On Friday night’s Real Time with Bill Maher, liberal talk show host Bill Maher proposed a hypothetical: What if Jesus ran for president today?
Let’s just say he thinks it probably wouldn’t turn out well.
This video is from HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, broadcast Friday, Sept. 30, 2011.
Within president Obama’s 7 billion jobs bill he announced Thursday in an address to a joint session of Congress, some billion would go directly to K-12 educators and renovations to nearly 35,000 schools.
The speech has won plaudits from labor groups and most of the Democratic base for its extension of unemployment insurance benefits and direct jobs training and hiring subsidies for employers, while the package of household and business tax cuts has piqued the Republican Party’s interest as well.
Among the direct jobs spending the president called for, billion would be spent on retaining 280,000 teachers as a counter-cyclical measure to wait out the sluggish economy. After a several-month period of 100,000-plus job gains in the labor market, hiring has slowed, with the most recent monthly jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics noting job growth was completely flat, with net zero new hires.
Going into the 2011-2012 school year, nearly 85 percent of all school districts face budget cuts, according to labor groups; the depletion of 2009 stimulus money that relieved state legislatures from cutting even deeper into education spending meant more layoffs and school infrastructure neglect. The National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in the country, have said the first round of stimulus funds helped 90 percent of school districts avoid spending cuts. Though with many state legislatures passing expansive tax cuts, school spending was on the cutting block.
Many states have dramatically thinned out spending streams to education. From Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:
21 of the 24 states analyzed are providing less funding per student to local school districts in the new school year than they provided last year, and 17 of the 24 are providing less than they did before the recession, after adjusting for inflation. In 10 of these 24 states, per student funding is down by more than 10 percent from pre-recession levels. The three states with the deepest cuts — South Carolina, Arizona, and California — each have reduced per student funding to K-12 schools by more than 20 percent.
Though state contributions to school district spending varies by state, nationally, 47 percent of public education spending comes from state coffers. Since the start of the Great Recession, 229,000 teachers were laid off. And with the housing market at a standstill, local communities are strapped as their chief revenue stream runs dry.
Still, a few states upped their primary and secondary education spending: Alaska, Iowa, New Hampshire, Maryland, Massachussetts and Pennsylvania sent more dollars to K-12 education since the start of the recession.
Because public education allotments follow ‘formula’ spending as indicated by federal law — in which dollars are sent over based on district financial need — a disproportionate amount would flow to poorer neighborhoods, meaning middle-class zones would feel the squeeze. New Jersey, for example, is under court order to withhold any more spending cuts affecting school districts in low-income areas.
The remaining billion would go to refurbishing school structures while funding new science labs, internet-ready classrooms, and modernizing rural school houses while bolstering public school facilities’ green bonefides across the country.
A statement from the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teachers’ union, read in part:
President Obama also made it clear that the path to our future is through education. We have seen a loss of 300,000 education jobs since 2008 as well as long-delayed school repairs and modernization projects. We can’t equip our kids for the knowledge economy if we continue to slash education budgets. This robust plan will put people to work teaching and modernizing schools, and it will save money in energy costs that can be reinvested in education.
For a spending breakdown of the president’s proposed jobs bill, click here [PDF].
If anyone is going to the Libertarian National Committee meeting this weekend, and can broadcast it for our readers, please let us know in the comments and/or at contact.ipr@gmail.com. We would also be interested in a video for later broadcast and/or liveblogging from the meeting.
LNC meetings are taped by LPHQ staff, but those tapes are not public. Other taping and broadcast is permitted during the public portion of the meetings, but only if individuals take the initiative of being there themselves and providing the equipment and operating it. I have done this myself at several past meetings and have always been able to find equipment to borrow; the biggest difficulty is in actually being there and committing to operate the equipment.
Thanks,
-paulie
by R. Lee Wrights
BURNET, Texas (March 19) – After weeks of vacillation, uttering veiled threats that Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi must go while his key advisers made contradictory statements, President Obama has followed the example of his recent predecessors and decided that it is okay for the United States to attack another sovereign nation so long as the United Nations approves it. For an American president to initiate an attack on a nation that does not threaten us is despicable enough, but to justify such aggression by citing a United Nations resolution sets a dangerous precedent that threatens our very sovereignty.
Now the president has made an incredibly duplicitous statement on Libya, claiming that American leadership is essential in this situation and vowing that the United States would not stand “idly by while global peace and security is undermined.” In other words, we need some war so we can have peace. George Orwell, author of 1984, seems more like a prophet every day.
What hubris! A tyrant, who just a few weeks ago wasn’t even on the State Department’s radar, is now suddenly a threat to the world? Tyrants in other Middle East nations are shooting citizens who protest their oppression, but the United States says and does nothing. Why? Because the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet is based in the area and we need the support of those tyrants in order to flex our muscles against another tyrant.
As President Obama spoke, you could almost hear echoes of the high-sounding, pretentious, but dishonest and false arguments expounded by his predecessors to justify American military action anywhere and everywhere. We’re not imposing our will, the president claims, we are just intervening to protect innocent civilians so they can decide their own fate. We will not use any force beyond that well-defined goal, and there will be no American troops on the ground.
The arguments are illogical, irrational and false to say the least. You cannot stop violence by committing violence. You don’t teach people it is wrong to kill people by killing people. A no fly-zone imposed using “all necessary measures” is an act of war and aggression, plain and simple.
Democrats and Republicans used to agree that any partisan debate over foreign policy should end at the nation’s shores. Now they seem to agree that any debate over foreign policy shouldn’t involve discussion of the U.S. Constitution. From the moment the people in Libya said they’ve had enough and rebelled against the tyrant whom the United States has either ignored or tolerated for 40 years, voices on both sides of the aisle were heard urging the president to send American troops to fight and die on yet another foreign shore.
Sen. John McCain, who should know about the dangers of flying over a hostile nation before fully suppressing its air defenses, was one of the leading voices calling for the United States to impose a no-fly zone over Libya. He was joined by Sen. John Kerry, who voted for the Iraq war before he voted against it (or was it the other way around).
All the while President Obama bobbed and weaved around the issue, even to the point of ignoring it completely in one of his weekly radio addresses. Finally, when Gadhafi was on the verge of destroying the rebels, the clumsy and inept United Nations Security Council stirred from its slumber to “authorize” members “to take all necessary measure” to impose a no-fly zone over Libya, enforce an arms embargo and freeze Libyan assets.
There are two things glaringly wrong with this view, as anyone who has even the remotest familiarity with the U.S. Constitution and American history could figure out, but which escapes most members of Congress and the president. First, the United States has no business initiating an attack on any other nation unless there is a declaration of war by the Congress. Second, Libya has not attacked us, nor does it threaten U.S. security or sovereignty. The conflict in Libya is a civil war, and anyone, especially anyone from the South, knows that civil wars are especially terrible and awful.
No resolution of the U.N. justifies violating the U.S. Constitution. Doing so sets the stage for U.N. sovereignty over the U.S. Any attack on Libya by U.S. forces, even those acting under the guise of this bogus document, would be a war of aggression since Libya has not threatened us. The Nuremberg Trials condemned such attacks as war crimes. We already have one ex-president fearful of traveling overseas afraid of being charged with war crimes; do we really want another such blot on our nation?
If the president orders U.S. forces to take such action he will be in clear violation of his oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The Founders of our nation gave the war-making power to Congress for a very specific and real reason. They were all too familiar with a ruler who used claimed omnipotent powers to engage in endless military adventures overseas, bankrupting the nation and destroying the lives of its people.
As Jacob Hornberger, founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation wrote: “Our ancestors brought into existence a nation with no standing army, no militarism, and no empire, no Federal Reserve, no federal torture, no federal kidnapping, no war on terrorism, no CIA, no war on drugs, no foreign wars, no public schooling, no paper money, and no wars of aggression.
“They brought into existence a government based on limited powers expressly enumerated in the U.S Constitution, an economic system based on free-market principles, and a society deeply committed to the preservation of civil liberties and fundamental rights.
“The time has arrived for Americans to return to first principles.”
We must stop all war … and stop this war before it starts.
R. Lee Wrights is a longtime libertarian writer, political activist, a lifetime member of the Libertarian Party, and a past vice chair of the Libertarian National Committee. He is considering seeking the presidential nomination because he is determined that the Libertarian message in 2012 be a loud, clear and unequivocal call to stop all war. Wrights has pledged that 10 percent of all donations to his campaign will go toward ballot access so that the stop all war message can be heard in all 50 states. Wrights, 52, is the co-founder and editor of the free speech online magazine Liberty For All. He was born in Winston Salem, N.C. and now lives in Texas.
Political strategists have chosen it as the Word of the Month.
Whenever you hear a Republican say ‘Job-Killing’ remember that he doesn’t actually mean Health insurance reform. It’s pure political rhetoric.
Unfortunately, many voters find politics confusing so they latch onto particular words as if they were flotation devices in the ocean.
A better approach for voters would be learning how to think.
Allowing politicians to manipulate you with magic words.
A private sector job is not dependency.
‘Dependency’ is yet -another- phony Republican magic word. It has no connection to reality.
When a father has no job and has no insurance because of Republican policies, THAT’S dependency. When Obama strengthens the economy and that father gets a private sector job and when insurance reform makes health insurance for his family affordable . . .
