Tax Cuts Ubber Alles

Gov Scott Walker (R-WI) of union busting fame, has proposed a budget that would provide $83.3 million in tax cuts “primarily for businesses and investors” and would make up for lost revenue by eliminating tax credits and exemptions that primarily benefit the poor and even some in the middle class. In addition to eliminating these tax credits, Walker also has proposed a spate of new fee increases. The “bulk of the fee increases are for tuition at University of Wisconsin campuses, totaling more than $105 million over two years.”

Wisconsin’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau — the state’s equivalent of the Congressional Budget Office — finds that this would amount to a $49.9 million tax increase on people who receive these credits over the next two years:

Low and middle income people would lose tax credits worth about $49.4 million over two years, the new Legislative Fiscal Bureau report said.

Those affected most by Walker’s proposal would include low-income families who qualify for the earned income tax credit program, and low-income homeowners who receive tax rebates under the homestead tax credit.

We would say this guy is a reverse Robin Hood, robbing from the poor to give to the rich, but we don't want to act as if this isn't the MO of the entire Republican party. It strikes us further that cutting education shows they don't give a rip about investing in the future of this country. All in all it's a recipe for a third world banana republic.

Bad Faith

According to The Wisconsin State Journal economists allege that Governor Scott Walker's budget crisis is a fabrication invented out of whole cloth and predicated on a series of tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.

No Republican should be allowed to say we can't afford this or that. They've spent the last 30 years deliberately destroying the tax base though tax cuts and outsourcing and now they're crying crocodile tears. It's like pouring out the pitcher and then saying we'll have to go thirsty because there's just not enough water to go around. The only way to restore this country is to rebuild the tax base and bring back the middle class. The only way to do that is to get Republicans out of government.

Pivot Please

Think Progress: On several occasions, Trump has implied that Obama’s grandparents essentially lied about his citizenship “for social reasons.” The other “smart people” who agree with him include conservative blogger Tom Maguire who claims the birth announcement was planted to win a potential custody battle involving “a black Kenyan baby sought by the black Kenyan father and his African family.” Yet, this is the first time the person interviewing Trump has actually bothered to point out that the birth information printed in the Honolulu Advertiser always came directly from the state health department (via the local hospital), not grandparents or relatives. It’s also worth noting that since Obama’s mother was a U.S. citizen, he was automatically conferred citizenship and all of its “assets” no matter where he was born. Unless his grandparents somehow knew that baby Obama would one day want to run for president, there wouldn’t really be a reason for his family to fabricate a convoluted lie regarding his birthplace.

White House senior adviser David Plouffe dismissed Donald Trump’s birther beliefs today, noting that “there may be a small part of the country that believes these things, but mainstream Americans think it’s a side show.” In fact, more than half of GOP primary voters believe Obama was not born in the U.S., compared to 11 percent of the general public.

This is all well and good, however both TP and the White House need to conclude that people who disregard facts to make unfounded accusations are untrustworthy and of low character.

The Base

A new poll out of Mississippi finds that in a bastion of America's south, many Republican voters have tightly held onto the old, hateful views of race as a dividing line in society. A full 46 percent of Mississippi Republicans said they believe interracial marriage should be illegal, according to the left-leaning survey group Public Policy Polling. Only 40 percent said they thought it should remain legal, with the rest unsure.

Of course 24% of the GOP also believes Obama just might be the anti-Christ.

If the Dems were any good at messaging the GOP would consist only of this 46%. And it would be branded as the Confederate Flag Party. The base of the GOP is deeply racist. Thus, anybody else who votes GOP is voting with a deeply racist base. Somebody should poll the GOP base on their views of slavery...

Next Up, The Laws Of Physics

Think Progress: Eighty six years after the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial opened Tennessee classrooms to the teaching of evolution, the state House is trying to slam the door shut again. Tennessee’s House Education Committee approved a bill Tuesday in the name of “academic freedom,” but in reality, it is a thinly veiled attempt to curtail the teaching of evolution. House Speaker Emeritus Jimmy Naifeh (D) has even taken to calling it “the monkey bill.” From the bill’s summary:

This bill prohibits the state board of education and any public elementary or secondary school governing authority, director of schools, school system administrator, or principal or administrator from prohibiting any teacher in a public school system of this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught, such as evolution and global warming.

Should this bill pass, Tennessee teachers will have official sanction to teach about evolutionary “controversies” that simply do not exist. Furthermore, it will allow teachers to teach pseudo-scientific ideas — such as creationism or intelligent design — as legitimate scientific theories comparable to evolution.

The neanderthals in the GOP are proof enough of evolution. Our children should be taught about the crusades, not subjected to them.

Taking The Country Back(wards)

WASHINGTON -- Far from places like Ohio and Wisconsin, Maine has become a new battleground in the labor fight. Gov. Paul LePage (R) recently sparked the anger of the union community by ordering a mural depicting workers throughout the state's history removed from the Department of Labor. Now, Republican members of the state legislature are attempting to loosen child labor laws that the community fought hard to put into place.

Seems the GOP wants to party like it's 1899. So it goes in the party of the CEO.

The Religious Police

Republican Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell's nominee for the Alaska Judiciary Council would like to see Alaskans prosecuted for having sex outside marriage. In telephone testimony, Don Haase of Valdez told the state Senate Judiciary Committee that premarital sex should be outlawed because it could "cause violence" and "spread disease," according to The Anchorage Daily News.

Yet another conservative intrusion into our private lives. They talk about freedom but don't seem to want to let anybody have it. To be honest when we hear about a conservative getting caught in a normal affair with an adult it elicits a sigh of relief. This is because so many of them seem to be into molesting kids or doing drugs with gay prostitutes.