Tag Archives: Republicans

MA legislature blocks Gov. Baker’s painful education cuts

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massachusetts-statehouse

Last week the State Senate voted to restore much of the education funding to the Massachusetts State budget, including: $5.25 million to the University of Massachusetts, $217,000 for Quinsiggamond Community College, and, perhaps most importantly, $17.6 million in kindergarten grants. The House followed along the same lines.

By July 30, lawmakers had restored 60% of Governor Baker’s $162 million budget cuts (via line-item veto) to the $38.1 billion Massachusetts budget originally sent to his desk. As to be expected in Massachusetts, a state consistently ranked as having one of the country’s best public education systems, it was the cuts to education that drew the most attention and ire.

Senate President Stanley C. Rosenberg (D) spoke strongly about the need to keep funding for education:

“If we’re serious about closing the income inequality gap, expanding educational opportunities for working families must be an important priority. By overriding the governor’s ill-advised education vetoes, we’re helping middle-class kids get the tools they will need to prosper in a demanding and competitive economy.”

 
Governor Baker, who ran and won his seat as Governor as a moderate Republican in a deeply blue state, has been evasive when it comes to his true opinion of early childhood education. While running for governor, he insisted:

“We need to make sure there’s a runway here between pre-k into strong elementary and middle school and high school education.”

 
However, as a candidate, he refused to pledge to shrink the waiting list of 17,000 low-income students hoping to get a spot in a subsidized pre-kindergarten program.

As governor, Baker has frequently pointed to the cost of pre-Kindergarten programs, but vetoed a program to establish best practices for cost-control in pre-K programs. Baker also frequently sites a Brookings Institute study, which notes the disappearance of benefits of a pre-K program by the third grade if students are in under-preforming schools. This seems like a thin defense for cutting pre-K programs, but an important reason to figure out how to improve pre-K programs.

Governor Baker points out that the $17.6 million of kindergarten grants he planned to cut was part of a program originally intended to help school districts establish full-day kindergartens and with 90% of MA towns now providing full-day kindergarten, the grants no longer fulfill their original purpose. Many school leaders say their kindergarten programs rely on this funding and if it is to disappear, it should do so gradually, not all at once, leaving school districts in the lurch.

The cut of these kindergarten grants was overridden unanimously in both the House by a vote of 155-0 and the Senate by a vote of 38-0.

The truth is that Baker governs a state where 73% of residents support early childhood education and 53% would support raising taxes to support it. With polls like this one, it is easy to see that Baker’s values may not match up with the state he is governing. It is hard to believe that short-sighted budget cuts like this one will not come back to haunt him.

AFD Micron #1

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Re: Trump rhetoric comparisons to fascism: America’s origin-story villains, the Nazis, are always portrayed as cold, unfeeling machines, because we don’t want to admit that the greatest evils of history are committed by passionate, patriotic people motivated by righteous anger and simplistic good vs. evil views. Because what’s more American than that?

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Scott Walker: Abortion is between you, your doctor, and me

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Scott Walker and family at his 2016 presidential campaign announcement. (Credit: WisPolitics.com / Flickr)

Scott Walker and family at his 2016 presidential campaign announcement. (Credit: WisPolitics.com / Flickr)

Flippy-floppy Scott Walker just signed a 20-weeks abortion ban bill in Wisconsin. One the one hand, it’s fully consistent with his overall views:

Walker’s record includes defunding Planned Parenthood, requiring abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, a law currently blocked by a federal court judge, and requiring women to have ultrasounds and be shown images of the fetus before having an abortion.

 
On the other hand, he refused to give a position during the 2014 campaign on the type of ban he just signed and even went as far as to put out a very misleading ad:

Just nine months ago he ran a television ad during his gubernatorial re-election campaign where he said whether to obtain an abortion is an agonizing decision between a woman and her doctor.

 
Apparently, he meant to say, it’s a “decision between a woman and her doctor” and her state legislature and her governor / native-son presidential candidate.

But he’s the leading choice of “conservative” Republican voters, so, guess he’s gotta do what he’s gotta do, and really get himself right up in there.

I wonder where the “Obamacare repeal” bills went this year?

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Remember how Republicans held the House for four years without the holding the Senate and managed to vote more than 50 times in the House to repeal “Obamacare” only to have it die in the Senate?

Anybody else notice it’s now half a year into Republican control of both chambers of Congress and they have yet to send any Affordable Care Act repeal bill to the White House?

Flashback to my December 2013 forecast:

The one good thing about the crushing strength of the American private health insurance industry’s Washington lobby is that they will never allow through these idiotic Republican proposals to replace the Affordable Care Act. That lobby understands two key truths:
1. this law benefits their industry as currently written by providing lots of healthy new customers and,
2. the replacement proposals keep the most popular but most expensive parts in place, while stripping out the money-making purchase mandate that makes it financially feasible to keep the costly parts going.
[…]
Those firms benefiting from this law donate a lot of political money. If you’re a Republican in Congress right now, you don’t want to get into a political gunfight with the health insurance lobby, unless you’re a self-funding candidate.

Even the tea party wing is still dependent upon big business. They can’t afford to cross private health insurers at the moment.

 
Maybe they were all just waiting for the Supreme Court to strike it down for them? Too bad (for them) about that as well.

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If you said it, then you meant it, Oklahoma GOP chairman

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The AP reports that the Oklahoma Republican Party chairman is in hot water over a Facebook post comparing SNAP (food stamps) recipients to wild animals that you shouldn’t feed:

The original message, posted Monday, said 46 million Americans participate in the Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program, or SNAP, commonly referred to as food stamps. The post then said the National Park Service encourages people not to feed wild animals because they ‘‘will grow dependent on handouts and will not learn to take care of themselves.’’

As is usually the case with other like-minded posters in such situations, he thinks everyone just didn’t get it and it’s all a big misunderstanding:

Party chairman Randy Brogdon said on Facebook that the post was intended to illustrate the cycle of government dependency. He apologized ‘‘for any misconceptions that were created.’’

 
Worth noting:

About 604,000 people receive SNAP benefits in Oklahoma, mostly the elderly, disabled, and children.

That’s almost 7% of the Republican-dominated state’s entire population — which is a pretty comparable figure to a Democratic-dominated state like Massachusetts, but not a glowing testament to the dependency-ending benefits of conservative governance.

In predictable fashion, fellow Republicans objected more on the optics than the substance:

‘‘It is not a representation of the party as a whole and it makes the party look uncaring,’’ said state Senator Stephanie Bice, a Republican.

(My bolding.)

However he may have phrased it, that vehement opposition to and dismissive view of food stamps is the mainstream position of the Republican Party. Hard not to “look uncaring” when you are uncaring. Dressing it up rhetorically in a nicer outfit doesn’t fix the underlying problem.

In the immortal words of one Christopher Brian “Ludacris” Bridges in his 2008 commentary, “Politics As Usual”:

Talkin’ slick and apologizin’ for what?
If you said it, then you meant it.
How you want it: Head or gut?

 

Previously from Bill on Similar Topics:

“How the South Really Operates”
“The American South: Take the Money and Run”

United States Census Southern Region

United States Census Southern Region

TG: “Americans Need Better Pay Before Longer Hours”

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Arsenal Bolt: Quick updates on the news stories we’re following.

The Globalist: “Americans Need Better Pay Before Longer Hours” – George R. Tyler: What Jeb Bush and Scott Walker get wrong about U.S. workers with their war on wages.

Americans have worked harder and smarter since 1979. Productivity is up 66.5% and Americans now work 1800 hours annually on average – 300 hours more than Germans. But the GOP’s vision of America is one where hard work is rarely rewarded with higher wages.

Exhausted employees must wonder at the remarkably rarefied air enjoyed by America’s wealthy, when multimillionaire GOP presidential candidates like former Florida Governor Jeb Bush urge them to work even harder. The Republican answer to wage stagnation is simple: With hourly pay stagnant, the solution is to work more hours.

Read the rest.

 
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Op-Ed | Donald Trump: The Democrats’ Best 2016 Asset

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The essay below was co-authored with Stephan Richter, Editor-in-Chief of The Globalist, where it originally appeared.

Donald_Trump_by_Gage_Skidmore_3

Hillary Clinton’s campaign may not develop the sizzle the would-be first Madam President and her team has long planned for. But the race has already created its first, truly searing image in the skin of the American nation.

To the Democratic Party establishment’s great relief, this is not the result of any of Hillary Clinton’s missteps, of which there have been some.

Rather, the problem emerged from the inside of the tent of the Republican Party. It is commonly called the “Donald Trump problem.”

The worst part for the Republicans is that Trump has the same effect as a Trojan horse. (Beware of the “Greeks” bearing gifts, Republicans of the United States!)

Trump’s emergence in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire gives the Democrats a secret weapon to frame the race – and the entire Republican field — well before a Republican nominee emerges.

Trump’s troublesome personality characteristics and policies are essentially also true of nearly all the other Republican candidates, but nobody knows who they are and there are twenty of them. He jumped from 3% to 12% in CNN’s polling of Republican voters nationwide from May 31 to June 28. That puts him within striking distance of Jeb Bush, whose campaign is floundering.

Donald Trump’s net worth

It would be one thing if Trump’s downer effect were only that he embodies ostentatious – even offensive – wealth, far more so than Mitt Romney, the party’s 2012 candidate, ever did. The comparatively reserved Romney came to symbolize the 1% class with “just” $250 million. Forbes values the flamboyant Trump at a minimum of $4.1 billion.

That also means that Trump outperforms the previous wealthiest candidate ever to seek the U.S. presidency — Ross Perot – by a factor of two. (Perot ran in 1992 as an independent against President George H.W. Bush and then-Governor Bill Clinton.)

So, he paints Republicans firmly into the corner of the money worshippers (which inoculates Hillary Clinton against similar charges).

But an ocean of money is not Trump’s only similarity to Mr. Perot. Trump represents a similar brand of nativist economic populism that is popular with a sizable chunk of American voters.

In an era where Democrats are publicly debating the economic values of their party, Trump helps divert the (rightly or wrongly) feared label of “economic populist.”

That alone would not cause Republicans a problem, were it not for the unfortunate fact that nearly all their major candidates this cycle are promoting similarly ridiculous and nativist platforms on economics, immigration and beyond.

Hillary’s man in the Republican camp

Where Trump does Hillary’s (and the Democrats’) bidding is that he is a very loud magnet for media attention. Without the Democrats trying (and leaving fingerprints), Trump highlights how not-ready-for-primetime the rest of the Republican field is.

His outrageous views on racial minorities are doubly politically problematic: First, he profits off employing “illegal” workers at construction sites.

And second, the silence of the Republican field to stand up to Trump’s race-baiting is as deafening as it is electorally deadly.
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