Blogger Kevin Drum has passed away of bone marrow cancer at 66

 Remembering Kevin Drum

... Kevin’s success was also a kind of victory of democracy over snobbery. It proved that you can write incisively about national affairs without being in Washington, New York, or San Francisco. You can be an ordinary person living an everyday middle-class suburban life where you don’t rub elbows with influential journalists, academics, or financiers, yet write journalism that those sophisticates—and plenty of other ordinary Americans—read and respect. ...

Liberals Deliberately Conflate Extension of Bush Tax Rates With New Cuts

As here. It's their, well, job to lie like this.

Steve Benen still expects us to believe that a reduction in the top rate from 39 percent to 35 percent, ten years ago, was a massive cut?

It would be nice if we could have some Republicans today actually proposing reducing top marginal tax rates to say, 28 percent. Now that would be a cut. But massive? From 70 percent, and 50 percent, yes (for a brief, shining moment under G.H.W. Bush, when 'Read My Lips. No New Taxes.' meant raising them anywhere north from 28 percent). But cutting taxes now anywhere south from 35 percent would be a massive cut? Puh-leeze.

Of course things haven't improved since the Bush tax rates were extended, temporarily. Nothing has changed.

Unless of course the Republicans want to argue that the extension averted another Great Depression.

But only Democrats could say such things with a straight face.