enlarge Credit: Paul Krugman/New York Times As the New Year – and the new GOP House majority – approaches, Republicans are ramping up their war on government workers . Grover Norquist and his Weekly Standard allies urged Congress to let cash-strapped states go bankrupt in order to slash public employees, drain their pension funds and punish their unions. At the heart of their crusade is the bogus claim, as 2012 GOP White House hopeful Tim Pawlenty put it two weeks ago, that “since January 2008 the private sector has lost nearly 8 million jobs while local, state and federal governments added 590,000.” Alas, as with so much conservative mythmaking, the statement isn’t merely a lie. As the data show, the public sector has actually shed hundreds of thousands of jobs over the past two years. While Ohio Republican Steve LaTourette was among the first to deploy the mythical 590,000 figure this summer, it was Governor Pawlenty who brought it to prominence two weeks ago in his vitriolic Wall Street Journal op-ed, ” Government Unions vs. Taxpayers .” “They work for government, which, thanks to President Obama, has become the only booming “industry” left in our economy. Since January 2008 the private sector has lost nearly eight million jobs while local, state and federal governments added 590,000.” Sadly for the man who calls himself ” T-Paw ,” the figure isn’t even close. As Politifact noted about T-Paw’s “Pants on Fire” lie, “Pawlenty’s statement doesn’t account for the tremendous — and now vanished — bump from hiring Census workers.” And as it turns out, Pawlenty simply reproduced the 590,000 figure from a June 24, 2010 blog post at Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government web site. Once the temporary hiring of Census workers from January 2009 through May 2010 came to an end, Politifact concluded, “total federal hiring comes to only 34,000.” Or as Paul Krugman put it: See, if you measure right at the top of that peak at the right, pretend not to notice that it’s all Census workers, and never update the number, you get your myth inserted into the discourse, and it becomes part of what everyone knows … But the Republicans’ sleight of hand over the Census is just the beginning. Even as they wrongly rail against “over-benefited and overpaid” government workers, hundreds of thousands of state and local government employees have already lost their jobs. By July 2010, over 200,000 state and municipal workers were laid off. By October, as David Leonhardt reported in the New York Times : Local governments are cutting jobs at the fastest rate in almost 30 years. They cut 76,000 jobs last month and over the last three months have cut 143,000 jobs, many in education, according to today’s jobs report. That’s 1 percent of total local-government employment across the country. Since the Labor Department began keeping records in the 1950s, the only other time that the cuts were so steep was in the harsh 1981-2 recession. As Ezra Klein lamented in the Washington Post two months ago, the draconian job cuts at the state and local level constituted ” the anti-stimulus .” The government is now impeding an economic recovery. But it’s not for the reasons you often hear…It’s because, at the state and local level, it’s firing people…Consider this: If we only counted private-sector jobs, we’d have had positive jobs reports for the last nine months. As it is, public-sector losses have wiped out private-sector gains for the past four months. By November , state and local governments had shed 407,000 jobs (-39,000 state, -368,000 local) since their peak in August 2008. With state budget shortfalls estimated to top $100 billion for each of the next two years, analysts including Moody’s Economics and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have forecast more state and local job losses reaching between 400,000 and 900,000. Surveying the data for the past year and the catastrophic fiscal landscape across the country, Derek Thompson of The Atlantic rightly concluded: “The biggest job killer in 2011? Cities and states.” Cities, states and, if the likes of Tim Pawlenty, Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels and other conservative luminaries have their way, the Republican Party . (This piece also appears at Perrspectives .)
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This just in: Sarah Palin may not be a shoo-in for the GOP’s 2012 presidential nomination, according to a new CNN poll released on Tuesday. The survey also suggested that President Obama hasn’t squandered his support from Democrats, even after making several conciliatory gestures to the right side of the aisle this year.
Continue reading …Larry King wanted the last laugh from his testy interview with former Miss California Carrie Prejean, and got it Sunday in an interview with CNN's Howard Kurtz. Kurtz hosted King Sunday on “Reliable Sources” to showcase memorable interviews from 25 years of “Larry King Live.” One of the interviews was King's clash with Carrie Prejean from November, 2009. As NewsBusters then reported, King pressed Prejean about reports of a sex video she made as a teenager for her boyfriend. In addition, he repeatedly asked her about a settlement she made with the Miss Universe organization even though she kept asserting the matter was confidential. Prejean then told King he was being “inappropriate.” She removed her mic when a caller claiming to be gay pressed her about same-sex marriage. Supposedly the agreement between Prejean's publicist and King included no phone calls during the interview, although King denied having knowledge of that at the time of the interview.
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Click here to view this media Greenspan makes an admission of sorts: Waxman: Then where do you think you made a mistake? Greenspan: I made a mistake in the presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, was such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders… Waxman? Do you have any financial responsibility for the financial crisis? (On his ideology) Greenspan: …to exist you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not, and what I’m saying to you is, yes, I found a flaw… He found a flaw? What an asshole. Nothing in all of Conservative/Bircherland is as creepy as some of the unmitigated horsecrap that has been recycled from Ayn Rand. It’s the embodiment of a bloated narcissistic belief that you all suck except for us elitist few. Here’s an excerpt from Matt Taibbi’s new book called ‘Griftopia” Greenspan met Rand in the early fifties after leaving Columbia, attending meetings at Rand’s apartment with a circle of like-minded jerkoffs who called themselves by the ridiculous name of the Collective and who provided Greenspan the desired forum for social ascent. These meetings of The Collective would have an enormous impact on American culture by birthing a crackpot anti-theology dedicated to legitimizing self interest — a grotesquerie called Objectivism that hit the Upper East Side cocktail party circuit hard in the fifties and sixties. It is important to to spend some time of the seriously demented history of Objectivism, because this lunatic religion that should have choked to death in its sleep decades ago would go on, thanks in large part to Greenspan to provide the entire intellectual context for the financial disasters of of the early twenty first century. enlarge Fox News and their stable of lying liars have been hoisting this bulls–t religion on its legion of followers every da y while they helped build the Tea Party movement almost singlehandedly to undermine any type of progress we could have made, while the working people of this nation suffer from their economic policies. Digby links to a Steve Benen post about the hypocrisy of Republicans on tax cuts and finds this other crap spewed by Greenspan : Alan Greenspan, the most influential and powerful central banker of the last half century wrote this , as a young man: ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.” In other words, anyone on unemployment is a lazy bastard and should be left to perish while the Millionaire Club should feast off of their Bush tax cuts. As you know, Greenspan was at the helm like an anti-Captain Kirk during much of the destruction of the world’s financial systems during his reign in politics. Ben Stein is one of the Capos of these freaks at Fox, where he is housed. DWT has a list of Republican douchebag quotes about the parasite class, including one of Stein’s patented quotes about the unemployed. “The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities. I say ‘generally’ because there are exceptions. But in general as I survey the ranks of those who are unemployed, I see people who have overbearing and unpleasant personalities and/or do not know how to do a days work.” 2011 is going to be a difficult year because the John Galt worshipers will be running the House. It all ties in with Libertarian and Bircher belief systems that say the free markets are our lord and masters. Digby explains it thus: Woe be to all those ordinary Joes and Janes who are just working at jobs and raising families and trying to find some happiness in their short time on earth without feeling they need to be conquerors. Among many of the political and business elite in America they are no longer considered neighbors or even customers. They are parasites. In other words, the American Dream is nothing more than a system designed to drain all the “purpose and reason” from the legitimate owners of the world. Taxing the hell out of them will teach them a necessary moral lesson.
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Click here to view this media Now that it has been immortalized, Sarah Palin wants to pretend on her TLC show that her coinage of ‘refudiate’ was just an accidental typo : While in the car, Sarah also talked to Todd about the time she tweeted the word “refudiate.” “I pressed an F instead of a P and people freaked out,” said Sarah, pointing out that her blunder was the second-most-searched word on Google trends. “Make lemonade out of lemons,” said Sarah. Um … right. Except, of course, that she made the tweet on July 18: But as you can see, she actually said ‘refudiate’ on national TV, on Sean Hannity’s Fox show, four days before that, on July 14. No doubt she will claim that this was just a typo too.
Continue reading …GOP’s Plan for the Economy: Force States into Bankruptcy and Default on Union Contracts and Pensions
December 28, 2010 No Comment
Click here to view this media Sam Seder filling in for Keith Olbermann on Countdown talked to former C&L contributor, FDL’s Dave Dayden about his recent article at the News Desk — In Unfolding War on Public Employees, State Lawmakers and Media Likely to Do the Work Themselves : There’s no question that Republicans have introduced a bill which would require more transparency on state public pensions, and that they hope this would provide a road map in the states for where they can cut budgets; namely, on the backs of public employees. That doesn’t mean it will happen in exactly that way, however. And the idea that the next Congress will overhaul the 30s-era law allowing states to go bankrupt seems fanciful to me. But I don’t think states or municipalities need much help from the federal government in their desire to rewrite public employee union contracts. There has been a concerted effort for years to demonize and delegitimize public employee unions, from both Republican pols and the media in general . This has left a distorted impression about greedy union contracts and well-paid government functionaries. So the new class of Republican governors would certainly want to capitalize on that by pleasing the public, who now favor things like wage freezes (which Obama just instituted at the federal level) and furloughs and bigger pension contributions, punishing those workers. And they are animated by a general hatred of unions, which have maintained their strength in the public sector while fading away in the private sector. Alongside that, there are legitimate budget problems in the states. The National Conference of State Legislatures estimates a $118 billion dollar shortfall in state and municipal budgets in 2011. And there are certainly some states and municipalities with currently unfunded pension liabilities . While federal aid could offset some of that, there’s no chance it will happen – expect the House to pass, early next year, a resolution basically forbidding “bailouts” of the states. At that point, state governments will either have to cut spending or raise taxes to balance their budgets, which almost all of them are constitutionally required to do. With public employees – or rather, cops, firefighters, nurses, teachers, the people who prepare your state tax refund, the people who get you your driver’s license, the people who get the roads and bridges fixed and basically secure your safe passage through the commons – seen in a negative light, they will in many states be lined up for cuts. There’s much more there so go read the rest. Republicans continue to prove that they’re willing to finish wrecking our economy for political gain and to get their dream fulfilled of busting every union we’ve got left in this country in the process.
Continue reading …By Eugene Robinson It’s been not quite two months’ time since Republicans won a sweeping midterm victory, and already they seem divided, embattled and—not to mince words—freaked out. For good reason, I might add. Related Entries December 27, 2010 Closed Door December 27, 2010 Lame Duck
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