Tim Pawlenty kept up his searing criticism of Michele Bachmann Friday morning, deriding the notion that the Minnesota congresswoman has been a “leader” for conservative causes.
At POLITICO’s Playbook Breakfast in Des Moines, Pawlenty disputed the notion that he had gone after Bachmann too harshly in Thursday night’s GOP presidential debate. Pawlenty said he didn’t think he’d pay a price for attacking the lone female candidate on the stage.
“It’s not about gender. It’s about the issues and it’s about results and it’s about leading and saving our country,” Pawlenty said, noting that “Congresswoman Bachmann likes to assign herself the label of the leader.”
“She says, ‘I led the charge against Obamacare.’ Well, we ended up with Obamacare,” Pawlenty said, mentioning Bachmann’s unsuccessful opposition to federal spending and the 2008 bank bailout.
“Everything she’s led the charge against, she’s failed to accomplish. That’s not gonna be good enough for our nominee for president of the United States,” Pawlenty said. “We’re not gonna have a nominee and we’re not gonna put somebody in the Oval Office who has not achieved results during her time in Congress.”
So this estimated $35 million got spent by national special interest groups on these recall campaigns, these temper tantrums. This is a big chasm; generally speaking, Republicans think public employee unions are too fat while Democrats think they are noble champions of working people in a world the Republicans want to hand over to the untaxed super-rich.
This is where Brummett misses the boat. The problem is not just that the public employee unions are too fat, but that they exist at all. Take a look at this article below:
Somewhere, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is grinning past his cigarette holder at Wisconsin’s governor. They are on the same page regarding government unions.
Except that Scott Walker — Republican cheapskate, his visage Hitlerized on signs waved by beet-faced union crowds besieging the Capitol — is kind of a liberal squish compared to FDR. He’s OK with some collective bargaining.
Walker, you might have heard, wants some changes in how Wisconsin deals with unions. He wants state employees to pay 5.8% of their salaries toward their pensions (they pay almost nothing now) and he wants them to cover 12.6% of their health care premiums (their share would go up from $79 a month to about $200; the average private-sector sap pays about $330).
Unions are enraged. They’ve been calling such increases unspeakable since Walker was elected handily in November. Then, Feb. 10, Walker went further. He’d allow public-sector unions to negotiate only pay, not benefits, mainly because he wants HSA-style health plans and 401(k)-style retirements for state workers, and unions would fight that, tooth and ragged red claw.
So unions erupted. Teachers faked illness in such numbers as to close school districts for days. Mobs beat on the doors of legislative chambers. And in some heavenly Hyde Park, the great liberal god of the 1930s is saying he saw it all along.
Roosevelt’s reign certainly was the bright dawn of modern unionism. The legal and administrative paths that led to 35% of the nation’s workforce eventually unionizing by a mid-1950s peak were laid by Roosevelt.
But only for the private sector. Roosevelt openly opposed bargaining rights for government unions.
“The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” Roosevelt wrote in 1937 to the National Federation of Federal Employees. Yes, public workers may demand fair treatment, wrote Roosevelt. But, he wrote, “I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place” in the public sector. “A strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government.”
And if you’re the kind of guy who capitalizes “government,” woe betide such obstructionists.
Roosevelt wasn’t alone. It was orthodoxy among Democrats through the ’50s that unions didn’t belong in government work. Things began changing when, in 1959, Wisconsin’s then-Gov. Gaylord Nelson signed collective bargaining into law for state workers. Other states followed, and gradually, municipal workers and teachers were unionized, too.
Even as that happened, the future was visible. Frank Zeidler, Milwaukee’s mayor in the 1950s and the last card-carrying Socialist to head a major U.S. city, supported labor. But in 1969, the progressive icon wrote that rise of unions in government work put a competing power in charge of public business next to elected officials. Government unions “can mean considerable loss of control over the budget, and hence over tax rates,” he warned.
There was “a revolutionary principle rather quietly at work in American government,” he wrote.
The principle was working at about 100 decibels in Wisconsin’s Capitol last week, once the union drum-beaters got going. What worked them up was the money they’d concede, they said, but even more that Walker would make their unions surrender the control they’d gained over every government budget.
Walker, like other Republicans, was long accused of hating government. For eight years as chief executive of heavily Democrat Milwaukee County, he would not raise taxes, which opponents said showed his contempt for government.
Yet all this past week, he praised public employees and he said the work government does is so necessary, taxpayers should get as much of it for their money as possible. Meanwhile, thousands of schoolteachers on the Capitol lawn manifested their intent to obstruct Government and their belief that the tots back at Roosevelt Elementary could darn well spend a day or three watching Nickelodeon at home.
And, to beat all, the president who now professes to be the new Reagan weighed in to say Walker was being unduly mean to unions. President Obama gave no audible word on whether unions were being unduly mean in shutting down schools.
Walker, good Republican, is no FDR but he is offering Wisconsin a new deal, lower-case. Wisconsin’s been a seedbed of bad ideas since it hatched Progressivism, and for years it’s stuck with unionized government even as the price swelled. Walker’s radical shift is to try securing necessary government at a better price. The unions, whose model depends on making government labor as costly as taxpayers will bear, object.
May they be haunted by the ghost of the 32nd president, and his little dog, too.
Patrick McIlheran is a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial columnist who blogs at jsonline.com/blogs/mcilheran. E-mail pmcilheran@journalsentinel.com
Senator Mark Pryor wants our ideas on how to cut federal spending. Take a look at this video clip below:
Senator Pryor has asked us to send our ideas to him at cutspending@pryor.senate.gov and I have done so in the past and will continue to do so in the future.
On May 11, 2011, I emailed to this above address and I got this email back from Senator Pryor’s office:
Please note, this is not a monitored email account. Due to the sheer volume of correspondence I receive, I ask that constituents please contact me via my website with any responses or additional concerns. If you would like a specific reply to your message, please visit http://pryor.senate.gov/contact. This system ensures that I will continue to keep Arkansas First by allowing me to better organize the thousands of emails I get from Arkansans each week and ensuring that I have all the information I need to respond to your particular communication in timely manner. I appreciate you writing. I always welcome your input and suggestions. Please do not hesitate to contact me on any issue of concern to you in the future.
I just did. I went to the Senator’s website and sent this below:
Charles Krauthammer is absolutely right that Republicans must call President Obama’s bluff on the debt-limit vote. I suggested that the House GOP pass $2 trillion in cuts tied to a $2 trillion debt increase, thus handing the matter over to the Senate and the president and refusing to budge.
Krauthammer has the same idea, but with $500 billion in cuts and a $500 billion debt increase. That would certainly be better than Senator McConnell’s chicken-out plan, and it would have the advantage of being so modest in size that I think it would ultimately get large support in the Senate from moderates.
The cuts–small “trims” really–could be taken right from Obama’s own Fiscal Commission report. The table below illustrates how modest and limited are the reforms needed to hit $500 billion in savings over 10 years. Indeed, the data from the commission only covers a nine-year period and includes just some of the proposed entitlement savings.
Obama Fiscal Commission Entitlement Trims
$Billions
Trim Health Care Subsidies
Reduce subsidies for medical education
$60
Expand Medicare cost sharing
$110
Enact tort reform
$17
Reduce Medicaid tax gaming
$44
Reform Tricare
$38
Trim Social Security Growth
Increase benefits by chained CPI
$89
Trim Growth in Other Entitlements
Increase other entitlements by chained CPI
$43
Reform federal retirement benefits
$73
Reduce farm subsidies
$10
Reduce student loan interest subsidies
$43
Total Trims, 2012-2020
$527
It would be blindingly obvious to most voters that Obama would be responsible for a debt default if he couldn’t bring himself to sign such modest cuts that were proposed by his own fiscal commission. Then, when the government runs up against the debt limit again five months from now, the GOP should have another package of cuts ready to be passed. This next time they could perhaps focus on discretionary program terminations, some of which I’ve proposed here.
Byron York asked Mitt Romney directly about the report that he’d bragged to S&P about a 2002 tax hike, and he again dodged the question, giving an answer that’s true but irrelevant:
I don’t believe in raising taxes and as governor I cut taxes 19 times … I was fortunate enough to be a governor who got an increase in the credit rating of my state … Our president simply doesn’t know how to lead and how to grow our economy.
One honest answer, which former Romney aide Eric Kriss gave me, was the former governor opposed taxes broadly, but that you tell ratings agencies what they want to hear, and they don’t care if you raise taxes or cut spending as long as the numbers run up. But that answer gets in the way of the claim that the U.S. downgrade is a judgement on spending.
The other answer is also obvious: Romney governed as a right-leaning technocrat, not an ideologue, and he’s hoping to squeeze through on the left side of this primary without getting into the details of governance.
Senator Mark Pryor wants our ideas on how to cut federal spending. Take a look at this video clip below:
Senator Pryor has asked us to send our ideas to him at cutspending@pryor.senate.gov and I have done so in the past and will continue to do so in the future.
On May 11, 2011, I emailed to this above address and I got this email back from Senator Pryor’s office:
Please note, this is not a monitored email account. Due to the sheer volume of correspondence I receive, I ask that constituents please contact me via my website with any responses or additional concerns. If you would like a specific reply to your message, please visit http://pryor.senate.gov/contact. This system ensures that I will continue to keep Arkansas First by allowing me to better organize the thousands of emails I get from Arkansans each week and ensuring that I have all the information I need to respond to your particular communication in timely manner. I appreciate you writing. I always welcome your input and suggestions. Please do not hesitate to contact me on any issue of concern to you in the future.
I just did. I went to the Senator’s website and sent this below:
House Republicans proposed some small cuts to the federal budget on their new YouCut website last week. I noted that the GOP cuts amounted to just 0.017 percent of the federal budget, and suggested that the conservative party in Congress could do much better. Below I’ve listed 10 terminations that would save about $380 billion a year, which is more than 10 percent of total federal spending.
Many politicians and congressional staffers will look at this list and consider the cuts too radical. But those folks should take a closer look at current budget projections, which show federal debt exploding to 100 percent of GDP within a decade and heading to the moon after that. Rising debt all but guarantees that there will be radical changes to the budget in coming years. So we can start making changes in an orderly way right now, or we can make then later when it’s harder to dig out from an even bigger pile of debt.
Besides, the 10 cuts proposed below are not radical. Canada doesn’t have a federal Department of Education, so why do we need one? New Zealand doesn’t hand out farm subsidies, so why should we? Britain’s new conservative-liberal government is cutting public-sector salaries, so why can’t we?
Cuts in subsidies will cause short-term dislocations for the groups dependent on them, but people will adjust quickly and society will be better off in the long run. Welfare supporters said that the reforms in 1996 would be a social disaster, but benefits were cut and low-income families prospered.
Americans don’t need subsidies, and the government obviously can’t afford them anymore. It’s time to start getting rid of them. The savings listed here are rough and rounded 2010 outlay amounts from the president’s budget.
1. Community Development Subsidies. The Department of Housing and Urban Development should not be funding local activities such as street repairs and parking lots. Save $10 billion.
2. Homeowner Subsidies. Federal subsidies for home ownership helped to cause the financial meltdown and recession by putting people into homes they could not afford. Save $10 billion
3. Energy Subsidies. Federal energy subsidies have a long record of waste and boondoggle. Private markets will invest in energy technologies when there is a reasonable chance for a return. Save $20 billion.
4. Higher Education Subsidies. Federal student aid contributes to college tuition inflation, and it can be replaced by private borrowing, family savings, and private charity. Save $20 billion.
5. Overpaid Federal Workers. Federal workers earn an average $120,000 a year in wages and benefits—twice what the average American earns. Federal wages should be cut 10 percent. Save $20 billion.
6. Farm Subsidies. More than 70 percent of aid goes to the largest 10 percent of farm businesses. With an average income 28 percent higher than the U.S. average, farm households don’t need federal welfare. Save $30 billion.
7. Public Housing and Rental Subsidies. Federal housing policies have damaged cities and created concentrations of poverty. They are based on a myth that markets can’t provide low-income housing. Save $35 billion.
8. K-12 Education Subsidies. Rising federal funding of the public schools has not improved test scores. It has only created large bureaucracies and stifled local control and innovation. Save $60 billion.
9. Transportation Subsidies. State governments and the private sector can more efficiently fund highways, airports, rail, urban transit, and air traffic control without federal subsidies and regulations. Save $85 billion.
10. Food Subsidies (Food Stamps and School Lunch). Low-income families often suffer from poor food choices and obesity, not a shortage of calories. Food aid for the needy should be left to private charities. Save $90 billion.
Senator Mark Pryor wants our ideas on how to cut federal spending. Take a look at this video clip below:
Senator Pryor has asked us to send our ideas to him at cutspending@pryor.senate.gov and I have done so in the past and will continue to do so in the future.
On May 11, 2011, I emailed to this above address and I got this email back from Senator Pryor’s office:
Please note, this is not a monitored email account. Due to the sheer volume of correspondence I receive, I ask that constituents please contact me via my website with any responses or additional concerns. If you would like a specific reply to your message, please visit http://pryor.senate.gov/contact. This system ensures that I will continue to keep Arkansas First by allowing me to better organize the thousands of emails I get from Arkansans each week and ensuring that I have all the information I need to respond to your particular communication in timely manner. I appreciate you writing. I always welcome your input and suggestions. Please do not hesitate to contact me on any issue of concern to you in the future.
I just did. I went to the Senator’s website and sent this below:
You are friends with the gang of six members and Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma is one of the those members. I noticed a study that Senator Coburn did on how to cut money out of our bloated federal budget and I have included below some of his suggestions concerning the Dept of Health and Human Services below:
Repeal Damaging Provisions of Wrong-Headed, Controversial Health Care Law
Before it became law, supporters argued the federal health care overhaul would become more popular after it passed Congress. However, more than a year later, most Americans remain opposed to the law and still concerned about its impact on their family, budget, and health care
choices.
15 The proposal outlines some of the most damaging impacts that are avoided through repeal.
Repeal prevents Americans from losing the health insurance plan they like
. Proponents of the health care overhaul often pledged that health reform would allow Americans who liked their current health plan to keep it. But In June, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued rules limiting changes employers can make to health insurance plans, and still be considered to be ―grandfathered‖ – or exempt from many of the new mandates in the law. Under the Department‘s own estimates, more than half of companies may have to give up their current health coverage because of the new law by 2013.16 And, in their estimate, the Administration predicts that eight in 10 small businesses could lose their current health plans.17
Repeal prevents the economy from losing nearly 800,000 jobs.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released an analysis of the ―effects of recent health care legislation on labor markets.‖18 The CBO‘s findings painted a troubling picture. The massive Medicaid expansion will ―encourage some people to work fewer hours or to withdraw from the labor market.‖19 Additionally, phasing out the subsidies to buy expensive insurance ―will effectively increase marginal tax rates, which will also discourage work.‖20 CBO said ―other provisions in the legislation are also likely to diminish people‘s incentives to work.‖ 21 The CBO ―estimates that the legislation, on net, will reduce the amount of labor used in the economy by a small amount—roughly half a percent—primarily by reducing the amount of labor that workers choose to supply‖, which is more than 788,470 employees.22 Another independent
estimate predicted the overhaul will ―destroy a total of 120,000 to 700,000 jobs by 2019.‖
23 This is a huge number of future jobs and future workers that will be effectively sidelined because of the health reform legislation. With more than 14 million Americans out of work today, we cannot afford to lose more jobs.
16U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, ―Group Health Plans and Health Insurance Coverage Relating to Status as a Grandfathered Health Plan Under the
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act; Interim Final Rule and Proposed Rule,‖ June 17, 2010.
17U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, ―Group Health Plans and Health Insurance Coverage Relating to Status as a Grandfathered Health Plan Under the
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act; Interim Final Rule and Proposed Rule,‖ June 17, 2010.
22Congressional Budget Office, ―The Budget and Economic Outlook: An Update,‖ August 2010, page 66-67 of PDF.
http://cbo.gov/ftpdocs/117xx/doc11705/08-18-Update.pdf . According to a U.S. Department of Labor estimate, the 2010 labor force is estimated to comprise 157,695,000 workers. Half of one of percent of our nation‘s 157 million work force equals 788,475 workers. Lee, Marlene and Mather, Mark. ―U.S. Labor Force Trends,‖ Population Bulletin, Vol. 63, No. 2, June 2008. http://www.prb.org/pdf08/63.2uslabor.pdf
As you know, we here at Red Arkansas Blog have been keeping tabs on the prognosticators’ ratings for Arkansas’ Congressional seats heading towards the 2012 election.
In Arkansas’ Fourth District, the word has been that Mr. Ross would be the likely winner in 2012.
We’re thinking the best-case turnout for Democrats would be that the immediate change for the race would be to “Toss Up.” We here at RAB think it may very well become a “Lean R” seat by the end of the day.
UPDATE
The Cook Political Reportis the first one out of the shoot, and it isn’t good for Democrats.
AR-04 has moved from Likely Democrat to Lean Republican.
Per Cook:
While the field in AR-04 will not emerge for several months, southern Arkansas is the last place Democrats want to defend an open seat with President Obama atop their ballot.
(snip)
Many Democrats will be livid at the news of Ross’s exit: in April, state Democrats passed a redistricting plan that stretched Ross’s district into northwest Arkansas, making it two points more Republican under the assumption that Ross would use it as a springboard to campaign in the fastest-growing region of the state. Now that Ross won’t be running next year, Democrats’ task of keeping the open seat is even harder than it would have been before redistricting.
UPDATE II:
Per Roll Call: AR-04 has moved from Likely Democrat to Lean Republican.
There are some Democrats out there that see an opportunity for a Republican pick up here.John Brummett in his article “Ross is running, but I repeat myself,” Arkansas News Bureau, July 26, 2011 noted:
To win, a Democrat will need to be as good a politician as Ross. I can’t identify such a Democrat at present.
At this point I’d give tea party pageanteer Beth Anne Rankin, the Sarah Palin wannabe of Arkansas, a decent shot.
Patrick Michaels argues that, when discussing climate change, “people accept the strangest things without really fact checking.” Michaels argues that many of Al Gore’s claims and presumptions about global warming are false.
—–
There’s a whole new world of global warming science today-but few ever hear about it. In recent years, an internally consistent body of scientific literature has emerged that argues cogently for global warming but against the gloom-and-doom, apocalyptic vision of climate change.
Not that you would know. Consult the daily newspaper or evening newscast: dire predictions are nearly all we see or hear.
In their new book, “Climate of Extremes”, coauthors Patrick J. Michaels and Robert C. Balling Jr. illuminate the other side of the story, the science we arent being told. This body of work details how the impact of global warming is far less severe than is generally believed and far from catastrophic. However, because it is not infused with horrific predictions and angst about the future, regardless of its quality it is largely repressed and ignored.
This in-depth exploration illustrates the crucial unreported forecasts: that changes in hurricanes will be small, that global warming is likely to be modest, and that contrary to daily headlines, there is no apocalypse on the horizon – Cato Institute
Pat Michaels is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia. He is a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. Michaels is a contributing author and reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He was an author of the 2003 climate science “Paper of the Year” awarded by the Association of American Geographers, for the demonstration that urban heat-related mortality declined significantly as cities became warmer. His writing has been published in the major scientific journals, including Climate Research, Climatic Change, Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Climate, Nature, and Science; and his articles have appeared also in the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Houston Chronicle, and the Journal of Commerce.
Senator Mark Pryor wants our ideas on how to cut federal spending. Take a look at this video clip below:
Senator Pryor has asked us to send our ideas to him at cutspending@pryor.senate.gov and I have done so in the past and will continue to do so in the future.
On May 11, 2011, I emailed to this above address and I got this email back from Senator Pryor’s office:
Please note, this is not a monitored email account. Due to the sheer volume of correspondence I receive, I ask that constituents please contact me via my website with any responses or additional concerns. If you would like a specific reply to your message, please visit http://pryor.senate.gov/contact. This system ensures that I will continue to keep Arkansas First by allowing me to better organize the thousands of emails I get from Arkansans each week and ensuring that I have all the information I need to respond to your particular communication in timely manner. I appreciate you writing. I always welcome your input and suggestions. Please do not hesitate to contact me on any issue of concern to you in the future.
I just did. I went to the Senator’s website and sent this below:
Over the past decade, Congresses and Presidents haveundertaken a
surge of spending that has accelerated America’s speed along the road to
economic ruin. Since 2000, non-defense discretionary outlays have expanded 50 percent faster than inflation. Antipoverty spending has risen 83 percent faster than inflation, and other programs have grown rapidly. Despite multiple government audits that have shown many programs to be duplicative or ineffective, no significant federal program has been eliminated in more than a decade. Government continues to grow, financed by taxes on Americans and an explosion of borrowing that is imposing huge additional burdens on future generations.
Thus, although the major entitlement programs are the primary driver of
long-term spending and debt, Congress must take tough action on discretionary programs and smaller entitlement programs to reach a balanced budget and ensure that federal spending is smaller, more effective, and more efficient.
Under the Heritage plan, non-defense discretionary spending—appropriated programs such as foreign aid, K–12 education, transportation, health research, housing, community development, and veterans health care, which account for 4.5 percent of GDP—is reduced to 2.0 percent of GDP by 2021. These reforms will reduce the burden of government, thereby empowering families and entrepreneurs and promoting economic prosperity.
In addition, antipoverty spending is reformed. Obamacare is repealed, as
noted earlier, and replaced with an alternative solution to uninsurance and high costs. Agriculture and education programs are structurally reformed. The central goal for defense is to guarantee national security as prudently and economically as possible. With improvements in efficiency, we estimate that defense needs will require spending approximately 4 percent of GDP for the foreseeable future.
Rather than across-the-board spending reductions, which would not set true priorities for government, the Heritage plan follows six guidelines in designing reforms:
The federal government should focus on performing a limited
number of appropriate governmental duties well while empowering state and local governments, which are closer to the people, to address local needs creatively in such areas as transportation, justice, job training, the environment, and economic development.
Functions that the private sector can perform more efficiently
should be transferred to the private sector.
Duplicative programs should be consolidated both to save money
and to improve government assistance.
Federal programs should more precisely target those who are
actually in need, which means reducing aid to large businesses and upper-income individuals who do not need taxpayer assistance and enforcing program eligibility rules better.
Outdated and ineffective programs should be eliminated.
Waste, fraud, and abuse should be cleaned up wherever found.
By following these six guidelines, the Heritage plan produces a more
effective and efficient government and promotes stronger economic growth.
Senator Mark Pryor wants our ideas on how to cut federal spending. Take a look at this video clip below:
Senator Pryor has asked us to send our ideas to him at cutspending@pryor.senate.gov and I have done so in the past and will continue to do so in the future.
On May 11, 2011, I emailed to this above address and I got this email back from Senator Pryor’s office:
Please note, this is not a monitored email account. Due to the sheer volume of correspondence I receive, I ask that constituents please contact me via my website with any responses or additional concerns. If you would like a specific reply to your message, please visit http://pryor.senate.gov/contact. This system ensures that I will continue to keep Arkansas First by allowing me to better organize the thousands of emails I get from Arkansans each week and ensuring that I have all the information I need to respond to your particular communication in timely manner. I appreciate you writing. I always welcome your input and suggestions. Please do not hesitate to contact me on any issue of concern to you in the future.
Government auditors spent the past five years examining all federal programs and found that 22 percent of them—costing taxpayers a total of $123 billion annually—fail to show any positive impact on the populations they serve.
Lawmakers diverted $13 million from Hurricane Katrina relief spending to build a museum celebrating the Army Corps of Engineers—the agency partially responsible for the failed levees that flooded New Orleans.
Tim Pawlenty kept up his searing criticism of Michele Bachmann Friday morning, deriding the notion that the Minnesota congresswoman has been a “leader” for conservative causes.
The Daily Hatch 