Photograph by Robert A. Reeder/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Fred Malek

Putting out think tank studies to make a partisan point is a decades-long tradition in Washington.

One that came out last week offered a dose of irony to go with its claim that the Environmental Protection Agency is imposing an increasing burden of rule-compliance paperwork on the economy.

The two-page analysis, by the conservative American Action Forum, declared that “using Bureau of Labor Statistics calculations, AAF finds that EPA’s red tape burden consumes roughly $10.5 billion in annual economic activity” and “has increased by 30 million hours – 20 percent – since FY 2007.”

No word on the ethnicity of the BLS employees doing the calculating — something that at one time would have been of great interest to AAF’s founder and board chairman, Fred Malek.

Malek was a White House aide when he compiled a list of BLS employees with Jewish-sounding last names at the request of President Richard Nixon, who was worried that a “Jewish cabal” had too much influence in the agency.

Malek, who went on to become a venture capitalist and a Republican fundraising stalwart, apologized for his actions. But the BLS incident remains a lightning rod, especially for Democrats, who sharply criticized Virginia Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell when he appointed Malek to head a government reform task force in 2010.

Malek’s AAF board colleagues include former Netscape CEO James Barksdale, former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and former Minnesota Republican Sen. Norm Coleman.

The board also includes at least one political figure who could make eventual use of Malek’s fundraising prowess – former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a potential GOP presidential candidates in 2016.

USA Today clip on Malek’s stature as a Republican fundraiser:

Malek bio from AAF website:

Original post is Malek’s Study Cites Labor Bureau Once Suspected of `Cabal’ by Political Capital.

In recent days, Norquist has wandered from The Nutcracker ballet to a crime scene investigation, to a Catholic schoolboy in the confessional, to a GOP lawmaker’s matrimonial vows — all in search of the right denunciatory images for the growing number of Republicans who say they’d consider raising taxes.

Those who would entertain a tax hikes have “sugar plum fairies dancing in their head,” Norquist, who is president of Americans for Tax Reform, told the Huffington Post Wednesday.

Backing a tax increase means Republicans would  “have their fingerprints on the murder weapon,” he said at a Politico breakfast on Wednesday.

Those talking about renouncing the anti-tax pledge are beset by “impure thoughts”, Norquist told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien on Monday.

In the same interview, Norquist said the idea that Democrats will agree to a fiscal-cliff forestalling package with enough entitlement cuts to offset a tax increase is like imagining “a pink unicorn.” He was talking about that unicorn on National Public Radio, too.

Also on Monday, Norquist took a swipe at Rep. Peter King, a New York Republican, who said he’d consider repudiating the pledge he signed more than a decade ago because circumstances have changed.

“I hope his wife understands the commitments last a little longer than two years or something,” Norquist told CNN’s Piers Morgan.

Norquist is a “lowlife,” and his wife will “knock (Norquist’s) head off,” King subsequently fired back in Politico, proving, perhaps, that Norquist does not yet have the market on over-top-commentary cornered.

Norquist’s colorful defense of the pledge should not surprise anyone.

The vow itself is a yawner, but the animating statement underlying it is anything but.

“I don’t want to abolish government,” Norquist said on NPR in 2001. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

If enough Republicans stray from their vows and taxes are raised, it may be because lapsed pledgers agree with another recent much-publicized observation by Norquist, originally meant to apply to Mitt Romney.

They may decide, however, that it’s Norquist who is the “poopy head.”

Norquist’s facility with words does not extend to spelling them.

The ATR web page describing the pledge and how it has become mandatory for Republicans seeking office misspells “de rigueur” two different ways.

Original post is Norquist’s Brash Managerie: Pledge-Breakers Beware the `Sugar Plums’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Supporters wait for President Barack Obama's arrival at a campaign stop at City Park in Denver, Colorado, on Oct. 24, 2012.

President Barack Obama benefits from a gender gap with women voters as well as with women who make campaign contributions.

About 44 percent of the donations to Obama’s main campaign fund, Obama for America, came from women, compared with 34 percent of contributions to challenger Mitt Romney’s Romney for President Inc., according to a Bloomberg Government analysis of campaign finance data through August.

Female financial backing of Obama breaks with historical patterns in which men typically supply about two-thirds of political donations.

Obama beat Arizona Sen. John McCain of Arizona by 13 points among women in 2008, and Obama has had a significant lead among them in his contest with Romney.

In addition to being an indicator of approval of his policies, women’s monetary support for Obama reflects a developing trend of increased political giving among females, according to Jamie Pimlott, a political scientist at Niagara University who has studied gender patterns in campaign donations.

The trend currently is most noticeable among Democratic candidates because women’s advocacy groups that favor Democrats, like EMILY’s List, are well-established. But Pimlott says she expects women soon to play bigger roles in financing campaigns in both major parties.

Original post is Obama’s Gender Gap: Financial, Too by Political Capital.

Photograph by Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images

The presidential debate at a laundromat in the Chatsworth area of Los Angeles.

This just in from the meme patrol.

Mitt Romney used the term “crushed”, or a variant, 11 times in the debates with President Barack Obama, mostly in reference to his view of the  treatment of the middle-class at the hands of the incumbent president.

As in:

“They’re, they’re just being crushed.”

“It’s been crushing.”

And,  ”Middle-income families are being crushed,” Romney said, all in the first debate.

Or, from the second debate:

“The middle class is getting crushed under the policies of a president who has not understood what it takes to get the economy working again.”

And, ”The middle-income families in America have been crushed over the last four years.”

You get the picture.

There were five deployments of “crushed” in each of the first two debates, which dealt in part or entirely with domestic policy and, by extension, the fortunes of middle class voters, a subset of whom are expected to decide the election.

Last night’s foreign policy debate left few easy segues to domestic economic issues, though Romney did manage to slip in a reference former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak “crushing his people”.

While Obama avoided any temptation to use “crush” during the debates, Vice President Joe Biden couldn’t help himself, rolling it out once during his Oct. 11 running mates debate with Rep. Paul Ryan.

To Biden, no stranger to the use of strong verbiage in the service of political goals, “crushed” is what happened to the middle class in 2008 after enduring Republican economic policies.

“The middle class got knocked on their heels,” Biden said. “The Great Recession crushed them.”

On Oct. 2, Biden fumbled an attempt to link some Americans’  struggles to the economic policies of the George W. Bush administration, declaring that the middle class had been “buried the last four years”.

Romney forces wasted no time in applying the campaign’s favorite modifier to what’s transpired on Obama’s watch.

“Under President Obama, the middle class has suffered from crushing unemployment, rising prices and falling incomes,” Reuters reported the campaign said in a statement.

Think of the repeated use of “crushed” as a linguistic version of an attack ad, a word chosen for emotional impact rather than factual accuracy, says Allan Metcalf, an English professor at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois, and author of “Presidential Voices: Speaking Styles from George Washington to George W. Bush.” 

“If you try to figure it out logically, the middle class hasn’t been crushed,” Metcalf said.

Romney’s use of the word is an effort to exploit disappointment in Obama on an emotional level and peel away voters who supported the president in 2008 but feel he hasn’t delivered, he said.  ”It’s an excellent choice of word for what Romney is trying to convey,” Metcalf said.

“I was thinking about love songs, how you get crushed when a relationship ends,” Metcalf said. “All of those people who pinned their hopes on Obama four years ago had their hopes crushed.”

Original post is Crushed in Obama-Romney Debate: Anatomy of Emotional Weaponry by Political Capital.

Photograph by Everett Collection

Big Bird, who lists taxable wages of about $280,000, may not get much of a tax break from Romney.

If Mitt Romney gets elected president, Big Bird and his Sesame Street colleagues may have to go out and hustle donations to keep stations airing their show operating.

Big Bird, who lists taxable wages of about $280,000 on the IRS filing of his non-profit employer, Sesame Workshop Inc., also may not get much of a tax break for all Romney’s promises to lower rates.

Big Bird, aka Caroll Spinney, would lose much of the savings in a lower income tax rate proposed by Romney if the former Massachusetts governor follows through with an idea to cap deductions at $17,000, according to Clay Batchelor, a Washington DC tax attorney. (And the Romney campaign may like to know that Defense spending is jeopardized by the candidate’s pledge to eliminate federal aid for Sesame Street in a PBS cut-off.)

Under Obama’s tax proposal, which would allow Bush-era tax cuts for higher earners to expire, the worker who plays the yellow-feathered icon would pay about $48,500 in personal income tax, assuming he has $50,000 in deductions, a reasonable amount for someone in his income bracket, Batchelor said.

That compares with about $47,000 under the under Romney’s tax proposal, if the Republican candidate is elected and can deliver his idea to cap deductions at $17,000.

“If he can’t claim as many deductions, his tax number may wind up being about the same,” said Batchelor. The deduction cap would hit middle and upper income taxpayers hardest, he said.

Romney proposes lowering top rates to 22.4, 26.4 and 28 percent, compared with 33, 36 and 39.6 percent in the Obama plan, which allows Bush-era tax cuts to expire for high earners.

Big Bird’s tax bill drops to about $39,000 if he can use Romney’s tax rate and $50,000 in deductions.

Batchelor’s back of the envelope calculations assume no other investments and a married joint filing.

Spinney, 78, who also created Oscar the Grouch, declined to comment through Sesame Workshop.

“Unfortunately, Big Bird is not doing interviews,” said Sherrie Westin, vice president and chief market officer of Sesame Workshop, which has called upon the Obama campaign to pull its cable TV ad featuring Big Bird in its Romney attack.

Big Bird became an unlikely player in presidential politics during the Oct. 3 Romney-Obama debate, when Romney declared that he could make tough decisions, like cutting federal support for the Public Broadcasting Service.

“I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS,” Romney told moderator Jim Lehrer, of the PBS NewsHour. “I’m going to stop other things. I like PBS. I love Big Bird. I actually like you too. But I’m not going to — I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it.”

The story line got legs when Obama seized on Romney’s comment to illustrate what he portrayed as is his opponent’s willingness to overlook big problems in favor of less pressing issues.

“He’ll get rid of regulations on Wall Street, but he’s going to crack down on Sesame Street,” Obama said Oct. 4 at a campaign event in Madison, Wisconsin.

Over the weekend, Big Bird appeared on NBC’s Saturday Night Live and on Tuesday, the Obama campaign rolled out its satirical ad featuring an image of the gangly bird amid pictures of Bernard Madoff, Kenneth Lay, of Enron Corp. and Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco International Ltd., who all were convicted of large-scale financial crimes.

“Big. Yellow. A menace to our economy,” the narrator says. “Mitt Romney knows it’s not Wall Street you have to

worry about, it’s Sesame Street.”

The ad didn’t amuse either Sesame Workshop, which asked the Obama campaign to stop airing the ad, or the Romney campaign.

PBS doesn’t actually produce Sesame Street. Sesame Workshop is a separate entity that produces and licenses the show.

Out of Sesame Workshop’s $140 million operating budget, about $1.5 million annually comes from PBS via a licensing fee, which is the net of PBS’s share of Sesame Street merchandising and sponsorship revenue.

Sesame Workshop has gotten federal government money in the form of about $12.3 million in contracts over the past 10 years, including a high of $3.68 million in fiscal 2008, when President George W. Bush was in office.

Most of the money came from the Defense Department, which has used the Sesame Street characters in videos to help children through transitions and separations.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports PBS and National Public Radio, got about $445 million in fiscal 2012 from the federal government.

Spinney has performed as Big Bird and Oscar the Grouchm in over 4,000 episodes of Sesame Street, beginning with the first show in 1969, according to the show’s Web site. Spinney co-authored a 2003 book called The Wisdom of Big Bird (and the Dark Genius of Oscar the Grouch): Lessons from a Life in Feathers.

Danielle Ivory contributed to this post

Original post is Big Bird’s Taxes: Little Relief Promised in Romney’s Tax Cuts by Political Capital.