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Photos: HuffingtonPost.com
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Photos: HuffingtonPost.com
Texas Gov. Perry (R), who has taken every opportunity in recent weeks to slam President Obama's economic stimulus and recovery program, did so again Wednesday in remarks to several hundred Texas home builders gathered outside the Texas Capitol.Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) News Item Two:
Gov. Perry’s opposition to the economic stimulus program isn’t shared by the Texas Association of Builders. According to a Dallas Morning News report, Scott Norman, the Association’s executive director, said he hopes Texas takes every dollar it can get. “From our industry, we need it to succeed,” Norman said. “We need the stock market to rebound. We need the credit markets to rebound. And we need people to get out there and drive our economy.”
Texas stands to get $17 billion from the just-passed federal stimulus package. It includes an $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers, although Norman said, “We wanted more. We were pushing for anything, obviously.”
Perry's likely Republican primary opponent next year, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, voted against and also stands opposed to President Obama's economic stimulus and recovery program.
Gov. Rick Perry, who strongly supports teaching only "abstinence" sex education in Texas schools, greeted several hundred anti-choice activists rallying outside the Capitol. Gov. Perry promised the group that he would prevent embryonic stem cell research in Texas and touted his record for passing more restrictions on stem cell science and research than any previous Texas governor. [Apparently, Gov. Perry does not think Texas needs the high tech science dollars flowing into Texas to replace the crumbling telecom industry that is rapidly disappearing from Texas' "silicon prairie" corridor.]
Gov. Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst are strongly pushing 2009 Tx legislative session legislation mandating that doctors require women seeking information about an abortion must view their own fetal ultrasound image and listen to the fetal heartbeat monitor.
Jim Dunnam, Tx House Democratic caucus chairman has observed that if Gov. Perry and other anti-abortion leaders would support broader sex education, such as provided for in the “Education Works!” 2009 Texas House and Senate legislation (HB741/SB515) – instead of strictly abstinence only – fewer abortions would be contemplated.
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Kathy Miller's news conference announcing the report |
Teenagers who receive abstinence-only sex education and pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do, according to a large federal survey released last month.Related Links:
More than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a "virginity pledge," but the percentage who practice precautions against pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for those receiving abstinence-only education and making abstinence pledges.
…require schools to still discuss abstinence but also require information be included alongside about testing and prevention for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and complete, medically-accurate information about the health benefits and risks of contraception and condoms.No Texas school district is required to offer a sex education course. If they choose to, they must emphasize abstinence over all forms of contraception. At this time, schools are not required to offer any information on contraception at all. Study after study has shown that abstinence-only education does not prevent teens from having sex.
Additionally, this bill includes strategies to encourage young people to develop healthy communication with their parents and peers, and help build other living skills such as goal setting and responsible decision-making about sexuality.
Quoted from PPNT website
WaPo/ABC News: 73 percent say Obama is “trying to compromise with the Republican leaders in Congress” while just 34 percent believe Republican leaders are trying to compromise with Obama.As Greg Sargent points out, the New York Times/CBS News poll had a particularly interesting finding regarding bipartisanship. According to the poll, “a sizable majority wants Obama to pursue his policies with or without Republican support” while “a huge majority says that Republicans should emphasize working with Obama in a bipartisan way over pursuing their policy ideas.”
NYT/CBS News: 74 percent think Obama is “trying to work with Republicans in Congress” while just 31 percent think Republicans in Congress are trying to work with Obama.
Fox News/Opinion Dynamics: 68 percent believe that Obama “has sincerely tried to reach out to Republicans and be bipartisan” while only 33 percent believe Republicans have “sincerely tried to be helpful to Barack Obama and be bipartisan.”
President Obama, responding to conservative Republican Governors' public criticism of the economic stimulus package, said the criticism has more to do with politics than policy. Texas Gov. Rick Perry waged a weeks long aggressive campaign and co-wrote an op-ed piece with South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford opposing the stimulus bill. Last week Gov. Perry grudgingly informed the White House that he'll accept "some" stimulus money, but left the door open to not taking all of the money allocated to Texas. Several southern conservative governors including Texas Gov. Perry (R), South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (R) and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jinda (R) have made public statements that they are considering rejecting part of the money because they do not want to accept money that would fund social programs, like unemployment insurance to every unemployed worker, to which they are opposed. | |
Obama speech to governors 22nd February : no time for politics. Part 1 | |
Obama speech to governors 22nd February : no time for politics. Part 2 |
Before you bash the idea of New Deal-style government spending, take a look around. Some Texans have been "agin" federal projects since 1933 and the beginning of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s original New Deal. Nothing wrong with watching pennies. But, if you want to see the New Deal in action, you don’t have to go very far. . .
Start at Dealey Plaza.
Those oak trees were planted with Washington money. The columns were sculpted with New Deal dollars.
Back before freeways were built, and before President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade made its fateful turn onto Elm Street, Dealey Plaza was known as the "Gateway to Dallas."
In today’s dollars, that project cost $1.5 million.
The Children’s Aquarium in Fair Park and the Museum of Nature & Science were New Deal projects. So was the lagoon — and the drainage system, built quickly before Dallas hosted 6 million visitors for the 1936 Texas Centennial state celebration and fair.
In Fort Worth, our parrots and Komodo dragons in the Fort Worth Zoo live in shelters built for monkeys and alligators during the New Deal. (The zoo didn’t make the cut for projects this go-round.)
Federal money helped build the Will Rogers Memorial Center and plant roses in the Fort Worth Botanic Garden. Same for its counterpart in East Texas, the Tyler Municipal Rose Garden.
The New Deal also built not one but two roads between Dallas and Fort Worth.
Texas 183 from Love Field to Fort Worth eventually became Airport Freeway, paving the way for our cities’ single greatest success, Dallas/Fort Worth Airport.
Spur 303 — Pioneer Parkway — still connects Oak Cliff with Grand Prairie, Arlington and Fort Worth.
Government money built Fort Worth’s art-deco high school football stadium, Farrington Field. The New Deal built the county hospital, the downtown municipal courts building, a now-gone library and college classrooms in Arlington.
College history professor J. Todd Moye mentioned a few of the projects Monday on the opinion page. He wrote: "Imagine for a moment what Fort Worth would look like had the government not made those investments." Yes.
Not only that, but imagine San Antonio without the River Walk.
Imagine Texas without the $350 million in federal projects — $5 billion in today’s dollars — delivered by the New Deal through the Works Progress Administration and the park-building Civilian Conservation Corps.
Imagine North Texas going through the 1930s without 250,000 working-class jobs.
Maybe those weren’t "real jobs." But they paid real money that Texans spent on real rent, real groceries and real clothes. And saved real jobs.
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This is essentially the same argument Texas Gov. Perry makes in leaving the door open to also turn away at least a portion of the federal stimulus money.But it is not clear why participating in the expanded unemployment insurance program would result in tax increases for business. By Jindal’s own estimate, the recovery package would have funded his state’s unemployment expansion for three years, at which point the state could — if it chose to do so — phase out the program.
As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin suggested earlier today, perhaps Jindal’s presidential ambitions are “clouding” his judgement. “I think he’s been tapped as the up-and-coming Republican to petition a run for president the next time it goes around. So he has a certain vernacular, and a certain way he needs to talk right now,” Nagin said.
Continue ReadingChart 1: Texas Leading Index signals recession |
Chart 2: Texas job growth beginning to sink |
Chart 3: Texas exports drop sharply |
Chart 4: Public sector contract values increasing,but private sector shows declines |
Chart 5: Drilling activity declines following rapid fall in energy prices |
Chart 6: Most major Texas metros weakening |
Congress’ approval is only 31%-59%, but additional questions show a much more complicated picture. The number for Congressional Democrats is at 49%-45%, while Republicans are at 33%-59%.Meanwhile, people are increasingly confident that Obama is leading the country in the right direction. Since Obama’s election, there’s been a 23 percent rise in those saying the country is headed in the right direction. In October, only 17 percent of Americans felt that way, while 78 percent thought the country was headed in the wrong direction.
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Only 30% say Obama hasn’t done enough to cooperate with Republicans in Congress — the GOP base vote, basically — while 62% say he’s doing the right amount and 6% say it’s been too much. Flipping it around, only 27% say Republicans have done enough to cooperate with Obama, with 64% saying not enough and 5% saying too much.
Congressman Joseph "Anh"Cao, a Republican, who defeated William "Bill" Jefferson is facing a recall petition because of his vote against President Obama's stimulus package. The recall has been initiated by a group of ministers.The two Congressmen in the U.S. House that represent Collin County residents, Sam Johnson (R) and Ralph Hall (R) and both Texas’ Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison (R) and John Cornyn (R) voted against the stimulus bill.
Cao had originally announced his intention to vote for the stimulus package, but House Republican Minority Whip Eric Cantor whipped him and other moderates into a solid 'No' vote. Without Cao's 'No' vote, Cantor could not have boasted about the GOP being "back in the saddle" by touting the GOP's big ZERO votes for the stimulus. The GOP's branding strategy is literally dependent on being the party of NO and, thanks to Cantor whipping Republicans into a unanimous NO vote, Cao may not even make it to 2010.
Papers have been filed with the Office of the Louisiana Secretary of State which started the process requiring sufficient signatures to force a recall election for the office held by Representative Cao.
As you know, President Barack Obama will today sign into law H.R.1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the federal economic stimulus bill. The stimulus bill contains nearly $790 billion in tax cuts and key federal investments, including billions of dollars for infrastructure funding and incentives for job creation in Texas.Rep. Dunnam copied Speaker of the Texas House Joe Straus and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst to the letter as well. It is time to act and create and preserve Texas jobs and insulate our economy from further deterioration.
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I respectfully request that you immediately take the appropriate action under the Act to certify both that Texas will request and use the funds provided for by the Act and that the funds will be used to create jobs and promote economic growth. Because of ongoing deadlines, we do not need to delay acceptance, as there is a great deal of work necessary. If you would prefer to have the Legislature make the acceptance of the funds by concurrent resolution, which is also provided for in the Act, I stand ready to assist in that option. And if this is the case, I would request you designate the Legislature's consideration of the Act an emergency item for this legislative session so we can move the resolution more rapidly through the process.
"Senate Republicans on Tuesday narrowly defeated an effort to impose budget rules that would make it harder to increase spending or cut taxes, a move that critics said that showed Republicans were posturing in their calls for greater fiscal restraint. ... Republicans said the push to add the rules to the budget was a back-door effort to make it harder to extend President Bush's tax cuts. 'The practical effect of this is to raise taxes,' said Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire and chairman of the Budget Committee."And, as tax cuts along side hundreds of billions of dollars of war spending in Iraq pushed the nation ever deeper into long term deficits, our Republican representatives never spoke a word of concern about deficit spending.When Pres. George Bush "tax cut" the nation from an annual budget surplus of $300 billion, as Pres. Clinton left office, to an annual budget deficit of $1 trillion, as Pres. Bush left office, our Republican representatives in Washington fully supported and voted for Pres. Bush's deficit spending policies and legislation without complaint. Now our Republican representatives in Washington fuss about deficit spending? This smacks more of political expediency and posturing than principled government philosophy that we can believe in.
Of particular concern to Gov. Perry is the federal funding for the state's unemployment insurance because it is contingent on the state relaxing its narrow unemployment benefit limits so that more jobless people can qualify.A memo to the Texas House Democratic Caucus highlights that Governor Perry is intent on sticking to the same failed tax cutting and deficit spending economic strategies of President Bush and our Republican representatives in Washington:
The Houston Chronicle reports that Texas State Rep. Jim Dunnam, D-Waco, who heads the state House’s Select Committee on Federal Economic Stabilization Funding, said it’s hard to understand why Governor Perry is reluctant to use stimulus money.
Rick Perry and the Unemployment Fund
Upon hearing the news that the Comptroller was predicting a $9.1 billion drop in [state] revenue, Governor Perry's reaction was to increase the shortfall by calling for more tax cuts. This is right in line with what he has done with the State's Unemployment Compensation Trust Fund.
A year ago, the Unemployment Fund had a surplus of $90 million. In a shortsighted and politically expedient move, Governor Perry halted collection of the replenishment tax. Nearly 12 months later, Governor Perry reinstated the replenishment tax. Now the Unemployment Fund faces a $447 million deficit.
“The governor every year comes in and wants half a billion dollars for the (state) enterprise fund to create jobs and stimulate economic growth and he’s going to say we don’t want $20 billion?” Dunnam said. “I find it difficult to understand.”Governor Perry must certify that Texas will use the money to create jobs and promote economic growth in order for Texas to share of the economic stimulus money. If Perry declines to do so, however, the Legislature can accept the money on the state’s behalf by passing a concurrent resolution.
Dear fellow Democrat,
I wanted to share with you this latest press release from your Texas Democratic Party.
In these tough economic times, Texans are trying to hold onto their jobs while coping with the skyrocketing cost of insurance, health care and college tuition.Now that President Obama has signed the economic recovery plan into law, Texas stands to receive much-needed assistance - unless Governor Rick Perry rejects these funds for the sake of his own partisan agenda.
Call Governor Rick Perry's office and demand that he fulfill the responsibilities entrusted to him by Texans and get to work on solving our state's problems rather than rejecting funds that will improve our infrastructure, create jobs and allow more parents the opportunity to send their kids to college.
Governor Perry's Austin Office: (800) 843-5789
PERRY'S OBSTRUCTIONIST ANTICS
COULD COST TEXAS BILLIONS
Threats to Reject Stimulus Funds Ring Partisan
(Austin, TX) - Texans have already seen Republican U.S. Senators John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison and Republican Congressman Pete Sessions play politics instead of working to develop a bipartisan plan to rescue our economy. Now that the economic recovery plan has been signed into law by the President, Governor Rick Perry continues to put Texans in the crossfire of his partisanship by threatening to reject all or part of the benefits Texans would see from our federal tax dollars that would be used here under the plan.
"Governor Perry's obstructionist antics demonstrate he is more concerned with political recovery for the Republican Party than economic recovery for Texas," said Texas Democratic Party Chairman Boyd Richie. "If the Governor's political agenda allows our tax dollars to be shipped off to other states, 'Ripoff Rick' will cost Texans an important investment in job creation, schools, health care and transportation."
"Years of failed Republican economic policy got us into this mess, and now Rick Perry is threatening to reject real solutions to cleaning up the mess he himself helped create. That's not leadership - that's reckless partisanship," continued Richie.
Gov. Perry's partisan antics are at odds with the new direction our country is taking - the recovery plan is being welcomed by an overwhelming majority of our nation's governors - both Democrats and Republicans. If Gov. Perry rejects Texas' share of the federal aid, our state could lose as much as $27 billion to invest in infrastructure - funds that could create or save an estimated 269,000 jobs.
"Apparently, Rick Perry would rather Texans sit in traffic on his toll roads than have the funding to build new roads," added Richie. "He should be ashamed of his threats to ship hard-working Texans' tax dollars off to other states - but perhaps he's hoping the 39% of voters who supported his reelection won't mind becoming casualties of his obstructionism."
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Your friend and fellow Democrat,
Boyd L. Richie
Updated Tuesday February 17, 2009 at 3:20 PM This afternoon, the White House released a statement by President Obama announcing the deployment of additional troops to Afghanistan. Noting that the “situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan demands urgent attention and swift action,” Obama said that he “approved a request from Secretary Gates to deploy a Marine Expeditionary Brigade later this spring and an Army Stryker Brigade and the enabling forces necessary to support them later this summer.” |
This op-ed by Karl Frisch originally appeared in the San Jose Mercury News.
It's probably a good thing that cable news generally doesn't draw much of an audience from the 18- to 24-year-old demographic. Otherwise, history professors across the nation could very well be witnessing the undoing of their work to educate students about the dire economic climate the United States faced for much of the 1930s.
Those who have been watching cable news lately have undoubtedly noticed the litany of conservative media figures attempting to rewrite history by denigrating the tremendous successes of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal policies in what amounts to an orchestrated effort to derail the economic recovery plans of President Obama.
Fox News Washington managing editor Brit Hume recently called Roosevelt's policies "a jihad against private enterprise," just after claiming that "everybody agrees, I think, on both sides of the spectrum now, that the New Deal failed." That may be accurate if by "both sides of the spectrum" Hume is referring to the right and far-right over at Fox News.
Hume's own jihad against the facts, however, represents only a small portion of the historical misrepresentations passed off as reasoned debate about the New Deal.
Witness the day-break machinations of the crew over at MSNBC's Morning Joe. During a recent broadcast, Joe Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski kicked off a string of attacks against the president's recovery plan, using the New Deal as their dubious weapon du jour. Mika said of Obama's plan, "I think we're going to have the same unemployment in three or four years, just like the New Deal." That just isn't true -- unemployment fell every year from 1933 through 1937.
Her buddy Joe didn't fare much better, cherry-picking data in telling viewers that unemployment was at "20 percent" in 1938, ignoring the downward trend in unemployment that occurred under the New Deal.
Joe isn't alone -- conservative columnists George Will and Mona Charen have played the same numbers game to falsely claim the New Deal failed to reduce unemployment, a contention disputed by historians and economists.
Don't take my word for it -- data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show the unemployment rate in 1933 clocking in at 24.9 percent and falling each year thereafter (to 14.3 percent in 1937) until 1938 when it rose to 19 percent. Why the increase from 1937 to 1938? As Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has noted, it was a reversal of these very same New Deal policies, which had reduced unemployment, that actually led to recession and drove the numbers back up. It's worth noting, by the way, that these numbers do not include those in federal work-relief programs (at the time, BLS counted those employed by the New Deal's emergency work programs as unemployed). So, the unemployment numbers were actually lower than reported in these years.
The strengthening of the social safety net during the 1930s stimulated the economy while also providing assistance to those waiting to feel the economic recovery for themselves. That's perhaps why Fox News' Bill O'Reilly saw fit to lambast portions of the president's plan aimed at assisting those most in need during these difficult times, claiming last week on his television show that increased funding for programs like food stamps has "nothing to do with stimulating the economy." Though his ego will never let him admit it, O'Reilly is dead wrong.
Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf and former McCain campaign economic adviser Mark Zandi have both said that extending food stamps does, in fact, stimulate the economy. Zandi stated last year that "extending food stamps [is] the most effective [way] to prime the economy's pump," while Elmendorf noted in congressional testimony just last week that "[t]ransfers to persons (for example, unemployment insurance and nutrition assistance) would also have a significant impact on GDP."
Faced with the prospect that history will again demonstrate that government spending and investment are important tools in confronting an economic crisis, it is now clear that conservatives are engaged in a misinformation campaign to mislead the public.
So, when radio host Rush Limbaugh, whom former President Ronald Reagan reportedly called the "Number one voice for conservatism" and House Republicans named an honorary member of Congress in 1994, recently said of Obama, "I hope he fails," it makes one wonder if he might not be speaking for all of his pals on the right.
If Limbaugh and conservatives truly want the president to "fail," rewriting the history of the New Deal may very well be the first salvo in a long war to defeat Obama's agenda for America.
Karl Frisch is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog, research, and information center based in Washington, D.C.