San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency, Muni, has been under fire for accepting ads referring to Arabs and Muslims as “savage” that were placed by anti-Muslim activist Pamela Geller. The ads declare that “in any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man”—a paraphrase of an Ayn Rand quote—while also urging readers…
Category: News & Opinion
Paul Ryan and Todd Akin Partnered On Radical Personhood Bill Outlawing Abortion And Many Birth Control Pills
Yesterday, ThinkProgress reported that Rep. Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin R-MO and GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan both cosponsored the bill that introduced America to the despicable term “forcible rape.” As it turns out, this may only be the second most sweeping attack on reproductive freedom that both men partnered on. Ryan and Akin also…
Ohio GOP Election Board Member: Our Voting Process Shouldn’t Accommodate Black Voters
Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s recent decision to prohibit early voting on nights and weekends in all districts has many concerned about the effect on voter turnout in the state, particularly among low-income and minority communities. But one Republican Party chairman is content to suppress votes among this vulnerable demographic. Doug Preisse, chairman of…
FAQ: Decoding The $716 Billion In Medicare Reductions
The structure and financing of Medicare, the federal health insurance program that serves seniors and the disabled, has become a defining issue in the presidential and congressional campaigns since GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney picked as his running mate Rep. Paul Ryan. KHN’s Mary Agnes Carey answers some frequently asked questions about the numbers and…
The US Government Can Track Your Location at Any Time Without a Warrant
Is law enforcement tracking your cell phone’s GPS more like intercepting a phone call or tailing someone on the street? A federal court decision says it’s more like following you—which means the authorities don’t need to get a warrant to find out where you are at any given time. The case involves a marijuana courier,…
White House Kills $473 Million in Earmarks
President Barack Obama’s administration eliminated $473 million in old transportation earmarks today, telling states to reallocate the money by the end of the year or lose it for good. Old earmarks for projects that have not yet been built, from fiscal years 2003 to 2006, have been effectively nixed. Appropriations bills for those years contained…
Middle-Class Economic Security Declines as Wealth Concentration Increases
America’s middle class became poorer and more economically insecure during the Great Recession, as household wealth concentrated in the hands of the rich, according to new Federal Reserve data about the recession and its aftermath. The latest Survey of Consumer Finance data covering the years 2007 to 2010 are yet another reminder that addressing the…
Five Budget Questions Mitt Romney Needs To Answer Now That Paul Ryan Is On The Ticket
Now that Mitt Romney has selected Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to be his running mate, Ryan’s budget plan moves to the center of the presidential campaign. Ryan’s budget is a near-pure distillation of right-wing economic ideology. It would slash basic economic investments, end the Medicare guarantee, decimate the social safety-net, and dramatically cut taxes for…
Romney’s budget plan is a fantasy
Consider what Romney has promised. By 2016, he says federal spending will be below 20 percent of GDP, and at least 4 percent of that will be defense spending. At that point, he will cap federal spending at 20 percent of GDP, meaning it can never rise above that level. All that’s hard enough. Romney…
This Congress could be least productive since 1947
In 2011, after Republicans took control of the U.S. House, Congress passed just 90 bills into law. The only other year in which Congress failed to pass at least 125 laws was 1995. These statistics make the 112th Congress, covering 2011-12, the least productive two-year gathering on Capitol Hill since the end of World War…
Timeline: Cutting Poverty and the Federal Deficit Is Possible
Our nation unequivocally boasts the resources to dramatically cut poverty while simultaneously cutting the federal government’s long-term deficit. Unfortunately, too many of our political leaders put these two goals at odds, arguing that the way to stabilize our fiscal outlook is to hand the bill to middle- and low-income Americans. The House Republican leadership, for…
The Conservative Takeover of State Judiciaries
Since the New Deal, despite several attempts, no state in our nation has shifted to a system for seating state court judges that makes these judges more vulnerable to politics. But that might well change this year. This November, ballot measures in three states would politicize state courts in an unprecedented way, calling into serious…
Wind accounts for one-third of new energy-generating capacity in US
In 2011, roughly one-third of the new generating capacity installed within the US was in the form of wind turbines, according to a new report prepared by the Department of Energy. That represents nearly seven Gigawatts of new wind installations. Although that leaves the nation a distant second to China (which installed a hefty 17.6GW),…
GOP pros fret over Paul Ryan
Away from the cameras, and with all the usual assurances that people aren’t being quoted by name, there is an unmistakable consensus among Republican operatives in Washington: Romney has taken a risk with Ryan that has only a modest chance of going right — and a huge chance of going horribly wrong. In more than…
Picking Ryan: Why Romney Changed to Obama’s Game
In choosing Ryan, Romney, in effect, both acknowledged and granted the validity of that latter set of criticisms. As my colleague Jonathan Chait and others have written, Ryan has become the de facto ideological and intellectual leader of the contemporary GOP. His agenda of turning Medicare into a voucher program, bloc-granting and taking the meat…
Paul Ryan’s Tax Plan Would Slash Mitt Romney’s Tax Rate to 1 Percent
The tax plan proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.), the newly minted GOP vice presidential candidate, would have slashed Mitt Romney’s effective tax rate to about 1 percent in 2010, based on Romney’s tax return that year, according to a Roll Call analysis. The Ryan tax cut, which would shave about 90 percent off of…
Romney Demanded ‘Several’ Years Of Tax Returns From Potential VP Candidates
Former Minnesota governor and Mitt Romney surrogate Tim Pawlenty was caught off guard when asked how many years of tax returns he had to turn over to the Republican campaign as part of the vice presidential vetting process, during an appearance on ABC’s This Week on Sunday MORE: Romney Demanded ‘Several’ Years Of Tax Returns…
FAQ: How Paul Ryan Proposes To Change Medicare
Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan, GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s choice for vice president, has provoked consternation from Democrats and anxiety among some congressional Republicans with his proposals to reshape Medicare. The Republican-controlled House, along party lines, twice approved his proposals to overhaul the popular social insurance program for the elderly and disabled by giving beneficiaries…
Paul Ryans Plan For Medicare: Essential Reading
By choosing Wis. Rep. Paul Ryan to be his running mate, presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney has put Medicare on the table as a major 2012 campaign issue. Ryan has had a long-standing interest in restructuring the health insurance program for the elderly and disabled. In 2010, Republicans won a majority in the House…
What Mitt Romney’s Body Language Is Trying to Tell Us
This signature Romney pose—eyes softened, mouth closed, sometimes in a Mona Lisa smile, stomach slightly out, shoulders slightly slumped—has always struck me as a benevolent, kindly look. If he’s looking on as other people speak, it seems he’s doing so in admiration, perhaps like a proud pastor letting his flock speak from the pulpit. That…