A South Dakota lawmaker proposed expanding the state's definition of "justifiable homicide" to a family member who kills another person in the "lawful defense" of an unborn child. In other words, they could legalize killing abortion providers.
The National Abortion Federation calls the bill an "invitation to murder abortion providers."
Moveon.org released an ad today in response to the recent attacks. It features Lisa Edelstein from House M.D., walking down a dark corridor and presumably going back to the dark days of women’s rights. It asks, “why is the GOP trying to send women back to the back-alley?" Moveon went all out with the 1950s coat-hanger imagery (yikes!).
Here's the ad. Please tell us what you think in the comment section below.
Republican-proposal to ‘right our fiscal ship’ throws more workers overboard Rebecca Thiess February 9, 2011
Update: Since this piece was posted last week, the magnitude of discretionary funding cuts for the duration of this fiscal year proposed by House Republican leadership has grown substantially, especially considering the short time frame for implementation. After the House Appropriations Committee detailed $74 billion in cuts last Wednesday, a number of conservative members demanded $26 billion in additional cuts to make good on the “Pledge to America,” bringing the total level of cuts relative to President Obama’s FY 2011 budget request to $100 billion. A full $100 billion cut to discretionary spending would likely result in job losses on the order of 994,000, using OMB’s GDP projections (CBO’s projections are based on current law) and assuming a fiscal multiplier of 1.5.
The new GOP budget proposes cutting non-security discretionary spending by $81 billion relative to the president’s $478 billion request for 2011. Non-security discretionary cuts of this magnitude would likely result in job losses of just over 800,000. (2/15/2011)
Today the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee released a list of 70 proposed funding cuts to government operations for the rest of fiscal year 2011. The cuts included in the committee’s proposal are extensive in both their depth and reach. In total, House Republicans propose funding the government at a level $74 billion below President Obama’s FY 2011 budget request. Of that cut, $58 billion (over three-quarters) would apply to non-security discretionary spending.
Included on the chopping block are a $224 million cut to Amtrak, a $256 million cut in assistance to state and local law enforcement, an $889 million cut for energy efficiency and renewable energy programs, a $1 billion cut to the National Institute for Health, a $1.3 billion cut to community health centers, and a $1.6 billion cut to the Environmental Protection Agency. All cuts can be seen proportionally, below:
Cuts of this magnitude will undermine gross domestic product performance at a time when the economy is seeing anemic post-recession growth. Cuts in the range of $74 billion will lead to the loss of roughly 700,000 jobs. The domestic discretionary reduction of $58 billion will result in the loss of around 590,000 jobs, as we demonstrate in this briefing paper.
Like Paul Ryan’s budget outline, as we stress in this related piece, the proposal suggests Americans take on unnecessary pain with no long-term gain. While $58 billion represents a 12% reduction to the nonsecurity discretionary budget, it only represents 4% of the total 2011 deficit, and less than 2% of total spending as projected by the Congressional Budget Office. In other words, changes to the short-term budget picture would be inconsequential at best, and there would be practically no benefit at all regarding the longer-term budget trajectory. Meanwhile, associated job losses would certainly magnify the ongoing labor market crisis, which has now experienced 21 straight months of unemployment over 9%.
Appropriations Committee chairman Hal Rogers has stated that he has a unique opportunity to “right our fiscal ship.” In reality, the nonsecurity discretionary budget is not adding to our long-term debt instability. If anything, the GOP efforts to extend tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans and water down the estate tax have made our fiscal ship a leakier vessel (according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, these tax policies will have a two-year deficit impact of $139 billion). The proposed program cuts not only fail to offset that lost tax revenue, but they also target programs that exist to promote innovation, global competitiveness, and community and safety-net services. This is an effort to cut helpful and innovative programs and services traditionally opposed by conservatives, disguised as an effort to promote fiscal responsibility. It would reduce jobs, it would hurt millions of people, and it would barely dent our long-term budget picture.
ABC News’ John R. Parkinson reports:
On the House floor this afternoon, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi seized on Speaker John Boehner’s “so be it” remarks in response to a question about potential job loss related to the Republicans’ plan to cut $100 billion from the continuing resolution.
Pelosi went after Boehner for the apparent gaffe and said that House Republicans “have not presented a responsible plan for addressing the deficit.”
“Just today, Speaker Boehner said that if jobs are lost as a result of Republican spending cuts, ‘So be it.’ So be it?” Pelosi, D-Calif., asked incredulously. “Democrats do not subscribe to Speaker Boehner’s verdict that if jobs are lost in this Continuing Resolution, ‘So be it.’ Maybe ‘So be it’ for him. But not ‘So be it’ for the people who are losing their jobs. Instead, we support President Obama’s budget to ‘out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.’”
Earlier Tuesday, Boehner brushed aside a question about potential job losses resulting from the GOP’s $100 billion cuts, telling reporters that the expansion of the federal government over the past two years under Democratic rule has been an impetus for excessive federal spending and if some of those jobs are eliminated by the GOP’s cuts, then “so be it.”
“Over the last two years since President Obama has taken office, the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs and if some of those jobs are lost in this, so be it. We’re broke!” Boehner, R-Ohio, exclaimed. “It’s time for us to get serious about how we’re spending the nation’s money.”
Boehner then warned that by not acting to cut spending and reform entitlements, the country’s future is threatened.
“The biggest danger to our country is if we do not act,” Boehner said. “The status quo is shackling the future for our kids and grandkids – that’s why we have to act. And I believe that we can act in a responsible way to make sure that those entitlement programs that we have are sustainable for our parents and theirs and affordable for our kids and [our] grandkids.”
Pelosi said that the budget “should be a statement of our national values” and criticized Republicans for proposing cuts to programs like education, public safety and veterans’ benefits.
“Democrats and Republicans must work together to ensure our nation lives within its means. That’s for sure,” Pelosi said. “We must continue to aggressively attack waste, fraud, and abuse, and we will subject every taxpayer dollar we spend to the toughest scrutiny – ensuring the American people are getting their money’s worth.”
Business as Usual
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Democrats choose to ignore a real debate and jump on Boehner crack about the elimination of new government jobs.
Halperin's Take
Both sides engage in this kind of all-hands-on-deck exploitation of stray remarks by the opposition to try to win a wipe-out victory in one or more news cycles. From the DNC to liberal interest groups to Democratic members of Congress, the piling on Boehner is meant to drown out discussion of issues and define the budget fight on favorable terms. Again, Republicans pull this stunt too all the time. It is one of the Beltway's most unattractive sideshows, even when (especially when) it becomes the main event. Question: Will new White House spokesguy Jay Carney play this game?
FEBRUARY 15, 2011, 1:00 PM ET
Boehner: ‘So Be It’ If Federal Workers Are Laid Off
By Patrick O'Connor
House Speaker John Boehner expressed little sympathy Tuesday for federal workers who lose their jobs as the result of Republican budget cutting.
House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
“In the last two years, under President Obama, the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs,” Mr. Boehner told reporters Tuesday morning during a press conference in the lobby of the Republican National Committee, according to various news outlets. “If some of those jobs are lost, so be it. We’re broke.”
Republicans in the House are considering legislation on the floor this week that seeks to slash $62 billion from the federal budget by the end of September. Those reductions – which face significant resistance in the Democratically controlled Senate – would result in drastic reductions at just about every federal agency.
Republicans campaigned on the promise to cut federal spending in the run-up to the 2010 election. That pledge, if enacted, will inevitably result in job losses at the federal and state level. But Mr. Boehner’s “so be it” line marks a coarse reversal from his more sympathetic “Where are the jobs?” mantra from the last election.
The associations that represent government workers are scrambling to minimize the pain as cost-cutting takes hold in Washington.
Joe Beaudoin, president of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, greeted the president’s budget on Monday with trepidation – and the president’s budget, which calls for a two-year pay freeze on federal workers, is downright rosy for government workers compared with the plan Republicans have proposed.
“America’s federal workforce understands the importance of fiscal responsibility – federal employees are already doing their part to reduce the deficit by undergoing a two-year pay freeze,” Mr. Beaudoin said Monday in response to Mr. Obama’s budget. “On behalf of the 4.6 million active and retired federal workers, we must make sure that federal employees who are doing their jobs for our country don’t get caught unfairly in the middle of these consequences.”
Washington, DC—Senator Charles E. Schumer made the following statement today regarding Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to eliminate Social Security and Medicare as we know them:
“If Paul Ryan’s Roadmap is any indication, the House Republicans’ idea of entitlement reform will be privatizing Social Security and turning Medicare into a voucher system. Any such plans will be dead on arrival in the Senate. Democrats will fight any attempt to break our promise to America’s seniors. We want to extend the life of Social Security and eliminate waste in Medicare, but we will not go along with proposals that seek to end these programs.”
###
Ryan’s Roadmap Would Privatize Social Security, End Medicare As We Know It.
Congressional Budget Office: “Roadmap” Will Privatize Social Security. The CBO wrote in a letter to Ryan about his roadmap, “A system of individual accounts would be established in 2012. In that year, workers who are age 55 or younger would be able to participate in voluntary individual accounts, funded with a portion of their payroll taxes.” [Congressional Budget Office, 1/27/10]
•Roadmap Would Cut Social Security Benefits. “The Roadmap specifies reductions in traditional retirement benefits through progressive price indexing for many workers who are age 55 or younger in 2011.” [Congressional Budget Office, 1/27/10]
Ryan’s Plan Would Convert Medicare to a Voucher Program, Vastly Cutting Benefits. “People who become eligible for Medicare after 2020 would no longer have access to a defined set of benefits from any participating health care provider. Instead, they would receive a voucher worth $11,000 (on average) to be used to purchase private health insurance… Moreover, the Ryan plan imposes no requirement that private insurers actually offer health coverage to Medicare beneficiaries at an affordable price, or at all. Some beneficiaries, particularly the frail elderly, people with disabilities, and those with very modest incomes, could end up uninsured or heavily underinsured.” [Congressional Budget Office, 1/27/10; Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 7/7/10]
•Roadmap Would Raise the Retirement Age For Medicare. According to the CBO the Ryan plan would eventually raise the retirement age for Medicare from 65 to 69 ½ years old. [Congressional Budget Office, 1/27/10]
Republicans unveiled a budget plan on Wednesday that proposed a $1.6 billion cut [1] to the Environmental Protection Agency, an agency whose authority they have sought to curtail, while business trade groups [2] have complained about the burden placed on them by agency regulations. Politico also reported that the GOP's proposal would hit the Energy Department hard [3], with a proposal to cut energy efficiency and renewable energy programs in half. Rep. Fred Upton, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has said he favors gutting EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions with a “legislative fix” rather than simply denying it funds. (See our overview [4] of Upton’s positions on energy.) He told the Wall Street Journal that his disagreement with the EPA is: “You don't subsidize different forms of power [5] -- you let the market run on its own.”
Energy subsidies are not a new thing, and efforts to remove them for oil and gas companies have repeatedly failed in recent years. This week, when Senate Democrats wrote a letter challenging GOP lawmakers to end to tax subsidies for oil and gas companies [6]—an agenda item that President Obama also referenced in his State of the Union speech—Republicans balked and equated ending those subsidies with raising taxes, which would “destroy American jobs.” [7] Oil companies are subsidized by approximately $4 billion each year through deductions and loopholes in the corporate tax code. The New York Times reported last year that tax breaks are “available at virtually every stage [8] of the exploration and extraction process,” citing BP and the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon [9] rig as one example:
BP was reaping sizable tax benefits from leasing the rig. According to a letter sent in June to the Senate Finance Committee, the company used a tax break for the oil industry to write off 70 percent of the rent for Deepwater Horizon — a deduction of more than $225,000 a day since the lease began.
The Deepwater Horizon was also registered to the Marshall Islands, which as we noted [10] meant it received less stringent regulation than a rig registered to the United States. It also provided Transocean, the rig’s owner, with a “financial tax benefit [11],” the Swiss company told the Guardian. The American Petroleum Institute, an oil and gas trade group, has called elimination of the tax subsidies “misguided” and has echoed the Republican stance that it would kill jobs and slow economic growth. The group’s president told Politico that API has been busy visiting GOP freshmen [12] to make its pitch for the importance of the industry and feels that “the message resonates.”
Republicans this weekend offered the first advance glimpse of the battle they plan to wage once President Obama reveals his budget to Congress.
"He's going to present a budget tomorrow that will continue to destroy jobs by spending too much, borrowing too much and taxing too much," House Speaker John Boehner said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."
The Ohio Republican noted the president has stated a desire to freeze discretionary spending at current levels. But "locking in the current level of spending is way too much," Boehner argued.
The president on Monday is slated to release a budget that claims to reduce the federal deficit by $1.1 trillion over the next 10 years. But Republicans take issue with most of the administration's present spending priorities, which Democrats say the economy still needs in order to stimulate demand and encourage job growth.
Boehner on Sunday sent a letter to the president signed by 150 economists urging Obama to end spending related to the White House's stimulus program.
CBS News CBS News says this image of correspondent Lara Logan was taken in Tahrir Square shortly before she was assaulted.
CBS News' correspondent Lara Logan suffered "a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating" last Friday in Cairo and is now in a U.S. hospital recovering, the network says.
Here's the statement CBS has posted on its website and forwarded to reporters at other news outlets:
"On Friday February 11, the day Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, CBS Correspondent Lara Logan was covering the jubilation in Tahrir Square for a 60 Minutes story when she and her team and their security were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration. It was a mob of more than 200 people whipped into a frenzy.
"In the crush of the mob, she was separated from her crew. She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers. She reconnected with the CBS team, returned to her hotel and returned to the United States on the first flight the next morning. She is currently in the hospital recovering.
"There will be no further comment from CBS News and Correspondent Logan and her family respectfully request privacy at this time."
Update at 5:05 p.m. ET: NPR's David Folkenflik, reporting for our Newscast, notes that in previous days in Egypt, "dozens of other journalists were beaten or taken into custody. ... The Committee to Protect Journalists argued it was part of a last ditch effort by Mubarak supporters to censor news of the uprising."
The CPJ documented some of those attacks here, here and here.
Last Friday, the day she was attacked, Esquire's The Politics Blog published a post in which Logan talked about having been detained and interrogated overnight by Egyptian authorities the week before.
President Obama defends his budget plan at his first press conference of the year. | AP Photo By: Josh Gerstein
February 15, 2011 12:21 PM EST
President Barack Obama used his first press conference of the year Tuesday to defend his new budget plan against critics who say it doesn’t move quickly enough to cut the federal government’s massive deficit and fails to confront the difficult choices needed to reform ballooning entitlement programs.
“You guys are pretty impatient. If something doesn’t happen today, then the assumption is it isn’t going to happen,” Obama said. “My goal here is to actually solve the problem….It’s not to get a good headline on the first day.”
Obama said his budget plan would help get the country on the right fiscal path by bringing spending for everything other than interest costs into line with revenues by 2017.
“That’s important and that’s hard to do,” the president said. “We’re not going to be running up the credit card anymore.”
The president said the budget he proposed, which includes a freeze on domestic discretionary spending, will mean painful cuts for programs he values.
“We’ve taken a scalpel to the discretionary budget rather than a machete,” he said. “It’ll mean cutting things I care about deeply, like community action programs for low-income communities. And we have some conservation programs that are going to be scaled back. These are all programs that I wouldn’t be cutting if we were in a better fiscal situation, but we’re not.”
Obama denied that by failing to propose major entitlement reforms he was abandoning the plan presented in December by most members of a bipartisan commission he set up to tackle the nation’s grim fiscal picture.
“The notion that it’s been shelved I think is incorrect,” Obama said. “It still provides a framework for a conversation.”
“I agree with much of the framework. I disagree with some of the framework,” the president said. “There are some issues in there that as a matter of principle I don’t agree with where I think they didn’t go far enough or they went too far. He did not detail his disagreements and noted that some Republican panel members, including new House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, opposed the final report.
Obama said he thought significant progress could be made on the deficit and entitlement issues in the next couple of years—a prospect many analysts consider to be unlikely as the 2012 presidential election approaches. However, he signaled that he was reluctant to put forward a detailed entitlement reform plan that could be pilloried by critics at both ends of the political spectrum.
“If you look at history of how these deals get done, typically it’s not because there’s an Obama plan out there. Its’ because Democrats and Republican are serious about dealing with [these issues] in a serious way,” the president said. “This is not a matter of you go first or I go first,” he said before describing a goal of “everybody…ultimately getting in that boat at the same time so it doesn’t tip over.”
Obama repeatedly boasted about the tax deal he reached with Republicans last December—a deal which liberals are again decrying for extending tax cuts for the wealthy even as programs for lower-income individuals are now facing cuts to programs they benefit from.
Obama also said he was willing to talk to Republicans about further cuts, though he said he was likely to resist some of their proposals. But he professed optimism about reaching an agreement through what he called “an adult conversation where everyone says, here’s what’s important and here’s how we pay for it.”.
“If we’re cutting infant formula to poor kids, is that who we are as a people?…..That’s something we’re going to have to debate,” he said.
On the tumultuous international front, Obama said he was pleased with the direction of developments in Egypt since President Hosni Mubarak resigned last week. “What we’ve seen so far is positive…..So far, at least, we’re seeing the right signals coming out of Egypt,” he said.
Obama also rejected suggestions that his administration was too slow to embrace the protesters in Egypt and to publicly break with the Mubarak
“I think history will end up recording that at every juncture in the situation in Egypt that we were on the right side of history,” Obama said. “We were very mindful that it was important for this to remain an Egyptian event—that the United States did not become the issue….I think we calibrated it just about right.”
The president also joined a long line of U.S. officials giving encouragement to demonstrators in Iran who are trying to pressure their government in much the same way Egyptians forced Mubarak out.
“I find it ironic. You’ve got the Iranian regime pretending to celebrate what happened in Egypt when in fact they have acted in direct contrast to what happened in Egypt by gunning down and beating people who are trying to express themselves peacefully in Iran,” Obama said.
Obama also said technology has given demonstrators the upper hand over rulers in a variety of authoritarian countries—countries he said need to heed the trend towards change.
“You can’t maintain power through coercion. At some level in any society, there has to be consent,” Obama said. “That’s particularly true in this new era where people communicate not just through some centralized government or state-run TV but they can get on their smart phones or Twitter account and mobilize hundreds of thousands of people.”
“We do want to make sure that transitions do not degenerate into chaos and violence,” Obama added.
On a lighter note, Obama denied that he’s making calls to his hometown of Chicago to boost the mayoral campaign of his former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.
“I don’t have to make calls for Rahm Emanuel. He’s been doing just fine on his own,” Obama said. “He’s been very busy shoveling snow out there. I’ve been very impressed with that. I never saw him shoveling snow around here,” the president quipped.
