No Good Choices For Social Safety Nets

post from Docudharma - Front Page on 14 August 2012 11:06:23 AM. © Docudharma - Front Page

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow GazetteSince Saturday's announcement of the right wing darling Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) as Gov. Mitt Romney's choice for his Vice President, the number one concern has been Ryan's budget that would end Medicare as we know[...]

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Utah GOP Activist Hit With Another Sex Assault
Charge

post from TPMMuckraker on 14 August 2012 11:00:59 AM. © TPMMuckraker

Political activist Greg Peterson was charged Monday with sexually assaulting yet another woman at his Utah cabin where he hosted events for some of the biggest names in Republican politics there.

Prosecutors in Wasatch County, Utah charged Peterson, 37, with forcible sexual abuse, a second-degree felony, for a 2010 incident involving a woman he brought back to the cabin, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

Meanwhile, Peterson was scheduled on Tuesday morning to appear in court in Salt Lake City for the start of a two-day preliminary hearing, where a judge will determine if there is enough evidence to move forward in a case involving four other women who have accused him of sexually assaulting them since March 2011.

Salt Lake County prosecutor Joseph Hill told TPM recently that the women who have accused Peterson of rape and other sexual attacks were expected to testify at this week's hearing. Peterson has pleaded not guilty in the case. His attorneys have said he has been falsely accused.

Peterson was heavily active in Republican circles in Utah. He hosted events at his cabin in Heber, Utah, where some of the top politicians in the state were guests. That included Sens. Mike Lee and Orrin Hatch, Gov. Gary Herbert and Rep. Jason Chaffetz. He also co-chaired a fundraiser for presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2007 in Park City, Utah.

In the most recent case, the woman said Peterson took her to his cabin for lunch in April 2010. There, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, he allegedly exposed his genitals to her and tried to force her to touch him. The woman was able to make him stop when she placed her hand on the holster of her gun, the newspaper reported.

In the other cases, Peterson was accused of kidnapping women he dated and taking them to his cabin in Heber, where he then raped them. In one incident, prosecutors alleged, he found out the woman was an immigrant living in the U.S. on an expired visa and threatened to have her deported if she didn't do what he wanted.

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Unusual Arguments

post from Talking Points Memo on 14 August 2012 11:00:36 AM. © Talking Points Memo

Jeff Flake: Vote for me, though I would prefer you not be able to. [...]

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Until a Republican Tackles the Pentagon Budget
He’s Not A Conservative

post from TaylorMarsh.com on 14 August 2012 11:00:30 AM. © TaylorMarsh.com

PAUL RYAN FITS with Mitt Romney’s Pentagon giveaway mindset.

David Stockman, Reagan’s former budget man, who isn’t exactly a foreign policy guy, does the math. He begins by naming Paul Ryan’s foreign policy stance what it is, neoconservative imperialism.

Mr. Ryan professes to be a defense hawk, though the true conservatives of modern times ? Calvin Coolidge, Herbert C. Hoover, Robert A. Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, even Gerald R. Ford ? would have had no use for the neoconconservative imperialism that the G.O.P. cobbled from policy salons run by Irving Kristol?s ex-Trotskyites three decades ago. These doctrines now saddle our bankrupt nation with a roughly $775 billion ?defense? budget in a world where we have no advanced industrial state enemies and have been fired (appropriately) as the global policeman.
Indeed, adjusted for inflation, today?s national security budget is nearly double Eisenhower?s when he left office in 1961 (about $400 billion in today?s dollars) ? a level Ike deemed sufficient to contain the very real Soviet nuclear threat in the era just after Sputnik. By contrast, the Romney-Ryan version of shrinking Big Government is to increase our already outlandish warfare-state budget and risk even more spending by saber-rattling at a benighted but irrelevant Iran.

The other thing Paul Ryan does is continue the tradition of giving the Pentagon more strength over the State Department, which has just begun to recover under Secy. Clinton’s tutelage and strong hand, though she still plays second fiddle to DoD.

graphic via Shutterstock

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OCCs Chief Counsel, Julie Williams, Resigns,
Heralding Possible New Era at Bank Regulator

post from Firedoglake on 14 August 2012 11:00:28 AM. © Firedoglake

Believe it or not, we may have gotten a better retirement yesterday. Julie Williams, the longtime friend to the banks at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (which I call the Office of Bank Advocacy), is retiring after 19 years. Williams, the[...]

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Doocy Defends Ryan: 'What's the Matter With Being
an Ideologue'

post from Crooks and Liars on 14 August 2012 11:00:25 AM. © Crooks and Liars

Doocy Defends Ryan: 'What's the Matter With Being an Ideologue?'

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Fox News co-host Steve Doocy on Monday attempted spin Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan's "ideologue" label as an advantage to Mitt Romney's campaign.

During a series of interviews on Sunday, Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod blasted Ryan's plan to turn Medicare into a voucher system while skewing tax cuts to the wealthy, calling Wisconsin Republican a "right-wing ideologue" over and over and over again.

"They're trying to define Ryan before Mitt Romney even gets a chance to introduce Paul Ryan," Fox News host Eric Bolling noted on Monday.

"What's a matter with being an ideologue?" Doocy wondered. "I mean, an ideologue means you stand for something. And these guys clearly stand for something."

In fact, Merriam-Webster defines ideologue as "an impractical idealist" or "an often blindly partisan advocate or adherent of a particular ideology."

And on Sunday, President Barack Obama warned that it was blind partisanship from people like Ryan which was holding the country back.

"What's holding us back is a brand of Washington politics that says we are not going to compromise no matter what," Obama said during a rally in Chicago. "It's gridlock and stalemates and dysfunction, and it's an idea propagated by the other side that somehow we're going to grow this economy from the top down and that if people at the top are doing really, really well, then everyone else is automatically going to benefit."

The president explained: "My opponent and Congressman Ryan and their allies in Congress, they all believe that if we just get rid of more regulations on big corporations and we give more tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans, it will lead to jobs and prosperity for everybody else."

"They have tried to sell us this trickle-down fairy dust before, and guess what? It didn't work."

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Who Is Funding "Teachers Rock" and
"Won't Back Down"

post from Kmareka.com on 14 August 2012 11:00:21 AM. © Kmareka.com

Reblogged from Diane Ravitch's blog:

The money behind the “parent trigger” movie comes from the rightwing.

It’s a shame to see mainstream movie stars and musicians fooled into thinking this movie “honors” teachers.

The parent trigger is a transparent attempt to fool parents into seizing control of their public school and handing it over to corporate charter chains.

So, the game is to fool the Hollywood crowd and to fool parents with deceptive packaging.

While Calling Stimulus ‘Wasteful,’
Paul Ryan Secured Millions Of Dollars In Grants For Clean Energy

post from ThinkProgress on 14 August 2012 11:00:04 AM. © ThinkProgress

When it comes to the stimulus, presumptive GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan was against it before he was for it.

Or, to be more precise, he was for it at the same time he was against it.

According to documents obtained by the Boston Globe, Rep. Ryan (R-WI) lobbied the Department of Energy for tens of millions of dollars in stimulus grants for Wisconsin energy initiatives at least four times — even while calling the stimulus a “wasteful spending spree.”

The Globe reports:

?This trillion dollar spending bill misses the mark on all counts,? said Ryan in a statement from his office. ?This is not a crisis we can spend and borrow our way out of ? that is how we got here in the first place.?
But later that year, once the bill was passed and signed into law, Ryan sought to make sure his constituents benefited.
On October 5, 2009, he wrote a letter to Chu on behalf of the nonprofit Energy Center of Wisconsin, which was applying for a grant under the Recovery Act?s Geothermal Technologies Program.
Under the grant program the center received a total of $240,000, according to its president, Frank Greb.
The same day Ryan sent another letter advocating for a grant application, in which the Energy Center partnered with Milwaukee Area Technical College, for training building technicians and operators in energy-saving techniques. For that program, the government provided $740,364, according to federal records.
But the biggest payoff came for the Wisconsin Energy Conservation Corporation. Ryan predicted the $20 million grant would be able to ?create or retain approximately 7,600 new jobs over the three-year grant period and the subsequent three years.?
Yet in an interview with MSNBC two years later, Ryan again bashed the stimulus package.

Ryan is best known for his role as chairman of the House Budget Committee. He’s well liked within the Tea Party for his strong rhetoric on slashing federal spending (cutting everything except the military and fossil fuel subsidies) — a key reason why he was chosen by the Romney campaign.

However, according to the documents, Ryan requested millions of dollars for a variety of programs under the stimulus package, including $5.4 million for bus services and tens of millions of dollars for renewable energy and efficiency programs.

Ryan joins at least 62 Congressional Republicans who have actively lobbied the government for loan guarantees and grants for clean energy companies in their districts — even while many of them have publicly criticized the stimulus program that provided a boost to local companies and organizations around the country. According to the Department of Energy, the loan guarantee programs created or saved over 60,000 jobs and the 1603 grant program supported up to 75,000 jobs, stimulating tens of billions of dollars in private-sector activity.

And this is where these stories of hypocritical behavior around clean energy get tricky. It’s a great thing that Republicans once supported this industry. Assuming the dollars go toward good projects, we should resoundingly support conservatives who want to build their local economies through clean energy.

But the Republican party has made a choice to aggressively target clean energy this election cycle, spending millions of dollars on false claims about the industry that fact checkers call “ridiculous.” In addition, Paul Ryan is pushing a proposed federal budget that slashes the Department of Energy’s renewable energy program by 57 percent, put the breaks on incentives for advanced clean technology manufacturing, and retains $38.6 billion in tax credits for the oil and gas sector.

Joshua Freed, vice president for clean energy at Third Way, told the Globe that Ryan’s budget “waves a white flag on competing in energy technology” by defunding crucial clean energy programs at a time when every other country sees the sector as vital to competitiveness.

Like many in his party, Ryan is partially betting his political future on being against clean energy this election cycle. Unless, of course, he can get money for his own district.

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http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/08/14/687651/while-calling-stimulus-wastefu
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Tea Party House Candidate Calls For Troops Along
Arizona Border To ‘Start Shooting’

Samuel "Joe" Wurzelbacher

Samuel Wurzlbacher — known to most as Joe the Plumber — made an appearance at a fundraiser for a Republican Arizona State Senator candidate over the weekend, and told the audience that the way to solve the country’s immigration problem is to station troops along the border and have them “start shooting.”

The comment was first made at a Friday evening fundraising dinner for Lori Klein, the Republican candidate for her state senate district:

“For years I’ve said, you know, put a damn fence on the border going to Mexico and start shooting. I’m running for Congress and that should be a bad thing to say. But you know what, it’s how I feel…I want my borders protected, I’m very very adamant about that.”

The dinner attracted both Wurzelbacher, who is running for Congress in Ohio, and infamous conspiracy theorist Sheriff Joe Arpaio, along with 125 supporters. His comment was met with nervous laughter, as seen in a video shot by local news outlet Prescott eNews.

Lest anyone think that Wurzelbacher somehow misspoke, he repeated the outrageous comment the following morning at another campaign event for Klein, an outdoor “Patriot rally” in Prescott:

“I’m running for Congress. How many congressmen or people running for Congress have you heard, put a fence up and start shooting? None? Well you heard it here first. Put troops on the border and start shooting, I bet that solves our immigration problem real quick.”

Wurzelbacher’s comments were met with swift condemnation from his Democratic opponent, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH). “Joe the Plumber’s comments have no place in a civil society…He should take back his words and apologize to everyone who respects life, the Constitution and the rule of law,” she said in a statement obtained by the Huffington Post.

Watch it:

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http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/08/14/687411/tea-party-house-candidate-call
s-for-troops-along-arizona-border-to-start-shooting/

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Reagan Budget Adviser Blasts Paul Ryan’s
Budget As An ‘Empty Fairy Tale’

David Stockman

Vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s budget — which gives massive tax breaks to corporations and the wealthiest Americans, drastically slashes funding for social programs, decimates state budgets, and still ends up ultimately raising the deficit — has garnered critics ranging from Catholic bishops to top economists. Yesterday, former President Reagan’s budget adviser, David Stockman, added his voice to the dissent.

Stockman, who was the director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Reagan administration, blasted Ryan’s budget as an “empty conservative sermon” and “fairy tale” in an op-ed published in the New York Times:

The Ryan Plan boils down to a fetish for cutting the top marginal income-tax rate for ?job creators? ? i.e. the superwealthy ? to 25 percent and paying for it with an as-yet-undisclosed plan to broaden the tax base. Of the $1 trillion in so-called tax expenditures that the plan would attack, the vast majority would come from slashing popular tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance, mortgage interest, 401(k) accounts, state and local taxes, charitable giving and the like, not to mention low rates on capital gains and dividends.
…In short, Mr. Ryan?s plan is devoid of credible math or hard policy choices. And it couldn?t pass even if Republicans were to take the presidency and both houses of Congress. Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have no plan to take on Wall Street, the Fed, the military-industrial complex, social insurance or the nation?s fiscal calamity and no plan to revive capitalist prosperity ? just empty sermons.

Stockman’s scathing critique of the Ryan budget also notes that it preserves an unnecessarily large national security budget that currently “saddle[s] our bankrupt nation” and continues to eschew regulations for “dangerous” Wall Street banks.

Stockman isn’t the first Republican to oppose Ryan’s extreme budget plan. Reps. Denny Rehberg (R-MT) and David McKinley (R-WV) have refused to support Ryan’s budget because they recognize its draconian cuts to Medicare and Medicaid will negatively impact residents in their states. Donald Trump has referred to Ryan’s plan as a “big mistake” and a “dangerous plan for Mitt Romney” to support.

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/08/14/687561/reagan-ryan-budget-fairy-tale/

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