Republican Tea Party Presidential Candidates

First lets look at republican presidential debates.    There are too many to count with a never ending array of new faces in the number one position.    Mitt Romney has been running for the last 9 years and he was the front runner.    Donald Trump jumped in for a couple of weeks to promote his tv show and was the front runner.  

Herman Caine won the first debate and was the front runner.    Michelle Bachmann (as phoney a charcter as can be found on any circus midway) jumped in, won the Iowa straw poll and she was the front runner.   Rudy Guliani the  “911 Man” and former Mayor of New York is threatning to enter the race.    Rudy ran in 2008 and got one delegate.     With any luck he could double his prior numbers and maby be front runner for a day.

The republican primary has cut the number of candidates running to somewhere below 25 and there are only a  dozen or so yet to enter the race.      Oh John Huntsman is running.      I know I am forgetting 8 or 10 republicans running in the primary.

There are names I can barely remember like Gary Johnson the lets make pot legal candidate and Ron Paul the “Drugs and Prostitution and back to the Gold Standard” candidate.    And now we come to the “Cowboy Flake George W Bush want to be” Rick Perry who is scheduled to debut his act next week on Sept. 7th.    Poor President Obama was anxious to get started on his jobs plan but that might detract from the republican debate so John Boehner says no to the jobs plan and yes to the republican debate.     The President has to wait a day.   It’s the first time any congress has said NO to a Presidents request to address Congress.      Mitch McConnell said it straight and up front.      Republicans consider it job one to limit Obama to one term and they will block anything and lower the countries credit and bond rating to get it done.     The republican tea party will shut the government completely down without a seconds thought to injure Obama and they could not care less who else gets hurt.    Republicans will tell any lie and openly call the President a liar to make their dream happen.     Too bad the republican tea party won’t work to help unemployed Americans find jobs.

Off in the distance that demented half-wit from Alaska, Sarah Palin is looking for any chance to get some publicity and may drive her bus to the California debate.     Eric Cantor wants to delay helping hurricane victims while he and the tea party find some programs to cut to offset the FEMA costs.

God help us, These Dam Fool Republicans are destroying America to defeat Obama and keep him from a second term.

Republicans Decide Debate More Important Than Jobs.     “Limiting Obama to one term is more important than anything”    Mitch McConnell

President Obama has asked to address a joint session of Congress on September 7th  at 8 p.m. (ET) to outline his much-anticipated jobs plan, the exact same time that Republican Presidential candidates are scheduled to participate in a televised debate.   White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said today that the timing was purely “coincidental.”

“The president committed to speaking next week after the Labor Day holiday and immediately upon Congress’s return, and there are a lot of factors that go into scheduling a speech before Congress, a joint session speech,”   Carney explained at today’s White House press briefing.    “There is no perfect time.”

“Obviously, one debate of many that’s on one channel of many was not enough reason not to have the speech at the time that we decided to have it,”   he added.

What’s the solution?     “There are many channels, there are many opportunities for people to watch the president, and obviously an opportunity for people to watch the debate, and I believe that, you know, the network involved here can decide how it wants to deal,” Carney said.

That network would be NBC, which now has to decide whether to air the debate, which is being held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., or the president’s remarks.     The debate, co-hosted by Politico, is slated to air live on MSNBC.

Asked if the White House was concerned that their timing would upset Nancy Reagan, Carney said only that  “the sponsors of the debate… control the timing of it.     They can make a decision based on how they want to handle this.”

As for the president’s choice of venue, Carney said that it is “appropriate”  for Obama to address Congress because lawmakers will need to work together to take the steps necessary to create jobs.

“It is my intention to lay out a series of bipartisan proposals that the Congress can take immediately to continue to rebuild the American economy by strengthening small businesses, helping Americans get back to work, and putting more money in the paychecks of the Middle Class and working Americans, while still reducing our deficit and getting our fiscal house in order. It is our responsibility to find bipartisan solutions to help grow our economy, and if we are willing to put country before party, I am confident we can do just that,”   the president said in a letter of request to Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

“Our Nation faces unprecedented economic challenges, and millions of hardworking Americans continue to look for jobs.    As I have traveled across our country this summer and spoken with our fellow Americans, I have heard a consistent message:    Washington needs to put aside politics and start making decisions based on what is best for our country and not what is best for each of our parties in order to grow the economy and create jobs.    We must answer this call,”  the president wrote.

According to Carney, Boehner and Reid have not yet accepted the president’s request to address a joint session.

Check This Polling Data

The latest Pew Research Center report includes an enormous amount of polling data, much of pointing in familiar directions — the public is frustrated and deeply unhappy with nearly everyone and everything.     But if we look beyond the top-line results, there are some related details that matter quite a bit.

For example, mainstream support for the Republican Party is reaching new depths.     In the new poll, just 34% have a favorable opinion of the GOP.     This is the lowest level of popularity for either major party since the Pew Research Center began asking the question two decades ago.     The approval rating for congressional Republican leaders is down to just 22% — also the lowest ever recorded for either party.     (The Democratic Party isn’t winning any popularity contests, but with a 43% favorable rating, Dems have a large edge over Republicans.)

And what about President Obama?     The results here are pretty important, and should be of great interest to the White House.

The president’s overall approval rating has ticked down to 43%, but it’s the related details that are arguably more interesting.    Obama is perceived as a warm, trustworthy president, who’s well informed, communicates well, and cares about regular people.    His support has sharply dropped, however, in the “strong leader” and “able to get things done” categories, and the only subject area in which Obama has a majority support is combating terrorism.

Looking ahead, this gem is arguably the most important result of all:

In general, compromise polls extremely well, but not in this case — a plurality wants Obama to fight Republicans more, and that total is up sharply over the last few months.    What’s more, the number of self-identified Republicans who want Obama to stand up more to the GOP has roughly doubled since April.

Think about that:     a growing number of Republicans want Obama to stand up more to Republicans.

The question hanging over Obama’s political strategy has always been the endgame.   His obsession with seeming reasonable makes sense if he uses it as an asset to spend down at the end.   You do everything to show your willingness to compromise, and when the opposition refuses and refuses, finally you assail them for their fanaticism.    It’s harrowing to watch, because we don’t know until the last minute whether we’re witnessing a rope-a-dope strategy, or just a boxer being beaten to a pulp.

This raises the stakes in the upcoming speech on the White House’s economic agenda quite a bit, but it also sends a signal to the president about what the public wants to see:    be ready to fight the wildly unpopular Republican Party, rather than trying to satisfy their demands.

Here’s the big question.    Can Obama find his spine and Fight? 

John McCain may be talking tough about Libya these days, but back in 2009 he promised Muatassim Gadhafi—Moammar’s fifth son and his national security adviser—that he’d do what he could to help Libya obtain military supplies, particularly new aircraft, a cable released by WikiLeaks reveals.    McCain met with Gadhafi along with such Senate notables as Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins, and Joe Lieberman, but the cable indicates that McCain did most of the talking.   John and his traveling buddy Lindsey are involved in many things and Joe Lieberman is never far away.   These guys are the Three Stooges of the US Senate.    

Liberman likes to pretend he is a Democrat except on issues and at election time.     Liberman supported McCain/Palin in the 2008 election.      After the election Obama let it slide and let Joe keep his committee’s and assignments.     

No Drama, No Discipline, No Spine Obama from the very moment he took office.

McCain stressed that Libya needed to fulfill its promise to give up its weapons of mass destruction, but he also described US-Libyan relations as strong, and thanked Libya for its counterterrorism cooperation.   But in a May interview, Lindsey Graham said the meeting led nowhere.   “We never did anything,” Lindsey said.   “We just like traveling together”.    “I didn’t feel comfortable pushing the Pentagon to provide military aircraft to Libya.
None of us did.”    “We were planning to go back a second time but John cancelled the trip because we didn’t get any good press for our efforts.”    “John McCain loves a war, any war.   He wants to appropriate money and give advice.   It’s all McCain lives for.”

  
Amherst County Virginia Democratic News

Amherst County Virginia Democratic News

Is President Obama finally testing his administration’s muscle? On Wednesday, Obama directed several federal agencies to identify “high-impact, job-creating infrastructure projects” that can be expedited by administrative directive without congressional involvement or approval.

One week before he will make a major address to Congress on jobs, Obama is making sure they know he plans to move forward without them. The president has also directed the Education Department to come up with a “Plan B” updating the 2001 No Child Left Behind law in the absence of congressional action. The message to Congress is clear: Do your work or we’ll do it for you.

Under Wednesday’s order, the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, and Transportation will each select up to three high-priority infrastructure projects that can be completed within the control and jurisdiction of the federal government.

The effort is labeled as a “common-sense approach” to spurring job growth “in the near term.” In practical terms, that means speeding up the permitting and waiver processes for green-building or highway projects to get the government out of the way. One of businesses’ foremost complaints with government infrastructure projects is that the paperwork is too cumbersome and creates unnecessary delays, according to White House economic advisers.

What is left unsaid in the administration’s rollout of the infrastructure project is that this may be the extent of the president’s powers while Congress embroils itself in months-long talks on cutting the deficit and responding to the White House’s jobs plan. Obama also pleaded with Congress on Wednesday to pass clean extensions of the Federal Aviation Administration and the surface-transportation laws, both of which expire this month.

Democratic Blog – News

Today McDonald’s Corporation will hire 50,000 new employees nationwide. At approximately an hour making take-home pay of 0 before taxes for a 40 hour work week, this boost to the economy sounds like the punch line to a bad … Continue reading →
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Haslam should back up talk of job creation

Written by state Sen. Lowe Finney and Rep. Craig Fitzhugh

Gov. Bill Haslam’s State of the State address followed the blueprint of responsible spending and tough choices that former Gov. Phil Bredesen laid out over the previous eight years. Thanks to our previous governor’s leadership, we are in better financial shape than most of the country.

But the state’s financial health means little to the nearly 300,000 unemployed Tennesseans who can’t provide for their families, or the hundreds of thousands more who want a full-time job and can’t find one. When presented with proposals to help small-business owners grow and create jobs in Tennessee, lawmakers in the majority party have dismissed them as ”hokey” while claiming that government doesn’t create jobs. They are more focused on printing their own money than helping put more money back into Tennesseans’ pockets.

Yet in Gov. Haslam’s speech, he outlined 2 million in economic development funds and other investments in projects across the state, “as a stimulus for new jobs and new business investment.” It appears the governor has decided, after all, that government has a role to play in creating jobs. Such an investment is a start, but more needs to be done to support our small-business owners and encourage businesses to start, relocate and grow in Tennessee. Major investments like those by Volkswagen and Hemlock required a governor who was all-in for jobs.

Tennessee needs that kind of hands-on approach, now more than ever, through investments like the West Tennessee megasite, which is not funded in the governor’s proposal. We believe that our rural communities should have the same opportunities as Chattanooga and Montgomery County, especially in areas with continued double-digit unemployment rates. Until we see that kind of proactive commitment from the majority party, they cannot truly say that they are working to put Tennesseans back to work.

College cuts are a misstep

In order to attract those jobs to Tennessee, we must also increase the number of Tennesseans with college degrees. A highly trained work force is the top priority for businesses relocating to Tennessee, and that training will come largely through our higher education institutions. Unfortunately, our colleges and universities are facing even more budget cuts, and those shortfalls will be made up almost entirely through tuition increases.

Increased fees are essentially a tax on our Tennessee students, many of whom have returned to school to train for a new career after losing a job. We’re telling low-income students that their scholarships will remain steady, but continued tuition hikes effectively decrease their scholarships. If we’re serious about job creation, we have to also be serious about giving Tennesseans the opportunity to train for those jobs. Cutting their legs out from under them with continued tuition hikes isn’t the answer.

The governor ended his address Monday with a call to avoid partisanship. We remain ready to work with him and the majority in the legislature to help put Tennesseans back to work. Such efforts will require an increased focus on job creation and job training, until everyone who is willing to work is able to find a job. We’re not there yet — and judging by the governor’s speech, we still have a lot of work to do.

State Sen. Lowe Finney of Jackson is the Senate Democratic Caucus chairman. Rep. Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley is the House Democratic leader.

TN Democratic Party News

The Center for Public Policy Priorities today released some devastating county-by-county analysis of the state budget cuts proposed by Gov. Perry and the Republican controlled legislature:

Impact By School District ISD Funding change in 2012($) Job loss Private sector job loss Total job loss Allen (13,949,745) (347) (485) (832) Anna (2,339,745) (58) (81) (140) Celina (1,402,810) (35) (49) (84) Farmersville (478,114) (12) (17) (29) Frisco (87,276,087) (2,171) (3,035) (5,206) McKinney (25,950,220) (646) (903) (1,548) Melissa (1,431,237) (36) (50) (85) Plano (62,715,776) (1,560) (2,181) (3,741) Princeton (1,421,577) (35) (49) (85) Prosper (15,206,604) (378) (529) (907) Wylie (5,947,427) (148) (207) (355) Community (749,628) (19) (26) (45) Lovejoy (14,484,554) (360) (504) (864) Totals (233,353,524) (5,805) (8,116) (13,921)

• Public Education Analysis
• Higher Education Analysis
• Health and Human Services Analysis
• Medicaid Spending Losses Analysis

The public education analysis projects that as many as 189,000+ public education jobs will be eliminated in Texas. Almost 14,000 public education jobs may be eliminated in Collin Co.

The state is short billion, more than one-quarter of the state’s discretionary budget, of which about 91 percent is consumed by public schools, higher education, and health and human services.

Texas already spends less per capita than almost any other state, but Senate Finance Chair Steve Ogden — a Republican who Rick Perry has described as the smartest budget man he knows, and someone he implicitly trusts with the budget — warned today the proposed budge cuts will “decimate public education.“

Texas Republicans would rather put our children’s future at risk than allow corporations to pay their fair share to help build the well educated workforce Texas businesses need to prosper in the future.

Texas Observer: Gov. Rick Perry has repeatedly said Texas’ deficit is “reflective of the national recession’s lingering impact on state revenue.”

In fact, the recession has little to do with the billion budget shortfall. Back in 2006 the Republican controlled Legislature concocted a Rube Goldberg-style [school funding and business tax reform] measure that simultaneously cut property taxes, implemented a new “margins” tax on business and rejiggered the way public schools are financed.

Problem was, as the state Legislative Budget Board pointed out at the time, the plan’s math didn’t wash because the margins tax wouldn’t bring in as much as the Legislature thought. In fact, the board said, it would leave a billion hole in the state budget every year.

The upshot: Perry, who pushed the swap, knew full well he was helping to create today’s “crisis.”

Star-Telegram: A 68-page report released by Texas Comptroller Susan Combs on Monday reveals that Texas will give business .2 billion worth of tax exemptions for sales, franchise, and gasoline and motor vehicle sales taxes for the 2011 fiscal year that ends on Aug. 31, 2011.

Exemptions to the state sales tax, the state’s biggest source of revenue, will total .8 billion for the current fiscal year, Combs said, although some items exempted from the sales tax are taxed from other sources. Gasoline tax exemptions will amount to 3 million. Motor vehicle sales tax exemptions will total 5 million.

“While sales and use tax collections totaled .6 billion in fiscal 2010,” Combs said, “the tax is limited in scope when compared with the total number and kind of transactions in the economy, because of various exemptions and exclusions,” Combs said.

A number of lawmakers are calling for the elimination of at least some exemptions to boost revenue and help offset deep service reductions proposed in preliminary draft budgets. Others say canceling the breaks amounts to a tax increase, which Gov. Rick Perry and Republican legislative leaders have vowed to oppose.

Read more at the Star-Telegram

NYTimes OpEd “Leaving Children Behind” by Paul Krugman:

Consider, as a case in point, what’s happening in Texas, which more and more seems to be where America’s political future happens first.

Texas likes to portray itself as a model of small government, and indeed it is. Taxes are low, at least if you’re in the upper part of the income distribution (taxes on the bottom 40 percent of the population are actually above the national average). Government spending is also low. And to be fair, low taxes may be one reason for the state’s rapid population growth, although low housing prices are surely much more important.

But here’s the thing: While low spending may sound good in the abstract, what it amounts to in practice is low spending on children, who account directly or indirectly for a large part of government outlays at the state and local level.

And in low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right. The high school graduation rate, at just 61.3 percent, puts Texas 43rd out of 50 in state rankings. Nationally, the state ranks fifth in child poverty; it leads in the percentage of children without health insurance. And only 78 percent of Texas children are in excellent or very good health, significantly below the national average.

But wait — how can graduation rates be so low when Texas had that education miracle back when former President Bush was governor? Well, a couple of years into his presidency the truth about that miracle came out: Texas school administrators achieved low reported dropout rates the old-fashioned way — they, ahem, got the numbers wrong.

It’s not a pretty picture; compassion aside, you have to wonder — and many business people in Texas do — how the state can prosper in the long run with a future work force blighted by childhood poverty, poor health and lack of education.

But things are about to get much worse.

A few months ago another Texas miracle went the way of that education miracle of the 1990s. For months, Gov. Rick Perry had boasted that his “tough conservative decisions” had kept the budget in surplus while allowing the state to weather the recession unscathed. But after Mr. Perry’s re-election, reality intruded — funny how that happens — and the state is now scrambling to close a huge budget gap. (By the way, given the current efforts to blame public-sector unions for state fiscal problems, it’s worth noting that the mess in Texas was achieved with an overwhelmingly nonunion work force.)

So how will that gap be closed? Given the already dire condition of Texas children, you might have expected the state’s leaders to focus the pain elsewhere. In particular, you might have expected high-income Texans, who pay much less in state and local taxes than the national average, to be asked to bear at least some of the burden.

But you’d be wrong. Tax increases have been ruled out of consideration; the gap will be closed solely through spending cuts. Medicaid, a program that is crucial to many of the state’s children, will take the biggest hit, with the Legislature proposing a funding cut of no less than 29 percent, including a reduction in the state’s already low payments to providers — raising fears that doctors will start refusing to see Medicaid patients. And education will also face steep cuts, with school administrators talking about as many as 100,000 layoffs.

The really striking thing about all this isn’t the cruelty — at this point you expect that — but the shortsightedness. What’s supposed to happen when today’s neglected children become tomorrow’s work force?

Anyway, the next time some self-proclaimed deficit hawk tells you how much he worries about the debt we’re leaving our children, remember what’s happening in Texas, a state whose slogan right now might as well be “Lose the future.”

Democratic Blog of Collin County – News

Top staffers for Gov. Deval Patrick – who has repeatedly denied his office plays the Beacon Hill patronage game…

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