It's Not About the Money!

"It's Not About the Money!" - It's time to make the point that the Republican agenda in Congress and many state legislatures, including the Texas legislature, has little or nothing to do with federal and state level budget deficits. Budget deficits that Republicans helped engineer by eliminating taxes for corporations and billionaires at both the federal and state levels. By eliminating taxes for corporations and billionaires Texas and many other states now face devastating cuts to their publicly funded K-12 and college education systems and other critical services like building and maintaining roads.

Much of the battle between Democrats and Republicans over government spending isn't about the deficit numbers, but about GOP efforts to grind various ideological axes, from defunding EPA and bank regulators and NPR, to crippling reproductive and contraceptive services, to repealing last year's health insurance reform legislation, to ending the rights of people to organize for job security, to privatizing every government service, including tax funded public education.

In effect, alarms about debts and deficits are being used as an excuse to eliminate taxes for business and the rich and to eliminate government services, like public education, that working families depend upon to build a better future for their children - regardless of budget deficits and surpluses.

Now on one level this isn't surprising, but these priorities need to be acknowledged and discussed openly and directly, and not in the disguise of making "painful but necessary cuts." The truth behind the Tea Party phase "We want to take our county back" is that most far-right Republicans would prefer to live in a country with:

• little or no regulation of corporations (environmental or any other sort) or banks,
  
• a fully regressive tax code where taxes on corporations and billionaires are eliminated while taxes on working families are greatly increased,
• a privatized education system with no public schools supported by tax dollars,
  
• workplaces that have no collective bargaining rights or even minimum wages,
  
• a health care system in which private insurers are free to increase premiums and deny health care to anyone at will,
  
• no social safety net provided through Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and
  
• all forms of reproductive contraception made unavailable and illegal.
  

Republicans also prefer to get rid of legal protections against discrimination generally, and government, both federal and state, limited to the kind of functions typical of the eighteenth century - the century when the U.S. Constitution was adopted.

It's the right of Republicans to favor this kind of society, but given the abundant evidence that a large majority of Texans and Americans in every state would be very unhappy with it, it's the responsibility of non-Republicans and of the news media to make this agenda as clear as possible, and not just mindlessly accept that conservatives are only worried about the debt burden on future generations.

The Internet and Campaign 2010

PewInternet: Fully 73% of adult internet users (representing 54% of all U.S. adults) went online to get news or information about the 2010 midterm elections, or to get involved in the campaign in one way or another. We refer to these individuals as "online political users" and our definition includes anyone who did at least one of the following activities in 2010:

• Get political news online - 58% of online adults looked online for news about politics or the 2010 campaigns, and 32% of online adults got most of their 2010 campaign news from online sources.
• Go online to take part in specific political activities, such as watch political videos, share election-related content or "fact check" political claims - 53% of adult internet users did at least one of the eleven online political activities we measured in 2010.
• Use Twitter or social networking sites for political purposes - One in five online adults (22%) used Twitter or a social networking site for political purposes in 2010.¹

Increasing Calls For Bexar County Democratic Party Chair Ramos To Resign

After disparaging remarks were made by Dan Ramos, Chair of Bexar County Democratic Party, and posted on a San Antonio news blog, Texas Democratic Party Chairman Boyd Ritchie asked for Ramos' resignation and released the following statement:

Budget Cuts Put School Sports On Chopping Block

NPR: School sports surely mean more in the United States than in any other country. For small-town America, sports teams even become a significant part of a community's identity.

And now that so many American school districts –– even whole states –– are facing reductions in school funding, more and more, it is athletics that are being cut back. Sometimes now, public school sports survive only by the grace of private donations, from parents and fans.

Rainy-Day Money Plus Cuts Cover $4.3 Billion 2009-11 Deficit

Many newspaper headlines this morning heralding "Deal breaks impasse on using state’s rainy-day money" and "Perry, legislators reach limited deal on dipping into rainy day fund" are a bit misleading -- and copy below the headlines does little to clarify. Here's the straight scoop...

Republican Claims About NPR Manufactured

The Republicans on the House Rules Committee will hold an emergency meeting Wednesday to consider legislation to permanently prohibit federal funding of National Public Radio (NPR) after conservative activist James O'Keefe released a video smearing the news organization.

Notes From The Campaign

by Lawrence J. Praeger

The elections are over and we have our new elected officials and judges. The Dallas Morning News while critiquing our Commissions, County Judge and other officials opine that partisanship is out of control.

As a citizen of Dallas for the last 25 years I have witnessed a lot of changes, read a lot of editorials, and follow the Dallas Morning News. I am past 50, a lawyer, former prosecutor and run my own law practice. I have a wife and two sons 12 and 15.

I was also a candidate for the 5th District Court of Appeals Place 12 in 2010. I had never before sought elective office. I decided to do this for many reasons. One of which was to show my boys that ours is a government of its citizens. That is the beauty of our republic. Another reason was that – without any false modesty – I thought I was more qualified than my opponent. He had recently been appointed to the office by Governor Perry. I had little money for a multi-county campaign but assumed that people and the media would support a judge based on experience, credentials and independence, not political party or ideology. With apologies to Lemony Snicket, thus began my series of unfortunate assumptions.

Paul Krugman: Leaving The Children Behind In Texas

NYTimes : Paul Krugman OpEd:

Will 2011 be the year of fiscal austerity? At the federal level, it’s still not clear: Republicans are demanding draconian spending cuts, but we don’t yet know how far they’re willing to go in a showdown with President Obama. At the state and local level, however, there’s no doubt about it: big spending cuts are coming.

And who will bear the brunt of these cuts? America’s children.

Now, politicians — and especially, in my experience, conservative politicians — always claim to be deeply concerned about the nation’s children. Back during the 2000 campaign, then-candidate George W. Bush, touting the “Texas miracle” of dramatically lower dropout rates, declared that he wanted to be the “education president.” Today, advocates of big spending cuts often claim that their greatest concern is the burden of debt our children will face.

In practice, however, when advocates of lower spending get a chance to put their ideas into practice, the burden always seems to fall disproportionately on those very children they claim to hold so dear.

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

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

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

And in low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right.

Read the full Paul Krugman OpEd @ NYTimes.com

Republicans Take From American Familes To Give To The Rich

With oil prices now more than $100 a barrel, gas prices pushing $4 a gallon and oil companies reporting tens of billions of dollars in profits every quarter, it seems like it's time for Congress to eliminate tax credits for the oil and gas industry.

The budget President Obama submitted to Congress last month proposed repealing oil and gas subsidies – subsidies that come in the form of tax credits, or in plain terms, taxpayers giving their money to oil, gas and coal companies. The White House estimates that repealing those fossil energy company tax credits would save $46 billion, but House Republicans strongly defend those taxpayer giveaways.

After extending the Bush tax cuts for billionaires in December, which worsens the budget deficit by $900 billion, the Republicans passed $60 billion in spending cuts for programs that range from disaster relief funding to helping young people find jobs. Here are a few of the programs House Republicans voted to slash.

Alliance For A Clean Texas (ACT) Lobby Day

by Bob Fusinato

For those interested in moving toward an environmentally responsible and sustainable resource economy here are some links to Alliance for a Clean (ACT) lobby day to be held in Austin on March 14th and 15th:

Save Texas Schools Rally At The TX Capitol

Updated Sunday March 13, 2011 @ 1:51pm

The Save Texas Schools organization held a rally and march at the State Capitol on Saturday March 12, 2011. An estimated eleven thousand parents, teachers, students, community members, business owners, and faith organizations converged on the Capitol to voice their opposition to draconian education cuts planned by Gov. Perry and the Republican controlled legislature. Event organizers said they ran out of the 11,000 stickers they brought to hand out to the participants.

In addition to tapping the Rainy Day fund, rally-goers urged Gov. Rick Perry to sign the application for the $830 million currently tied up in a political fight in Congress from the federal Education Jobs fund. They also asked Texas lawmakers to fix the state’s public education funding mechanism.

The Energizing Of Democratic Voters

From the Jobsanger Blog by Ted McLaughlin: It's no argument that the 2010 election was something of a disaster for the Democratic Party. They didn't just lose the House (and several seats in the Senate), they lost it big -- giving the Republicans a significant majority and the ability to kill anything the Democratic Senate or White House might propose. And that loss carried over into state elections, giving Republicans control of many state governments.

Why did this happen? Did Americans decide Republicans could do a better job? For one thing, a lot of voters stayed home. The 2008 election had a voter turnout close to 62%, while in 2010 the turnout fell to around 41%. But that is not unusual for an off-year election. The turnout was actually about what is normal for an off-year election. The difference is in who voted and who didn't. . .

. . . Nate Silver, author of FiveThirtyEight.com and one of the most respected analyzers of polls in the country, believes the Republicans have energized Democratic voters. I agree with him. By trying to shove through unpopular programs to benefit their corporate and rich buddies, the Republicans are in the process of committing political suicide. They are reminding voters why they felt it necessary to vote Democratic in 2008 and encouraging them to do it again in 2012.

It looks like the voters may be energized to once again boot the Republicans out of office in 2012 -- not because of anything Democrats have accomplished, but to protect themselves from the Republican policies.

Read on at Jobsanger Blog . . .