The state election office made a historic mess of Tennessee’s Presidential Primary — with mistakes that robbed a former U.S. Congressman and his wife of their right to vote and denied voters access to the polls.
Secretary of State Tre Hargett and State Election Coordinator Mark Goins are in charge of the government office [...]
TNDP News
THE DEVIL [mortified] Señor Don Juan: you are uncivil to my friends.
DON JUAN. Pooh! why should I be civil to them or to you? In this Palace of Lies a truth or two will not hurt you. Your friends are all the dullest dogs I know….
~ George Bernard Shaw – Man & Superman, Act III, “Don Juan in Hell” (1903)
Ladies and Gentlemen, meet the douchebag I am about to be uncivil to:
Peter Roff is a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report. A former senior political writer for United Press International, he is currently a senior fellow at the Institute for Liberty and at Let Freedom Ring, a non-partisan public policy organization. His writing has also appeared on Fox News’ Fox Forum.
Another mental midget of the Right, incapable of serious thought, a walking, squinchy compendium of talking points, bumper stickers and a wasted education, he is the poster boy for all of the right-wing idiocy and hypocrisy that has followed in the wake of the death of Andrew Breitbart.
Time for some fisking, because, really, this is what the entire response of the rabid reich-wing has stood for: imbecility masquerading as martyrdom. Emphasis on “dumb.” To wit(less):
Andrew Breitbart a Pioneer Journalist Who Stood Up to Liberal Media
U.S News and World Report (shame be eternally upon them)
March 1, 2012The old saying about the weather—everyone talks about it but no one does anything about it—used to also apply to the problem of liberal bias in the establishment media. Lots of conservatives complain about it, many of them even seem to enjoy doing so, but few actually do anything about it.
“Liberal bias in the establishment media” is such a hackneyed piece of garbage that only a brainwashed buffoon would have the effrontery to believe that it actually even MEANT something, but this buffrontery would be unworthy of a baboon. “Establishment”? Like Righties are the “hippies” fighting against “The Man”?
Puhleeze! For all but four of the last 32 years, the GOP has controlled either the White House or one house (minimum) of Congress. Making them the “outsiders”?
The continuing error of the “outsiders” is that what they mistake for “liberalism” is cowed incompetence, which, if one were to reasonably mistake for ANYTHING, it would surely be the non-evidentiary cloud-cuckooland fantasies of the “conservatives.” (And note that to them “liberalism” isn’t an actual ideology, it is merely negative space. If it doesn’t fall on its knees and worship at the false altar of Reagan — which has nothing to do with the actual terms of Ronnie — then it must be “liberal,” which is intoned with a venom formerly reserved for the N-word.)
Get a grip, monkey-boy. If ANY-one is the “establishment” it’s Peter Roff. Got that? Good. We continue (and I am reprinting the entire execrable essay, so that we may treasure every scream of horror as children and women cry “Dear GOD, what is that THING?”):
Andrew Breitbart, who left us early Thursday morning unexpectedly and far too soon, was different. Rather than simply complain, he established something approximating an electronic and social media empire on the Internet that, it needs to be said, changed journalism in America.
No: he didn’t change journalism in America. That’s hyperbolic nonsense. Period. Try again.
It’s not just that Breitbart did it well. He did it with an energy and passion and determination that made him the equal of the left, which even in his death continues to express its hate for him with a passion. As former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—himself no stranger to controversy—tweeted, “Andrew Breitbart never shied from controversy. He was one of conservatism’s most forceful spokesmen and will be greatly missed.”
Really? His barbarism in “taking out” Anthony Weiner — not through his arguments, but, rather, through the most scrofulous form of electronic peepery — is a) clearly NOT “journalism,” nor b) was his “forceful” arrogation of the podium at Weiner’s resignation announcement anything OTHER than a barbaric display of utter abrogration of civility that no civilized human ought do other than condemn.
He pulled this crap again and again, and no “civilized” person had the good sense to cold-cock the brute. Happily, Ghod took care of that oversight. And quoting Rummy as any sort of “moral” arbiter would seem utterly laughable in light of his decision to abrogate 230 years of American policy and tradition to engage in torture.
Through his various websites and media appearances, Breitbart broke stories. Without him, for example, former Rep. Anthony Weiner might still today be in Congress and on the way to being mayor of New York City. He was ruthless in his pursuit of truth, a rare quality among the left-leaning establishment press, which more often carries the agenda of bigger government forward rather than questioning it.
Anthony Weiner’s only sin was that he stood up to bullies LIKE Breitbart, who had to find some sleazy way to destroy him outside the boundaries of civil discourse or debate, and succeeded, hoping to (along with morons like Mr. Roth) destroy his marriage as well. Merely removing Weiner from the public stage was not enough, and that’s not a “forceful spokesman.” No: that’s being an assassin and a thug — as in “Thugee.”
This is so verdantly scrofulous and corrupt that it seems a minor feat to have packed so much blatant, errant psychotic nonsense into a single paragraph.
Scrofulous is precisely the term for it, too: “scrofulous - morally contaminated; “denounce the scrofulous wealth of the times”- J.D.Hart immoral; deliberately violating accepted principles of right and wrong.
“He was ruthless in his pursuit of truth, a rare quality among the left-leaning establishment press” is a grammatical outage (not “outrage”). To hold “ruthlessness” in pursuit of “truth” as a POSITIVE is, in context, a justification for torture, spying and extortion. All of which Breitbart demonstrably engaged in. Again, the means justifying the ends.
This conservative dimbulb seems to believe that the ends justify the means, which entailed falsification and tactics that would make the scumbags at the National Enquirer blanch. Only a mindless hypocrite would embrace this sad, sordid legacy and THEN decry any perceived incivility to the dead Breitbart as awful and horrible — as the entire Reich-Wing blogosmear has delighted in, from before the moment that rigor mortis actually set in.
They come not to bury Breitbart but to fight the preconceived notion that anyone watching his barbaric, childish bullying tactics, his deceptively-edited tapes, his wanton destruction of lives and careers, and his utter hatred for the “left” — that he engaged in with the feral glee of a hydrophobic dog — and for days now, they have publicly masturbated to their fantasy that all should be properly civil to the dead brute. In the MOST uncivil of terms.
“Breitbart broke stories” is precisely correct, albeit not in the manner that our felching necrophile “journalist” conservative seems to believe.
“which more often carries the agenda of bigger government forward rather than questioning it” is a slur stereotype that is mindlessly accepted by the mindless, but is idiotic to anyone capable of rational thought who does not masturbate to the speeches in Atlas Shrugged.
The trope that “Establishment Liberal Journalists” carry the water for “Big Government” (implicitly because their “liberalism” makes them either willing or unwilling dupes) is sheerest bad science fiction. Like foaming-at-the-mouth TV “prophets” they find justifications for their apocalyptic mentality in every news item, somehow linking it back to the babbling nonsense of a book that no one has ever been able to make heads or tails of. (I speak of Atlas Shrugged and not The Revelation of St. John, since there IS some meaning that can be derived from the latter.)
And now, the pièce de résistance from the pièce de shite writer:
There are others who knew him better, worked with him more closely, and are in a better position to comment on him as a person. His accomplishments as a journalist pioneer, however, are evident for everyone to see. He paved the way for a new generation of conservative writers and pundits, taught many of us how to use social media as an effective communications tool, and, in the end, made a difference. Few of us can probably think of a better epitaph.
They’re evident, all right. But the evidence is that Andrew Breitbart resurrected the ruthless blood-lust of the Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon raider and adopted it to new technology. No student of history, or of ethics or of morality can embrace his modus operandi without abandoning any lessons derived FROM those studies.
If he paved a way then the road he paved was wide and the “good intentions” espoused are those espoused by the first character quoted at the beginning of this essay.
I attempted to be respectful at the demise of Breitbart, but the license it has given his admirers for rapine pillage in the arenas of public discourse abrogate any attempt at respect for the dead. Since ANY dissing of dead Andy would be ramped up and megaphoned from the rafters as the conservative monkeys gleefully threw their feces, the actual display was not surprising, except in the universality and fervency of that flinging.
Which is Andrew Breitbart’s true epitaph. Legitimate journalists everywhere were chary about announcing his death — because Breitbart’s HOAXES were so ubiquitous that no one wanted to be caught in yet another one. That is the first epitaph.
The second is from morons like this idiot, who have twisted truth, nobility, moral purpose and the very foundations of American democracy into the Roman gladiatorial arena in which the only important spectacle is the death and dismemberment of the contestants, without regard to who they are as PERSONS — only that they are the negatively-defined “liberals” just as Jerry Falwell once defined anyone who didn’t accept HIS reading of the Bible as “secular humanists,” a term coined by that demon-spawn while on his way to worm-food.
Now, Andrew Breitbart is food for the worms, and I doubt seriously that the worms will survive his toxicity any more than the targets of his psychotic hatred did.
The necrophiles at Breitbart’s “media empire” are now reprinting essays on his toxic hatred of the President of the United States, and, thus, civility is no longer in order, as it ceased to be in order after a thousand essays like Mr. Roth’s.
I will not comment on the latest one in THIS essay, save to say that Mr. Breitbart has proven, posthumously, that he was every bit as lousy a drama critic as he was a lousy human being. I leave it to the worms to comment on how tasteful he might be, although I doubt it will be any less so than his reprinted essay, whose opening refrain of purest equine fecal matter I reproduce here:
THE VETTING, PART I: BARACK’S LOVE SONG TO ALINSKY
by Andrew Breitbart
Prior to his passing, Andrew Breitbart said that the mission of the Breitbart empire was to exemplify the free and fearless press that our Constitution protects–but which, increasingly, the mainstream media denies us…
Utter garbage. (Or, as I have noted before: Occam’s Dull Razor tells us: Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained just as well by stupidity. See “At the Mountains of Madness,” which applies here, as well).
Let us conclude, instead, with Mr. G.B. Shaw, who has written a better epitaph for Mr. Breitbart than could I or Mr. Peter Roth:
Nothing would flatter him more than your opinion of him. He loves to think of himself as bold and bad. He is neither one nor the other: he is only a coward. Call him tyrant, murderer, pirate, bully; and he will adore you, and swagger about with the consciousness of having the blood of the old sea kings in his veins. Call him liar and thief; and he will only take an action against you for libel. But call him coward; and he will go mad with rage: he will face death to outface that stinging truth. Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice. [ibid.]
For in the end, Breitbart was not a swaggering bully, nor some great innovator. No: in the end he was and remains a coward.
He should enjoy his new domicile in Hell very much, I believe.
Courage.
================
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog.
Since the record turnout of minority and young voters in 2008, there has been a wave of new laws that block access to the ballot box. The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that more than five million voters may be disenfranchised by the voting law changes. The most onerous restriction requires voters to present government-issued photo ID in order to vote.
On Tuesday, the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAPAF) hosted a panel discussion on how civil rights organizations, advocacy groups and ordinary citizens are using social media to protect the right to vote and fight strict photo ID requirements. Alan Rosenblatt, Associate Director of Online Advocacy for CAPAF, delivered welcoming remarks. Nicole Austin-Hillery, Director and Counsel in the Brennan Center’s DC Office, provided an overview of state photo ID laws.
The panel discussion was moderated by Vanessa Cárdenas, Director of Progress 2050, a project of the Center for American Progress. I was a panelist, along with Eric Rodriguez, Vice President, Office of Research, Advocacy, and Legislation for the National Council of La Raza, Erika Maye, Communications Specialist with the Advancement Project, and Rashad Robinson, Executive Director of ColorOfChange.
The panelists addressed a wide range of issues, including:
Faye Anderson gave a demo of the Cost of Freedom App, a location-based web app that will provide voters with information on how to get a voter ID. The prototype for the app was developed by Kin Lane, API Evangelist for CityGrid.
Users of the web app will be able to quickly access information about their state’s voter ID requirements, how to obtain a certified copy of their birth certificate (the document that’s typically produced to establish one’s identity), and the location, hours and directions to the Office of Vital Records using public transit.
Anderson also gave a live demo of the Cost of Freedom text-based app developed by Jack Aboutboul, Twilio’s API Evangelist. Twilio is making an in-contribution of text message services to promote voter education.
Development of the web and text apps is crowd-sourced. As chief evangelist for the Cost of Freedom Project, Anderson is recruiting researchers and designers on Facebook, Twitter and Idealist. Indeed, the project is powered by We the People and social media.
For information on how you can get involved in this citizen-led initiative, please visit us at Facebook.com/CostofFreedom.
Cross post from article in Social Media Week by Faye Anderson.
From Jill Stein for President:
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein praised former Senator Russ Feingold today for speaking plainly when he says that, “The President is wrong to have embraced the corrupt corporate politics of Citizens United and that’s what you’re doing when you start using and consorting with Super PACs.” [...]
Green Party Watch
From Jill Stein for President:
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein praised former Senator Russ Feingold today for speaking plainly when he says that, “The President is wrong to have embraced the corrupt corporate politics of Citizens United and that’s what you’re doing when you start using and consorting with Super PACs.” [...]
Green Party Watch
Click here to view the embedded video.
Via Rumproast… MA Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren:
I hear all this, you know, “Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.”—No!
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.
You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear.
You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for.
You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.
You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.
You didn’t have to worry that maurauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.
Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea—God bless. Keep a big hunk of it.
But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
She’s got spunk… lot’s of it apparently. The question to whoever wins the Dem nomination here in MA is “can you attract the independent voters,” who all flocked to Scott Brown in the election to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat?
Elizabeth Warren is already showing an “announcement bump” in polls. Time will tell…
The false narrative is that the Tea Party is a bunch of stubborn nuts, if not outright racists. In truth, the Tea Party has been right about everything, while almost everyone else has been nuts, especially the “experts.”
Minimum wage. One of the first things Democrats did after taking back Congress in 2007 was raise the federal minimum wage 41% from 2007 to 2009. Result? The unemployment rate went from 4.4% in May 2007 to 10.1% in 2009. It is 9.2% even today — four years later.
As for teens, the unemployment rate went from 14.9% to 27.1%, the highest ever recorded, meaning since 1948. Today it is still a high 24.5%. And for blacks: from a low of 7.9% in 2007 to 16.5% in 2010. It is still a high 16.2%.
The Democrat Congress also decided to apply the same minimum wages to American Samoa. Results? Near-decimation of its economy, one that had been based largely on low-cost tuna canning and textile work.
… employment fell 19 percent from 2008 to 2009 … tuna canning employment fell 55 percent from 2009 to 2010… Average inflation-adjusted earnings fell by 5 percent from 2008 to 2009 and by 11 percent from 2006 to 2009.
Of course, some of the increase in unemployment was a result of the Great Recession. But the Employment Policies Institute did a study to separate the effects for the most vulnerable group: males aged 16-24 without high school diploma. EPI’s answer: the minimum wage increase killed over 100,000 jobs (31% of the lost jobs) for that demographic.
TARP. Unless you were a politician or executive of a large bank, you were likely against the Troubled Asset Relief Program. I would guess that most anyone now calling herself a member of the Tea Party was against TARP in 2008. But Senator Barack Obama voted for it, along with most of his Democrat colleagues. Also the top brains of the Stupid Party pushed it: Henry Paulson, George W. Bush, and John McCain.
On October 3, 2008, Congress authorized Treasury Secretary Paulson to use up to 0 billion under TARP to do what was needed to stave off financial disaster. By December, after using 7B, Paulson said he was done, crisis averted. (Of course his successor, Tim Geithner, was not done.)
Here’s the funny thing: while Paulson was lending out less than .3 trillion, the Federal Reserve was lending out over T to do about the same thing! By my calculations, Paulson’s TARP slush fund was less than 2% the size of the Federal Reserve’s.
Do you think that 2% was critical to staving off financial apocalypse? (FYI, over 3T of the Fed’s emergency loans were to subsidiaries of foreign-owned banks.)
When the dust cleared, the federal government owned two bankrupt car companies and the god-awful home mortgage portfolios of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — entities that had nothing to do with the original purpose of TARP.
Global markets were so enamored with TARP that there was an immediate sell-off of about 20% in global stock markets the moment it went into effect. I also credit TARP, and McCain’s reaction to it, for McCain’s loss to Obama. Ever since, all budget discussions have involved units of trillions instead of mere billions. The world has not been the same since TARP.
Stimulus. Opposition to Obama’s stimulus was the origin of the Tea Party. Now we know the story.
How the stimulus was sold: It would create three million jobs or more. It would keep the unemployment rate under 8%, instead of 9% without a stimulus. It would cost 7B. The jobs were shovel-ready.
What really happened: There are 1.2 million fewer jobs now than when the stimulus was passed. Unemployment went over 10% (vs. prediction of 8%) and is still over 9% (vs. prediction of about 6.8% at this time). It cost 4B or more. Maybe 6% of it went to infrastructure projects. Obama’s reaction? A little joke: “Shovel ready was not as shovel ready as we expected.”
Of course, Obama and his minions simply blame this on their underestimating the size of the mess they inherited from Bush. But that has been studied by economists at the University of Western Ontario and Ohio State University. The verdict: the stimulus itself cost about one million private-sector jobs; the net job loss was about 595,000. We’d have been better off without any “stimulus” at all, just as the Tea Party said.
ObamaCare. ObamaCare was sold as a way to bend the health “cost curve” down. As it turned out, it is bending the cost curve up — health care will be more costly than it would have been without ObamaCare. It’s so great that in its first year about 1,500 companies, states, and unions were granted waivers.
ObamaCare strangled the recovery in the crib. The private sector has been generating only 6,400 jobs per month since it was passed, compared to 67,600 before. We would never return to pre-recession unemployment levels at the current pace. ObamaCare is costing us over 60,000 jobs per month.
Drilling moratorium. According to a new study by IHS Global Insight, merely picking up the pace in granting oil drilling permits would go a long way in producing jobs throughout the US, adding to GDP and reducing dependency on foreign oil sources. In 2012 alone it could mean 230,000 new jobs, B more in GDP, 150 million more barrels of oil, and B less in imported oil.
Budgets. Now we find ourselves in another budget fight, with the Tea Party getting the blame from much of the media and liberal punditry. The truth is that Democrats have not even written, much less passed, a budget of any kind in over two years; they simply kill everyone else’s.
• The Republican-led House passed a budget on schedule in April. Senate Democrats voted it down.
• Obama proposed a budget in February. The Congressional Budget Office scored it as having a 10-year cumulative deficit of .5 trillion. The Democrat-led Senate voted that down too, 97-0.
• The House proposed the only written plan for addressing the debt ceiling — the Cut, Cap and Balance plan. Senate Democrats voted that down, too.
It shouldn’t take a keen insight to see that Senate Democrats are the “Party of No” and the obstacle to resolving budget and debt issues.
Uncertainty and arbitrariness. Just last December Obama said keeping Bush’s tax rates was critical to keeping the recovery going. He and the Democrat Congress at the time extended them for another two years, plus added over 0 B in additional tax cuts and credits. Now, just seven months later, Obama insists that any deal to raise the debt ceiling must include tax increases.
Like ObamaCare, the Dodd-Frank bill to regulate all finance in the country is a thousand-page-plus piece of legislation. As the New York Times understated it just after its passage, “[a] number of the details have been left for regulators to work out.” Got it? Those thousand-plus pages did not include the details.
The EPA now has power to regulate every use of fossil fuels in this country, as well as every breath we take, if they so deem. What will it do with that power? You get to guess. If you think it wouldn’t do anything too stupid, know that the FDA just outlawed common inhalers for asthma sufferers. Their reason was, get this, those inhalers are blamed for contributing to upper-atmosphere ozone loss.
Even if you think CFCs contribute to ozone loss, how much do you think the CFCs released by asthma inhalers have to do with it? And how much is the indirect and ambiguous loss of ozone worth compared to the direct and known suffering of asthma patients? Such is the wisdom of government regulators.
The list is endless. If you were thinking of starting a business or making an investment that might not pay off for five or ten years, would you feel like you know the rules and could depend on them? No, you’d hunker down, which is exactly what everyone with any money left is doing right now.
This jobless recovery is not some mystery. It is very clearly the result of decisions — decisions made by Obama and the Democrats. At every opportunity they grew government, shrank the private sector, and viewed budding enterprises as little more than beasts of burden — something to whip while healthy and carve up and eat when not.
As Robert Mugabe viewed white-owned farms, Obama views corporations not yet in Chapter 11.
Nothing Democrats did helped; everything they did hurt. Everything. Min wage. TARP. Stimulus. ObamaCare. The Gulf oil spill. Every budget they ever proposed, written or not. Every little czar they put in place to spend other people’s money and to bully the only productive people still toiling away at the thankless tasks of making stuff and providing jobs.
At every point, the Tea Party and its sympathizers tried to stop these idiocies, only to be called ignorant racists. You might want to ask yourself why so many people talk of the “Tea Party,” whatever that is, the way Lenin and Stalin talked of kulaks and saboteurs, whoever they were.
Do “taxed enough already,” “stop spending,” and “obey the Constitution” sound that crazy to you? If so, you might want to think about why you think so.
Written by Randall Hoven.
Bill White has sent out an open letter to Texans commenting on the massive education cuts planned by Gov. Perry and the Republican controlled state legislature that Senate Finance Chair Steve Ogden — a Republican who Rick Perry has described as the smartest budget man he knows — has said will “decimate public education” in Texas:
Two years ago a blue ribbon panel with conservative business leaders appointed by Governor Perry reported that Texas “faces a downward spiral in both quality of life and economic competitiveness if it fails to educate more of its growing population.” The panel focused on the need to increase college attendance and to improve higher education.
Governor Perry’s budget proposes a 20% cut in state support for higher education. For the impact of the current proposed budget cuts on specific student aid programs and colleges throughout the state, click here.
Please circulate this information to other Texans, and let your elected officials know what you think about this. You can also join the discussion about these cuts on the Facebook page, www.facebook.com/BillWhiteTexas.
It is not right to blame the recession for these cuts. It is just common sense: the state’s economy hasn’t gone down by 20%!
These cuts reflect a lack of leadership and planning for the future.
The education of our workforce is the most important investment in Texas’ future. My dad came off a subsistence farm with help from the GI Bill, and a scholarship I earned opened the door to a college my family couldn’t afford. But the current budget proposal cuts student assistance by 41%. Even support for community colleges won’t be spared during a period when their enrollment is surging.
In the last decade eight countries have caught up with or tied the U.S. in the percentage of young workers with college degrees. Texas has been lagging behind other states.
If you love our state like I do, please share this information with other Texans.
Respectfully,
Bill White
For weeks now, there has been a steady stream of news stories about school districts laying off, or planning to lay off, hundreds or thousands of teachers as Texas legislators more closer to slashing billions from the state education budget for the next two years. Many districts have already started to fire administrators and other non-teachers, but is clear that many teachers must be fired given the deep budget cuts. As Texas parents become increasingly worried about their children’s education Republicans are tell them to “move along, nothing to see here…”
The Statesman: Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, a group that advocates for lower taxes and less government spending, has been making hundreds of thousands of [robo-]calls to voters around the state in an effort to push back against school districts that say the state’s budget shortfall will force them to lay off thousands of teachers.Michael Sullivan, the president of Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, said his group has called about 350,000 households around the state, with an emphasis on constituents of the lawmakers sitting on the budget-writing House Appropriations and Senate Finance committees.
“Right now, public education bureaucrats are threatening to scare parents and teachers by threatening the classroom,” Sullivan says on the call. “Superintendents and school board members say they’ll start making cuts by letting teachers go. That’s irresponsible. The classroom must be protected. … Tell your state legislators to stand firm on cutting the budget and tell them that cuts must be made outside the classroom.”
Sullivan has repeatedly proven himself to be an effective communicator with the conservative grass roots. Earlier this year, Texas Monthly named him one of the 25 most powerful people in Texas politics.
The argument from Sullivan and other conservatives is that cutting the budget won’t force schools to let teachers go, but rather that schools need to stop spending so much money on non-classroom expenses. An oft-cited number around the Capitol these days is that school districts employ as many non-teachers as teachers, but educators say most of those non-teachers are the people who, for instance, drive the buses, serve the food and clean the buildings.
Read the full story at The Statesman.
Did the right wing cabal murder President Robert Kennedy?
Are republicans creating a ‘hate state’?
So in the end with time running out and Democrat Senators making zero progress after delaying handling the matter until the last possible moment President Obama steped in and cut a deal. Had Obama not stepped in the tax rate on the lowest bracket would have gone from 10% to 15%, a 50% increase in tax rate on the poorest taxpayers.
If there is dissatisfaction it should be directed at the Senators who failed to do their jobs and the Republicans who obstruct and gum up the function of the government.
The President doesn’t have the luxury of letting the country fall apart and the Senators don’t appear to care one way or the other. Keith Olbermann (MSNBC Cable) has as is his want once again shot his mouth off with out using the grey matter between his ears to properly assign blame. If the House and Senate don’t like Obama’s Deal then they can vote it down, but they won’t. They are happy someone else made the decision and they have something to hide behind. As for Olbermann he seems intent on racing Glenn Beck to crazyville.
The end of December is the drop dead date for cutting a deal. I couldn’t care less who cuts it as long as it gets done. Here’s the bottom line, President Obama Did The Right Thing.
Click for Video Obama Explains Terms of Deal
Background Info
United Senate Republicans joined a small handful of Democrats on Saturday to defeat a pair of proposals to extend some of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts signed into law by President George W. Bush.
Voting nearly identically, the Senate twice failed to meet a 60-vote threshold necessary to move forward on both proposals. Meeting in a rare Saturday session after agreements fell through for a Friday vote, the results were widely expected. They were also somewhat premature, as the White House is still negotiating with congressional leaders on an alternative compromise proposal.
The first proposal by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) would have extended the cuts only for individuals with incomes of up to 0,000 and families with incomes of up to 0,000. That failed by a vote of 53-36, with all GOP senators in opposition as well as Democrats Russ Feingold (Wis.), Joe Manchin (W.V.), Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Jim Webb (Va.).
The second proposal by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) would have extended the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanently for incomes of up to million, among other provisions such as a one-year extension of unemployment benefits and cuts in capital gains, estate and dividend taxes. That failed, 53-37, with Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) joining the ‘no’ votes.
Senate Democrats give up push for pre-election tax cut vote, September 23, 2010.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other Democratic leaders have expressed desire to extend the tax cuts. Senate Democrats will not vote on extending Bush-era tax cuts for families making less than 0,000 a year before the upcoming congressional elections, the spokesman for Majority Leader Harry Reid confirmed Thursday.
“We will come back in November [after the elections] and stay in session as long as it takes to get this done,” said a statement from Reid’s spokesman, Jim Manley.
The announcement followed reports by CNN, citing senior Democratic sources, that Senate Democrats would hold off for now on forcing a vote on the measure pushed by President Obama.
The deal the President struck with republicans was necessary. It wasn’t his job to cut the deal. The House and Senate should have cut the deal and sent it to Obama for signature or veto. The House is willing to do their job and over the last two years has been hung out to dry by the Senate almost 200 times. The Senate is a Non-Functional Gathering of Wind Bags who lack the courage to reach a decision on anything.
Controlling the language and semantics is important in politics. It is obvious that calling the 2001 and 2003 Tax Cut bills the “Bush Tax Cuts” is not correct. I hereby propose a few alternatives. First, for the HB 1836: Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001:
Feinstein-Nelson Tax Cuts: In honor of the Yea votes of Sens. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and Ben Nelson (D-NE).
The Democratic Presents of 2001: In honor of the five Democratic Senators who voted “Present”. (Kerry (MA), Murray (WA), Boxer (CA), Harkin (IA), Leahy (VT), and a special Democratic Congressman who was also “Present”: Kendrick Meek (FL). Thanks guys for lacking the courage to cast a vote.
The Bi-Partisan Tax Relief Act of 2001
Now, for the 2003 cuts, the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003, which reduced the third through top
rates, lets consider these re-names.
Another Tax Cut McCain Voted Against Act. McCain voted against tax relief in 2003, just as in 2001. John McCain used to
vote Democratic more often than some of our Blue Dogs. Sadly John no longer remembers anything prior to 2009.
The Bi-Partisan Tax Relief Act of 2003, with seven Democrats in the House and two in the Senate voting yes.
The Cheney Liberty Act, in honor of the man casting the deciding vote in the Senate.
So now Obama steps in and brings some order to this cat herding madness and you want to pretend he messed up your master plan. Send your cards and letters to the phonies pretending to be Democrats. As long as Democrats have five different positions and are marching in three different directions then Democrats are going nowhere.
