I have a feeling President Obama is going to cut loose after the Democratic Convention…
Tag Archives: Deficit
Louisiana May Have to Close State Universities Due to Republican Deficit Disaster
Republicans signing the Grover Norquest tax reduction plan have now failed utterly and disastriously in at least 3 States. Republican Governor Bobby Jindal took a state budget surplus to deficit levels never seen before. Things got so bad under Jindal and his Republican led legislature, they had to pawn the state owned vehicles at auction to keep the lights on.
Faced with a cash flow issue as the legislature tries desperately to recover funds through tax increases and revenue proposals back to the level required for basic services – the current proposal to cover the massive shortfall includes the decision to close the State Colleges and Universities, the largest of which is Louisiana Tech. Further – shutting down some hospitals in the state.
This sort of tax-slashing myopia and adherence to Republican Orthodoxy has now had serious impacts in 3 states, including Kansas, which had to shut down the Public School System last year, and Michigan where thousands were poisoned by the water in Flint.
Watch Rachel Maddow’s summary below – and the emergency speech by Louisiana’s new Democrat Governor, who has been in office less than a month.
Governor John Bel Edwards who has an uphill battle to get his Republican led legislature to see the light…
Cracks in the Wall – Louisiana Sheriff Schools Fellow Republicans…Bats**t Crazy!
This is the Sheriff of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana – a Republican. Ran across him post-Katrina when working on trying to get the systems back up, when he worked for Harry Lee, the former Sheriff. He is a bright guy, and at least to my limited impression of him – a straight shooter. He is well educated and intelligent.
What Sheriff Newell Normand represents is the growing faction of the Republican Party who is getting tired of the same old tired answers, and massive tax cuts leading to debt resulting in massive cutting of community services run up in just about every state where there is a Republican majority in the legislature…And hobbling his state, Louisiana after Bobby Jindal’s disastrous governorship. What Jindal and his fellow Republicans have done to the state following bankrupt Republican orthodoxy are in some ways worse than Katrina.
Yet another sign that the poisoned Kool-Aid isn’t going down anymore.
GOP sheriff unleashes a stunning take down of Republicans—a party of ‘cult leaders’ and ‘idiots’
Republican Sheriff Newell Normand might be a good ol’ boy from Jefferson Parish in Louisiana, but that didn’t stop him from lobbing a dose of reality at the Metropolitan Crime Commission’s annual awards luncheon on Tuesday. According to a video of the speech posted by WUVE, Normand bad-mouthed the GOP’s Beltway establishment and elected officials, notorious tax cutter Grover Norquist and called former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal an “idiot,” equating him to cult leader Jim Jones.
Normand fully admits that he endorsed and supported Jindal when he ran for governor, but that Jindal’s leadership destroyed the state that Normand holds dear. “What a mess. Bobby Jindal was a better cult leader than Jim Jones,” he said to laughter and applause from the audience. “We drank the elixir for eight years. We remained in a conscious state. We walked to the edge of the cliff and we jumped off and he watched us and guess what? Unlike Jim Jones he did not swallow the poison. What a shame.”
Normand accused Jindal of working after his reign to rewrite history when the rest of the state doesn’t “even know what history is.” Much like other states with Republican governors like Kansas and Oklahoma, Louisiana faces a substantial budget shortfall, to the tune of $2.5 billion. Jindal is telling the world that he did a phenomenal job as governor and Normand is furious about it.
“We have to just say no!” Normand said. “I’m a Republican but I’m not a hypocrite. We have to look at ourselves critically as a party and figure out where we are and what we’re going to be about.” He admitted to the audience that he was partly at fault because he “endorsed that idiot,” but said that it was time to move toward solutions. Due to the budget problems, Normand says that the state will be cutting funding to mental health which causes more problems for law enforcement officers. The state also plans to close five state prisons that houses 8,000 inmates.
He even denounced following the policy recommendations of Grover Norquist, who makes Republican candidates sign a pledge not to raise taxes. “We better get concerned. We better wake up. We better be honest,” Normand said. “We better talk about the issues because we are going to pay the price.” He continued saying that the state cannot cut its way to a balanced budget because doing so will cut the resources necessary for law enforcement officers like him to do their job safely and effectively. “We do not need to face the stupidity of our leadership as it relates to how we’re going to face balancing this budget and talking about these silly issues because we’re worried about what Grover Norquist thinks. To hell with Grover Norquist! I don’t care about Grover Norquist!” he said to audience applause. “We’re worried about the ATR report card,” he said, referencing Norquist’s group Americans for Tax Reform.
When it comes to the Republican party in Washington, D.C., Normand wants them to stop attacking. He cited Medicaid expansion which would cover the cost for things like drug addiction and mental health that officers often witness on the streets and in prisons. “And I have to listen to my Republican counterparts talk about gobbledigook. Blah, blah blah… And I’m so sick and tired of hearing: Obama, Obama, Obama. You know how much intellect it takes to blame something on somebody else? This much!” he said holding his hand up to indicate zero. “Propose a solution. Work together.” He closed by comparing politics to being married and asked how many people in the audience refuse to compromise in their marriages.
Lindsay Graham, the Republican Senator from South Carolina puts it more succinctly…
Lindsey Graham: GOP Is ‘Batsh*t Crazy’
As the five remaining Republican presidential contenders battled it out in the Houston debate Thursday night, former candidate Lindsey Graham entertained a crowd at the Washington Press Club’s annual congressional dinner with his true feelings on the 2016 race. “My party has gone batshit crazy,” Graham told the crowd. The South Carolina senator lashed out at GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, adding that he thinks the billionaire will lose in the general election “because he’s just generally a loser as a person and a candidate,” he said. Making light of his own failed campaign and subsequent endorsement of Jeb Bush, who dropped out on Saturday, Graham called himself the Dr. Jack Kevorkian of the Republican primary—before putting on a Trump hat.
Small Business Owners Leave Republican Plantation Over Tax Cuts For the Rich
It is becoming ever more painfully obvious that the Republican Tax Giveaway to the Rich is a major element in the country’s finances being in freefall. The Chamber of Commerce has increasingly become noting but a propaganda arm of the Republican Party, much like Faux News.
Small Business Owners Demand Repeal Of Bush Tax Cuts For The Rich
Michael Teahan, like his father, mother, and uncles before him, is a small business owner. The 52-year-old has spent most of his adult life running his own businesses: a restaurant, a coffee bar and various companies involved in the espresso machine business.
“I was the only person in my family to go to college, because that’s not what we did — we all opened up businesses,” Teahan says. “For some people, that’s a big hurdle … for us, it was like having lunch.”
Teahan currently operates Espresso Resource, a company that imports espresso machine parts from Europe to sell to U.S. restaurants and coffee shops. And he’s doing very well for himself: The two-man operation clears about $1 million a year in total sales, Teahan says — enough to secure himself annual income in excess of $250,000.
That makes Teahan one of the few small business owners to actually benefit from the Bush administration’s tax cuts for the wealthy. He says the cuts save him about $12,000 a year, compared to what he paid before they were enacted. But as debates over the federal budget deficit have intensified, Teahan has found the political discussion increasingly divorced from the reality of his experience as a small business owner.
Tax cuts for the wealthy, according to Teahan, will do nothing to bolster his firm. They won’t affect his hiring decisions, they won’t encourage him to buy new equipment or help him move into a bigger warehouse. He says all of those decisions — the nuts and bolts of actually running a small company — depend on the his customers’ economic conditions, not his personal tax rate.
“What we do in business, how we spend our money, how we allocate our resources — that has very little to do with tax policy,” Teahan says. “I map my business based on my customers, and what my customers want to buy, and what they can afford to buy.” Read the rest of this entry »
Texas Miracle… Anther Fraud
What do the Texas “Education Miracle” and the Texas “Budget Miracle” have in common?
Really Big, Really Deep Holes...Good Places to Put Dead Rogue Elephants.
They are both frauds perpetrated by Republicans.
The Texas Education Miracle? This from one of the first people who broke the story about the fraud, George Scott –
The leadership of the Texas Republican Party in the Legislature and at the TEA made a calculated decision (individually and collectively) to permit the State of Texas to lie to parents about the academic skills of Texas students.
In validating, promoting and enshrining the lie, Texas Republicans have followed the path of many of their national counterparts. They abandoned their principles and recruited allies to validate the academic corruption. In sum, politicians, bureaucrats, many academicians and scores of public policy researchers reaped great financial, professional or political benefits from the schemes.
The same Texas Republican Party and Legislature is now doing it with the Texas Budget. After supposedly defying the national trend by fueling growth by tax cuts and budget cuts… The Piper has come home with a vengeance. The State is now projected to be $25 BILLION in the red. But like the Enron disaster of cooked books…The $25 billion number may well be the tip of the iceberg, in that the books may have been cooked to show the state with a surplus all along when it was in the red.
Conservative philosophy fails… Again.
The Texas Omen
These are tough times for state governments. Huge deficits loom almost everywhere, from California to New York, from New Jersey to Texas.
Wait — Texas? Wasn’t Texas supposed to be thriving even as the rest of America suffered? Didn’t its governor declare, during his re-election campaign, that “we have billions in surplus”? Yes, it was, and yes, he did. But reality has now intruded, in the form of a deficit expected to run as high as $25 billion over the next two years. Read the rest of this entry »
Rachel Maddow on Psyops – November 2010 elections
Rachel does get it correct that the MSM is spinning for the Republicans. What she gets wrong is why. This election is about race – not the economy, jobs, or the deficit… It is about fear of a non-white America. One of the best articles on this phenomenon was in the Village Voice – White America Has Lost It’s Mind…
Laying out why whack job right wing candidates suddenly have a chance, despite the reality that these folks are so far out of the mainstream as to be part of the tinfoil hat crowd.
Watched this same movie during the Bushit’s first illegitimate selection by the 5 thugs in robes. Bushit was their Golden Boy. Boy! That turned out well, now – didn’t it?
The really bad news is that things are so screwed up right now – America really can’t afford the off-the-wall isht the Tea Baggers and whack-job righties are going to bring…
So if it does turn out as so heavily advertised by the MSM…
Welcome to Third World America, complete with Banana Government.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Loan Sharked Democracy
In a recent report the conservative Heritage Foundation postulates that the rising US deficit will impact the United States credit rating…
Geez, where were these guys during Raygun and Bush II?
Paying off the sharks
The credit rating company Standard & Poor’s (S&P) recently lowered the United Kingdom’s debt rating from “stable” to “negative” as its debt-to-GDP ratio approaches 100. On May 21, Bill Gross, the co-chief investment officer of PIMCO, a leading bond trading house, said the U.S. may lose its credit rating as the federal government issues trillions in additional debt.
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