and Accepted by the Pennsylvania State University (July 23, 2013) and insufficient evidence that the institution is currently in compliance with the Requirements of Affiliation 5 (compliance with all applicable government policies, regulations, and requirements) and 9 (institution's governing body responsibility for the quality and integrity of the institution, for ensuring that the institution's mission is being carried out, and for making freely available to the Commission accurate, fair, and complete information on all aspects of the institution and its operations) and with Standard 4 (Leadership and Governance) and Standard 6 (Integrity). To note that the institution remains accredited while on warning. To request a monitoring report due by September 30, 2012 documenting steps that have been taken and are planned to ensure the institution's full compliance with Requirements of Affiliation 5 and 9 as well as Accreditation Standards 4 and 6. In addition, to request that the monitoring report also address Accreditation Standard 3 (Institutional Resources) with regard to the institution's capacity and plans for addressing financial obligations that will or may result from the investigation and related settlements, etc.

Details of the action and its meaning can be found at the Middle States website as well as links describing the process and the range of actions and penalties.

Eli wrote earlier this offers the accrediting agencies the opportunity to get control of athletics if they dare. The implications of this matter extend well beyond Penn State.

As a codicil allow Eli to say that he knows well many faculty members at Penn State and men and women, they are all excellent scientists. As for Integrity, he would park his last carrot with them.

An open letter to PolitiFact

EliRabett

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Saturday August 11, 2012 · 6:45 PM PDT

2012/08/11 · 18:45

PolitiFact continues to deny reality in a recent post

Our ruling
There are two main ways to make this calculation, and they lead to opposite conclusions. While we believe that including payroll taxes in the calculation offers a more accurate picture of what the American public pays the IRS, it's also true that the Obama ad didn't specify which measurement it was using, and in fact used a figure for Romney -- 14 percent -- that was based on income taxes alone. On balance, then, we rate the claim Half True.

In plain words your article on the 14% that Romney paid on his 2010 taxes is innumerate bullshit

First of all he would not pay any Social Security or Medicare taxes on non-wage earnings and that is the vast bulk of his declared income.

Second, we KNOW how much he paid in Social Security and Medicare Taxes, it is right there on his return in line 27 where he lists half the Social Security and Medicare Taxes from Schedule C Self Employment 2 x $14,576 or 29,152

Third we KNOW what his income was, 21,661,344.

Fourth, we KNOW how much he paid in taxes 3,009,766

You can find all of these numbers at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

So now you pick up your cell phone and do some long division.

The Social Security and Medicare Taxes as a percentage of his income is 29,152/21,666,344x 100% = 0.134%, or a bit more than an additional tenth of a percent

The Income Tax he paid was 3,009,766/21,661,344 x 100% = 13.89% of his income

The add it up and you find the percentage of the Federal Income Tax and Social Security and Medicare Tax he paid = 14.02%

So you are moaning about .02%?

You owe the Obama campaign a grovelling apology.

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