Rachel Maddow Exposed for Lying About Wisconsin Having a Budget Surplus
February 19, 2011 No Comment
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow began her show Thursday claiming, “Despite what you may have heard about Wisconsin's finances, Wisconsin is on track to have a budget surplus this year.” On Friday, the website Politifact exposed Maddow's assertion as 100 percent false (video follows with partial transcript and commentary): RACHEL MADDOW, HOST: I’m here to report that there is nothing wrong in the state of Wisconsin. Wisconsin is fine. Wisconsin is great, actually. Despite what you may have heard about Wisconsin’s finances, Wisconsin is on track to have a budget surplus this year. I am not kidding. I’m quoting their own version of the Congressional Budget Office, the state’s own nonpartisan “assess the state’s finances” agency. That agency said the month that the new Republican governor of Wisconsin was sworn in, last month, that the state was on track to have a $120 million budget surplus this year. So, then why exactly does Wisconsin look like this right now? (VIDEO CLIP PLAYS) MADDOW: Why is there a revolt in the American Midwest tonight? Why are we in day three of massive, massive protests — real upheaval in Wisconsin’s capital city of Madison? Why are we seeing what was described today by my friend John Nichols, a seventh-generation Wisconsinite, as perhaps the biggest protests that have been seen in that state since Vietnam? Why is this — look at this — why is this happening? As the state’s own finances show, it is not happening because people who work for the state are the cause of some horrible budget crisis. It’s not because teachers are lazy and rich. It’s not because greedy snowplow drivers have bankrupted the state somehow. The state is not bankrupt. Even though the state had started the year on track to have a budget surplus — now, there is, in fact, a $137 million budget shortfall. Republican Governor Scott Walker, coincidentally, has given away $140 million worth of business tax breaks since he came into office. Hey, wait. That’s about exactly the size of the shortfall. What is happening in Wisconsin right now has absolutely nothing to do with public workers. The headline here, the way this keeps getting shorthanded, is workers angry after state is forced by budget crisis to crack down. That’s not what’s going on. The state is not being forced to crack down. A lot of states do have budget crises right now, but heading into this year, Wisconsin was not one of them. Oh really, Rach? Well, that's not what Politifact found : Our conclusion: Maddow and the others are wrong. There is, indeed, a projected deficit that required attention, and Walker and GOP lawmakers did not create it. The confusion, it appears, stems from a section in [Director of the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau Robert] Lang’s memo that — read on its own — does project a $121 million surplus in the state’s general fund as of June 30, 2011. But the remainder of the routine memo — consider it the fine print — outlines $258 million in unpaid bills or expected shortfalls in programs such as Medicaid services for the needy ($174 million alone), the public defender’s office and corrections. Additionally, the state owes Minnesota $58.7 million under a discontinued tax reciprocity deal. The result, by our math and Lang’s, is the $137 million shortfall. It would be closer to the $340 million figure if the figure included the $200 million owed to the state’s patient compensation fund, a debt courts have declared resulted from an illegal raid on the fund under former Gov. Jim Doyle. A court ruling is pending in that matter, so the money might not have to be transferred until next budget year. So, contrary to what Maddow and many in the media including on MSNBC have been claiming, Wisconsin does indeed have a budget deficit. And what about that tax cut Maddow and others in the press have been focusing so much attention on? Well, they've been misrepresenting that as well: The tax cuts will cost the state a projected $140 million in tax revenue — but not until the next two-year budget, from July 2011 to June 2013. The cuts are not even in effect yet, so they cannot be part of the current problem. Amazing. Politifact concluded: There is fierce debate over the approach Walker took to address the short-term budget deficit. But there should be no debate on whether or not there is a shortfall. While not historically large, the shortfall in the current budget needed to be addressed in some fashion. Walker’s tax cuts will boost the size of the projected deficit in the next budget, but they’re not part of this problem and did not create it. We rate Maddow’s take False. Nice job, Rach. Your employers must be so proud of you. But Maddow wasn't alone in presenting this lie. Her colleague Ed Schultz did it Friday evening: Governor Scott Walker wants you to believe that the only way he can solve his made-up budget crisis is by taking away union rights. He says if he raises taxes on the wealthy, jobs will die and businesses will leave Wisconsin. That, my friends, is an old, outright lie. And here's the proof. The previous governor, Democrat Jim Doyle, was handed a $3.2 billion deficit when he took office. But he passed a budget that left the state poised for a surplus this year. Maybe Politifact should bust him as well. (H/T NB reader Carl Gullang)
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Andrew Richardson reports on the tournament hosted by Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka.
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http://www.youtube.com/v/aKJ3XjK0Pyc?f=user_uploads&app=youtube_gdata See the original post: VOD-LON-19.mpg
Continue reading …One of the Masters of the Villagers, Joe Klein takes a sledge hammer to the public employee unions of Wisconsin in his newest piece of dribble. Digby: Joe Klein Takes A Trip Down Memory Lane Wow, talk about misreading the zeitgeist . Joe Klein has been so immersed in the Third Way centrist babble on public employee unions for so long that he’s completely lost the thread. Revolutions everywhere–in the middle east, in the middle west. But there is a difference: in the middle east, the protesters are marching for democracy; in the middle west, they’re protesting against it . I mean, Isn’t it, well, a bit ironic that the protesters in Madison, blocking the state senate chamber, are chanting “Freedom, Democracy, Union” while trying to prevent a vote? Isn’t it ironic that the Democratic Senators have fled the democratic process? Isn’t it interesting that some of those who–rightly–protest the assorted Republican efforts to stymie majority rule in the U.S. Senate are celebrating the Democratic efforts to stymie the same in the Wisconsin Senate? An election was held in Wisconsin last November. The Republicans won. In a democracy, there are consequences to elections and no one, not even the public employees unions, are exempt from that. There are no guarantees that labor contracts, including contracts governing the most basic rights of unions, can’t be renegotiated, or terminated for that matter. We hold elections to decide those basic parameters. And it seems to me that Governor Scott Walker’s basic requests are modest ones–asking public employees to contribute more to their pension and health care plans, though still far less than most private sector employees do. He is also trying to limit the unions’ abilities to negotiate work rules–and this is crucial when it comes to the more efficient operation of government in a difficult time. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that Joe just dusted off an old column from 1993, changed a few names and just threw it on line. He clearly has not been following the changing debate on these issues over the past few years and certainly hasn’t the vaguest clue about what Walker is really doing. Joe Klein was on MSNBC during the 1 PM PST hour to debate with a union hater and it appeared as if the MSNBC host thought Klein was going to support the unions so they had a twofer railing against the Wisconsin protests. Weird. Suddenly elections matter to idiots like Klein. We had one in 2008 too. A BIG one. Ezra explains that unions aren’t the problem to Klein pretty easily: Let’s be clear: Whatever fiscal problems Wisconsin is — or is not — facing at the moment, they’re not caused by labor unions. That’s also true for New Jersey, for Ohio and for the other states. There was no sharp rise in collective bargaining in 2006 and 2007, no major reforms of the country’s labor laws, no dramatic change in how unions organize. And yet, state budgets collapsed. Revenues plummeted. Taxes had to go up, and spending had to go down, all across the country. Blame the banks. Blame global capital flows. Blame lax regulation of Wall Street. Blame home buyers, or home sellers. But don’t blame the unions. Not for this recession…read on.
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Western backing for the old regimes in the Middle East and north Africa precludes any cosy narrative about popular uprisings There has been a tendency among western commentators during the past few weeks of popular uprising in the Middle East and north Africa to interpret the events as occurring along starkly defined fault lines. There are the people versus the regime; Islamists versus the secular; and autocratic, corrupt rulers pitted against a popular desire for democracy, human rights and economic inclusion. All of which contains some truths, but it remains a partial picture. In our desire to create a joined-up narrative out of the unrest, from Yemen to Iraq and Bahrain, we have ignored the specifics. In the rush of politicians such as Hillary Clinton to support the new wave of “freedom”, western governments seem to be replicating the same errors they made during the “colour” revolutions, mistaking the act of revolt for the outcome of a long period of revolution, and accepting the incomplete in the name of “stability”. For, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each of the autocracies now embroiled in popular uprisings is autocratic in its own way. What can be said about the events in Tunisia is as inapplicable to Egypt as it is to Bahrain or Yemen. In truth, there are some broad common strands: each country has a young population with a significant, well-educated segment and many people looking for work. In each, power has been monopolised by a small elite, either drawn from a royal family or from a figure backed by the military and business and the west. Corruption is often rife; a culture of repression is vigorous and deeply ingrained. But that tends to be where the similarities end. Take, for instance, comparisons between Egypt and Bahrain. The former is a huge state with a massive urban hinterland centring on Cairo, one of the planet’s megacities. Its recent history includes a “revolution” in 1952 that was in reality a coup. Its social conflicts have been defined by the notion of the threat – in substantial part manufactured by the old regime – of the Muslim Brotherhood and a corrupt system of patronage overseen by the military and the associated National Democratic Party which have enjoyed a monopoly on power and economic opportunity. Bahrain, for all of the similarity of some of the chants at the Pearl roundabout – and the violence used in the attempts to break the protest movement – has a social conflict very differently defined. It has been underpinned by a long-festering sectarian conflict in a Shia-majority country where a Sunni royal family has ruled since the 18th century. Preferment for jobs, including the military and police, has not been through party patronage but through sect, resulting in a situation where the capital is largely Sunni and the far poorer countryside is Shia. Which leaves a profound challenge for the west, whose interventions in the region have historically tended to support exactly those autocrats whose power is now being challenged, while promoting neo-liberal economic policies that have enriched the minority elites while making daily life more difficult for many in the region. It is not good enough to talk, as Clinton, Barack Obama, William Hague and others have done, in feeble generalities about “stability”, “freedom” and “restraint” in a networked world where the weakness and slowness of expression of those sentiments is so rapidly exposed. If western diplomacy – and media commentary – has a function in these times, it should be to expose and focus on the precise dynamics of the awful inequalities in these societies and the routine violence and oppression that sustains them. If the west has a contribution to make, it is in an honest and accurate audit of the nature of the states our governments have for so long been supporting, not prevarication. To describe reality, not vague ideals, and in describing it, reboot the policies that have for so long supported repression and corruption. Arab and Middle East protests Middle East Bahrain Egypt Libya Tunisia Yemen Protest Peter Beaumont guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Krauthammer Rips Krugman’s Claim Republicans Are Stealing Food From Babies and Pregnant Women
February 19, 2011 No Comment
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on Friday made the idiotic claim that House Republicans are stealing food from babies and pregnant women. Later that evening, appearing on PBS's “Inside Washington,” syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer demonstrated just how foolish Krugman's assertion was (video follows with transcript and commentary): GORDON PETERSON, HOST: New York Times columnist Paul Krugman: “House Republicans are literally stealing food from the mouths of babies — nutritional and pregnant women and very young children, one of the items on their cutting block — so they can pose, falsely, as deficit hawks.” Peterson got that quote wrong. Here’s the correct one from Krugman’s column Friday: House Republicans, in particular, are literally stealing food from the mouths of babes — nutritional aid to pregnant women and very young children is one of the items on their cutting block — so they can pose, falsely, as deficit hawks. But I digress: CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Let me explain to you what these cuts are, the so-called cuts. Obama increased the baseline budget of all of the departments by an average of 24 percent in two years. If you add in stimulus, it’s over 80 percent. The cuts are from this artificially inflated, hugely inflated, baseline he created it. If you compare, for example, the home heating oil subsidy, it is cut in half, that’s the worst. It’s a barbarian measure? NINA TOTENBERG, NPR: It’s his cut, too. KRAUTHAMMER: It’s because since 2009, it’s been doubled. So all that’s happening is with the cut you are going back to pre-recession levels. The norm. These are called Draconian cuts. COLBY KING, WASHINTON POST: That is the difficulty in talking about this issue. Yes it’s right about that particular provision, but there also other provisions in the debate where it’s not, your scenario does not apply. For example, if you are going to zero out spending for the Presidio, a small item, the impact has nothing to do with the baseline budget. It is because somebody wants to do that. Or if you want to cut out money for enforcement of the SEC. These are legitimate issues to talk about. TOTENBERG: Or you cut out enforcement of Medicare fraud. KING: Don’t trivialize the debate over food for infant children. Those are important discussions, but that’s not the only discussion. The bigger ones will come later. KRAUTHAMMER: I’m trying to say that with all of the cuts, we are higher than we were in 2008 and 2009, and I didn’t hear any of you complaining in those years about women and children going hungry. Indeed. One of the things that worried conservatives regarding the explosion in spending in the past two years was that the claim much of it was emergency oriented to end the recession was absolute nonsense, and instead the raised level of outlays would become the new baseline from which future budgets would start. As we can now see from the squawking of people like Krugman, King, and Totenberg, that's exactly what's happened. These folks totally ignore that the budget has grown by a staggering 41 percent in the past four years, and that much of the additional spending was sold as temporary. Now that Republicans – and voters in the last elections! – want to cut this budget back down to something approaching pre-recession levels, the Left and their media minions are predictably accusing them of stealing food from babies and pregnant women. It would be laughable if it is wasn't so serious.
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As fresh violence grips Libya – there are claims that some of those cracking down on demonstrators are foreign mercenaries. Al Jazeera’s Hazem Sika reports.
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Click here to view this media Bahrain’s Special Envoy to the United States, Latif Al-Zayani thinks the force used to attack and sometimes kill protesters in Bahrain has been “proportional” and “legal”. The clip above with Suzanne Malveaux this morning. But he said essentially the same thing to Candy Crowley of CNN on Thursday night. Candy Crowley: “There does not seem to have been any harm done on the other side of this conflict. And yet we’re told that three protesters were killed. Is it possible that this was an overreaction? Could it have been dealt with in some other way?” Latif Al-Zayani: “No, actually. In our procedure, we always use force that is proportional. The force was proportional, minimum possible. Tear gas were—was used to be effective enough to disperse the people.” No mention of the use of rubber bullets, beatings against women and children during the crackdown at Pearl roundabout. And nothing at all of course about the live ammunition now being used. Watch this video below from earlier today and ask yourself if this looks “proportional”. The sooner these murderous scumbags are forced out of power the better. WARNING: GRAPHIC And seen from another angle, video taken by Simeon Kerr of the Financial Times.
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One person has reportedly been killed and dozens injured in violent clashes in Yemen. The country’s Interior Ministry has denied the claim. But at least six people have died since anti-government protests began nine days ago. Al Jazeera’s Hashem Ahelbarra reportsd.
Continue reading …Chris Hayes and Naomi Klein Explain Why the Protests in Wisconsin Matter
February 19, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media The Nation’s Chris Hayes laid out very plainly why the protests in Wisconsin matter. This move by Gov. Scott Walker is one of a series of power grabs by Republicans with the intent of achieving some of their long time goals; destroying unions and the middle class and getting rid of our public education system. And as Chris noted, it’s a reminder of the fact that when our political institutions fail us, people mobilizing outside of those institutions through the process of peaceful protests as we’ve seen in Wisconsin have brought about some of the greatest moments of progressive transformation in the United States. Chris’ fellow contributor to The Nation, Naomi Klein discussed how what Walker doing is a classic example of the Shock Doctrine, where politicians create a crisis and then using that crisis as an excuse to push through horribly unpopular economic policies. And as Hayes and Klein both explained, what ends up happening in Wisconsin is not only going to have local implications, but national as well.
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