Thursday, May 31, 2012
The Origins of Leftist Racial Orthodoxy
American Thinker ^ | May 31, 2012 | Michael Filozof
If "diversity" is good, why do liberals congregate in lily-white enclaves like Vermont (the whitest state in the Union, according to the Census) and Marin County, California? White liberals hector others incessantly about the need for "diversity," but most have no interest in living in neighborhoods with large numbers of blacks. The ideal society in the liberal mind always seems to be a Scandinavian socialist one (which is to say that liberals strive to make the U.S. more like some of the most uniformly white nations in the world).
The liberal enforcers of racial correctness are quick to decry the evils of racism, yet they are quite willing to practice it themselves in the form of affirmative action -- and they are strangely silent when blacks engage in "hate crimes" against whites. Conservatives have been increasingly willing to point out these and other hypocrisies of our racial orthodoxy, but they invariably fail to understand its true origins.
What drives our contemporary racial orthodoxy? Many conservatives mistakenly believe that liberals obsessed by race are afflicted with "white guilt." Not so. The truth about racial matters in the U.S. is this: racial issues are not actually about race. In the hands of the progressive left, race is a tool used by powerful whites against other whites; specifically, race is a weapon used by liberals to bludgeon conservatives and delegitimize conservative, patriotic values.
But it has not always been so.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
The Obama Spending Record
Wall Street Journal ^ | May 30, 2012 | by James Freeman
Every journalist not in the re-election tank has been shredding President Obama's recent claim that spending growth has been modest on his watch. But kudos in particular to the Associated Press for hitting several White House accounting gimmicks in a dispatch last week.
Team Obama has lately been arguing that the astronomical spending blowout of fiscal 2009 was President Bush's fault and that outlays have since climbed only moderately. This means ignoring that Mr. Obama's $831 billion stimulus was enacted during that notorious fiscal year that straddles both presidencies. And AP cataloged various other distortions embedded in the Obama claim. For example, early in his term Mr. Obama signed an omnibus appropriations bill that also increased spending in fiscal 2009. This was less than a month after the stimulus.
Beyond the AP report, it's also worth noting that Mr. Obama endorsed other 2009 spending that he now blames for today's deficits. As a senator, Mr. Obama was habitually absent during significant votes. But one that he did show up for in 2008 was the Senate's vote on the 2009 budget resolution, and he voted "yes." Mr. Obama showed up again in the fall to vote for TARP. One can reasonably label this as Bush spending, but it occurred with an explicit Obama approval.
Where Senator Obama did oppose the spending patterns of the Bush years, it was often, as with Medicaid, because Mr. Obama wanted to spend more. Speaking of health care, and given all of this attention on the Obama spending history, it should not be forgotten that the big taxpayer bills generated by ObamaCare are still to come.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Democrats squirm at Solyndra vs. Bain questions
The Daily Caller ^ | 30 May 2012 | Neil Munro
Republicans are scoffing at Democrats’ attempts to explain why President Barack Obama’s failed green-tech investments are unimportant but Mitt Romney’s few failures at Bain Capital, an otherwise wildly successful private equity firm, are a scandal.
Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter tried out the new tactic during a May 30 appearance on MSNBC’s “Daily Rundown,” when she was asked about the president’s support for Solyndra.
“The president’s not picking winners and losers, he’s making strategic investment to promote clean energy,” she said. “Mitt Romney’s role at Bain Capital was to make profits for his investors and for himself. … There were winners and losers, but Mitt Romney always won.”
Solyndra went bankrupt in 2010 after being given $535 million in taxpayers’ funds, and has since become a GOP watchword for crony capitalism.
The Solyndra money is a small portion of a larger $70 billion effort by the White House industrial policy to displace oil and gas energy with green-tech, including windmills, algae and the Chevy Volt.
Public debate over green-tech waste is damaging to Obama’s 2012 campaign because of the lack of tangible payoff in terms of increased employment.
“Well, no, it’s not fair. … Let’s just take a look at the facts of Solyndra,” Cutter said at the start of a 104-second answer. On Tuesday, Carney fended off a similar question with a 42-second evasive answer. “Look, there, there, there is the … the difference in that … your overall view of what your responsibilities are as president, and what your view of the economic future is,” he said.
Republicans scoffed at the answers from Cutter and Carney.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
Senator David Vitter: End Handouts for Illegals
National Review Online ^ | May 30, 2012 | David Vitter
The federal government is handing out $4.2 billion a
year to illegal aliens.
This isn’t some service benefit that illegal aliens are receiving, like taxpayer-subsidized health care or education. And it’s not a tax deduction or a non-refundable tax credit, which would require recipients to actually pay taxes in order to receive the benefit. It’s a refundable tax credit, a taxpayer-funded check from the federal government. And the government requires no proof that the recipient is actually eligible under the law, which illegals are not.
Abuse of this tax benefit is one of the most ridiculous examples of fraud adding to our federal deficit today. Equally harmful, it is acting as a powerful incentive for more illegal aliens to come to America.
While illegal aliens don’t qualify for legitimate Social Security numbers, the IRS allows them to apply for Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs). The overwhelming majority of returns with ITINs are filed by illegals. This is how they fraudulently apply for and receive these checks.
This tax credit was designed to help working families offset the costs of raising children. But illegal aliens — who don’t possess valid Social Security numbers because they are not authorized to work in this country — are able to receive these tax credits by simply providing an ITIN and claiming to have children. So, American taxpayers are writing checks to illegal aliens — $1,000 per child, $4.2 billion per year total.
An investigative reporter in Indianapolis recently uncovered cases in which illegal aliens were claiming the child tax credit for nieces and nephews who did not even live in the United States. Some received more than $10,000 from the federal government.
One admitted that his address was used by four other illegal aliens who don’t even live there. They claimed 20 children were living in one mobile home and received returns, including the additional child tax credit, totaling $29,608. But only one child actually lives at the residence; the other 19 live in Mexico and have never even visited the United States.
The Obama administration’s own Department of Treasury, through its inspector general for tax administration, has repeatedly warned about these abuses and said that “millions of people are seeking this tax credit who, we believe, are not entitled to it.”
Tragically, the IRS is doing nothing to fight this blatant fraud. While I believe they could and should, their complete inaction has prompted me to introduce a clear solution in Congress — the Child Tax Credit Integrity Preservation Act. It would require every individual applying for the child tax credit to provide a valid Social Security number, exactly as everyone must do to receive the earned-income tax credit.
Just last week, Senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) and I took to the Senate floor to ask our Senate colleagues to pass this commonsense bill by unanimous consent. Unfortunately, none other than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) blocked our effort.
The American people have the innate common sense and fairness to see that this abuse must end. The question is: Will the U.S. Senate muster those same virtues and do the right thing?
— Senator David Vitter (R., La.) is the founder and chairman of the Senate Border Security and Enforcement First Immigration Caucus.
This isn’t some service benefit that illegal aliens are receiving, like taxpayer-subsidized health care or education. And it’s not a tax deduction or a non-refundable tax credit, which would require recipients to actually pay taxes in order to receive the benefit. It’s a refundable tax credit, a taxpayer-funded check from the federal government. And the government requires no proof that the recipient is actually eligible under the law, which illegals are not.
Abuse of this tax benefit is one of the most ridiculous examples of fraud adding to our federal deficit today. Equally harmful, it is acting as a powerful incentive for more illegal aliens to come to America.
While illegal aliens don’t qualify for legitimate Social Security numbers, the IRS allows them to apply for Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs). The overwhelming majority of returns with ITINs are filed by illegals. This is how they fraudulently apply for and receive these checks.
This tax credit was designed to help working families offset the costs of raising children. But illegal aliens — who don’t possess valid Social Security numbers because they are not authorized to work in this country — are able to receive these tax credits by simply providing an ITIN and claiming to have children. So, American taxpayers are writing checks to illegal aliens — $1,000 per child, $4.2 billion per year total.
An investigative reporter in Indianapolis recently uncovered cases in which illegal aliens were claiming the child tax credit for nieces and nephews who did not even live in the United States. Some received more than $10,000 from the federal government.
One admitted that his address was used by four other illegal aliens who don’t even live there. They claimed 20 children were living in one mobile home and received returns, including the additional child tax credit, totaling $29,608. But only one child actually lives at the residence; the other 19 live in Mexico and have never even visited the United States.
The Obama administration’s own Department of Treasury, through its inspector general for tax administration, has repeatedly warned about these abuses and said that “millions of people are seeking this tax credit who, we believe, are not entitled to it.”
Tragically, the IRS is doing nothing to fight this blatant fraud. While I believe they could and should, their complete inaction has prompted me to introduce a clear solution in Congress — the Child Tax Credit Integrity Preservation Act. It would require every individual applying for the child tax credit to provide a valid Social Security number, exactly as everyone must do to receive the earned-income tax credit.
Just last week, Senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) and I took to the Senate floor to ask our Senate colleagues to pass this commonsense bill by unanimous consent. Unfortunately, none other than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) blocked our effort.
The American people have the innate common sense and fairness to see that this abuse must end. The question is: Will the U.S. Senate muster those same virtues and do the right thing?
— Senator David Vitter (R., La.) is the founder and chairman of the Senate Border Security and Enforcement First Immigration Caucus.
The Chicago Way
National Review Online ^ | May 30, 2012 | John Fund
Every president comes to Washington with a coterie of
outside advisers, friends, and fixers they’ve picked up during the course of a
career. Eventually one or more of them becomes controversial. Richard Nixon had
Bebe Rebozo. Jimmy Carter had his brother Billy and Bert Lance. Ronald Reagan
had Mike Deaver. Bill Clinton had many trailing after him — they became the
menagerie implicated in Whitewater and Monicagate. But Barack Obama’s inner
circle has almost completely escaped close scrutiny since he became president.
That may be about to change, and the rich cast of characters making up Team
Obama merits further attention.
A new biography of Obama by Edward Klein called The Amateur has rocketed to the No. 1 slot on the New York Times bestseller list. Among its explosive allegations is that after videos of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s anti-American sermons surfaced in the 2008 campaign, a close friend of Obama’s and a fellow member of Wright’s church named Eric Whitaker approached the reverend. In a taped interview with Klein, Wright said Whitaker offered him — via e-mail, through an intermediary — $150,000 to stop preaching and appearing in the media until after the election.
After Wright turned the offer down, Barack Obama set up a private meeting with him to urge him not to speak publicly during the campaign. Secret Service logs document that it took place, writes Klein. But Wright refused to cooperate, and the meeting ended in frustration for Obama.
Efforts to discredit Klein’s book by Team Obama went into overdrive after the revelation. Certainly, Klein made errors in a previous book attacking Hillary Clinton, and his occasional sloppiness in his current book isn’t up to the standards of a New York Times Magazine editor, which he used to be. But Klein says he has tapes with Wright to back up his account, which also includes the charge that Obama relied on Whitaker to find a replacement preacher once Wright was dropped from an Obama event.
Whitaker’s role in Obama’s world is important because, as Patrick Brennan has pointed out on National Review Online, “it’s almost impossible to overstate how close Whitaker is to the president.” He’s been a friend of and fundraiser for Obama for nearly 20 years and has joined the first family on every summer and Christmas vacation since 2008. Politico reported in 2009 that Whitaker had become “a kind of gatekeeper and spokesman for Obama’s inner circle.”
Whitaker has also been involved in Illinois’s always shady politics. He became the state’s top health official in 2003 when he was appointed by then-governor Rod Blagojevich, now a resident of federal public housing after his conviction in 2011 on corruption charges. As the Chicago Sun-Times reported in 2008, Obama gave Whitaker “a ‘glowing’ reference to Tony Rezko,” who interviewed him for the job. Rezko, a friend of Obama’s for two decades and a top fundraiser for both Obama and Blagojevich, is also now in federal prison on corruption charges. Prosecutors alleged that Rezko engineered pay-to-play schemes with Blagojevich to help allies secure jobs. Neither Obama nor Whitaker was implicated during Rezko’s trial.
You might recall the name of Tony Rezko from the 2008 campaign.
Rezko was involved with Obama in a controversial 2005 land deal in which Obama bought a $1.65 million home on the same day that Rezko’s wife bought the plot of land next to it from the same seller for $625,000. Obama has strenuously denied suggestions that the same-day sale enabled him to pay $300,000 under the house’s asking price because Mrs. Rezko paid full price for the adjoining lot — a portion of which Obama subsequently purchased — but he admitted the whole deal was a “boneheaded” mistake.
One of Whitaker’s duties as Illinois’s health director was to oversee the scandal-wracked Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board. Under Blagojevich, that board was used to extract kickbacks for state contracts to expand hospitals, which financially benefited Rezko and his associates who controlled the board. During a subsequent investigation, Whitaker denied knowing anything about the wrongdoing, saying he wasn’t involved in the board’s day-to-day operations.
Whitaker left his job under Blagojevich in 2007, and is now executive vice president of strategic affiliations at the University of Chicago Medical Center. He is in charge of its Urban Health Initiative, which this May won a $5.9 million federal grant. As Brennan reported, the UHI “is a microcosm of Obama’s small and incestuous corner of Chicago’s elite politics.” Michelle Obama, as an executive at the University of Chicago Medical Center, created and developed the UHI program until she took a leave of absence during her husband’s 2008 campaign. Valerie Jarrett, now perhaps the most powerful staffer in Obama’s White House, approved the program as chairman of the medical center’s board, and Obama strategist David Axelrod was hired to promote its minority-outreach efforts.
The program itself is controversial, with several medical groups claiming its efforts to shift poor patients to local clinics and away from hospitals such as the University of Chicago’s amount to a deliberate effort to dump uninsured and unprofitable patients onto clinics so that the hospitals can treat insured patients instead.
Fran Eaton, the editor of the conservative blog Illinois Review, says the Whitaker–Reverend Wright controversy is fascinating because it exposes the cozy world of the “Chicago Way” that brought Obama to power. Everyone in the drama is involved in the Richard Daley machine. Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama first met while working for then-mayor Daley. Obama ran for the first time for the Illinois state senate unopposed after Daley-machine lawyers knocked every one of his primary opponents off the ballot by successfully challenging the validity of their nominating petitions. Rahm Emanuel, the current mayor of Chicago, was elected to Congress in 2002 with Daley’s help and went on to serve as Obama’s White House chief of staff from 2009 to 2010.
None of this suggests Barack Obama was directly involved in the seamy underworld of the Daley machine — on the contrary, he was always protected from any hint of corruption because he was clearly being groomed for higher office. But it certainly demonstrates just how little scrutiny Team Obama got over its Daley connections during the 2008 campaign and how far removed the “hope and change” theme of his campaign was from the rough-and-tumble reality of Chicago politics.
John Heilemann, co-author of a definitive work on the 2008 election called Game Change, writes in a new piece in New York magazine that for “anyone still starry-eyed about Obama” the 2012 campaign will disabuse them of that notion:
— John Fund is the national-affairs columnist for NRO.
A new biography of Obama by Edward Klein called The Amateur has rocketed to the No. 1 slot on the New York Times bestseller list. Among its explosive allegations is that after videos of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s anti-American sermons surfaced in the 2008 campaign, a close friend of Obama’s and a fellow member of Wright’s church named Eric Whitaker approached the reverend. In a taped interview with Klein, Wright said Whitaker offered him — via e-mail, through an intermediary — $150,000 to stop preaching and appearing in the media until after the election.
After Wright turned the offer down, Barack Obama set up a private meeting with him to urge him not to speak publicly during the campaign. Secret Service logs document that it took place, writes Klein. But Wright refused to cooperate, and the meeting ended in frustration for Obama.
Efforts to discredit Klein’s book by Team Obama went into overdrive after the revelation. Certainly, Klein made errors in a previous book attacking Hillary Clinton, and his occasional sloppiness in his current book isn’t up to the standards of a New York Times Magazine editor, which he used to be. But Klein says he has tapes with Wright to back up his account, which also includes the charge that Obama relied on Whitaker to find a replacement preacher once Wright was dropped from an Obama event.
Whitaker’s role in Obama’s world is important because, as Patrick Brennan has pointed out on National Review Online, “it’s almost impossible to overstate how close Whitaker is to the president.” He’s been a friend of and fundraiser for Obama for nearly 20 years and has joined the first family on every summer and Christmas vacation since 2008. Politico reported in 2009 that Whitaker had become “a kind of gatekeeper and spokesman for Obama’s inner circle.”
Whitaker has also been involved in Illinois’s always shady politics. He became the state’s top health official in 2003 when he was appointed by then-governor Rod Blagojevich, now a resident of federal public housing after his conviction in 2011 on corruption charges. As the Chicago Sun-Times reported in 2008, Obama gave Whitaker “a ‘glowing’ reference to Tony Rezko,” who interviewed him for the job. Rezko, a friend of Obama’s for two decades and a top fundraiser for both Obama and Blagojevich, is also now in federal prison on corruption charges. Prosecutors alleged that Rezko engineered pay-to-play schemes with Blagojevich to help allies secure jobs. Neither Obama nor Whitaker was implicated during Rezko’s trial.
You might recall the name of Tony Rezko from the 2008 campaign.
Rezko was involved with Obama in a controversial 2005 land deal in which Obama bought a $1.65 million home on the same day that Rezko’s wife bought the plot of land next to it from the same seller for $625,000. Obama has strenuously denied suggestions that the same-day sale enabled him to pay $300,000 under the house’s asking price because Mrs. Rezko paid full price for the adjoining lot — a portion of which Obama subsequently purchased — but he admitted the whole deal was a “boneheaded” mistake.
One of Whitaker’s duties as Illinois’s health director was to oversee the scandal-wracked Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board. Under Blagojevich, that board was used to extract kickbacks for state contracts to expand hospitals, which financially benefited Rezko and his associates who controlled the board. During a subsequent investigation, Whitaker denied knowing anything about the wrongdoing, saying he wasn’t involved in the board’s day-to-day operations.
Whitaker left his job under Blagojevich in 2007, and is now executive vice president of strategic affiliations at the University of Chicago Medical Center. He is in charge of its Urban Health Initiative, which this May won a $5.9 million federal grant. As Brennan reported, the UHI “is a microcosm of Obama’s small and incestuous corner of Chicago’s elite politics.” Michelle Obama, as an executive at the University of Chicago Medical Center, created and developed the UHI program until she took a leave of absence during her husband’s 2008 campaign. Valerie Jarrett, now perhaps the most powerful staffer in Obama’s White House, approved the program as chairman of the medical center’s board, and Obama strategist David Axelrod was hired to promote its minority-outreach efforts.
The program itself is controversial, with several medical groups claiming its efforts to shift poor patients to local clinics and away from hospitals such as the University of Chicago’s amount to a deliberate effort to dump uninsured and unprofitable patients onto clinics so that the hospitals can treat insured patients instead.
Fran Eaton, the editor of the conservative blog Illinois Review, says the Whitaker–Reverend Wright controversy is fascinating because it exposes the cozy world of the “Chicago Way” that brought Obama to power. Everyone in the drama is involved in the Richard Daley machine. Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama first met while working for then-mayor Daley. Obama ran for the first time for the Illinois state senate unopposed after Daley-machine lawyers knocked every one of his primary opponents off the ballot by successfully challenging the validity of their nominating petitions. Rahm Emanuel, the current mayor of Chicago, was elected to Congress in 2002 with Daley’s help and went on to serve as Obama’s White House chief of staff from 2009 to 2010.
None of this suggests Barack Obama was directly involved in the seamy underworld of the Daley machine — on the contrary, he was always protected from any hint of corruption because he was clearly being groomed for higher office. But it certainly demonstrates just how little scrutiny Team Obama got over its Daley connections during the 2008 campaign and how far removed the “hope and change” theme of his campaign was from the rough-and-tumble reality of Chicago politics.
John Heilemann, co-author of a definitive work on the 2008 election called Game Change, writes in a new piece in New York magazine that for “anyone still starry-eyed about Obama” the 2012 campaign will disabuse them of that notion:
The months ahead will provide a bracing revelation about what he truly is: not a savior, not a saint, not a man above the fray, but a brass-knuckled, pipe-hitting, red-in-tooth-and-claw brawler determined to do what is necessary to stay in power — in other words, a politician.If the mainstream-media journalists who spent so little time in 2008 looking into the Daley machine that Barack Obama sprang from want to do more due diligence this time, they could start with a closer look at Eric Whitaker and the rest of Obama’s inner circle. It’s probably a much richer mine of stories than any investigation of Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital days or Ann Romney’s obsession with expensive horses is likely to provide.
— John Fund is the national-affairs columnist for NRO.
CBO: Obama stimulus may have cost as much as $4.1 million a job!
American Enterprise ^ | 5/30/12 | James Pethokoukis
The Congressional Budget Office in a new report: When [the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] was being considered, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that it would increase budget deficits by $787 billion between fiscal years 2009 and 2019. CBO now estimates that the total impact over the 2009–2019 period will amount to about $831 billion. By CBO’s estimate, close to half of that impact occurred in fiscal year 2010, and more than 90 percent of ARRA’s budgetary impact
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.american.com ...
Why Isn't "Obama's IRS" Going After Solyndra&Corzine,Yet Will Harass You For Two Thousand Dollars?
by The_Obama_Gerbil
This would make a great RNC ad. It has to sicken all of us that all friends of the Obama Chicago Thug Machine are getting away with theft of billions,and to add insult to injury,the IRS and debt collectors aren't on their trail.
But it's ok for the Obama's to spend our tax dollars on frequent vacations? The IRS will be on your case if you owe them even a mere $1000.00. But if you are an Obama Cronie like Rangel&Corzine, you walk away SCOTT FREE !!! Fox News should cover this story !
Awkward: Obama hosts Bush, the man he blames for it all!
The Washington Times ^ | 30 May 2012 | Dave Boyer
Talk about awkward.
When President Obama hosts former President George W. Bush at the White House on Thursday to unveil his predecessor’s official portrait, he’ll pay tribute to the man whom he has blamed lately for everything short of an outbreak of the flesh-eating virus.
The war in Iraq? An unnecessary and costly diversion that was Mr. Bush’s fault, according to Mr. Obama.
The worst recession since World War II? The president says Mr. Bush and the GOP are to blame.
Soaring deficits? Mr. Obama’s mantra is that he inherited the red ink from the Republican.
The Wall Street collapse? See “Bush, George W.”
Loss of America’s prestige in the eyes of the world? Mr. Obama has laid that allegation on Mr. Bush’s doorstep, too.
At a fundraiser in California last week, Mr. Obama used Mr. Bush as his foil to raise more money for his re-election campaign. The president began by criticizing GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney for planning “bigger tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans,” deep cuts in funding for education and Medicare, and deregulation of the banking and insurance industries.
“But that’s not new,” Mr. Obama told the crowd. “That was tried, remember? The last guy did all this.”
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Fisker May Never Build Electric Cars in US [Obama Stimulus]
ABC News ^ | May 30, 2012 | By MATTHEW MOSK
The luxury carmaker Fisker Automotive continues to signal it could ditch plans to build its next generation hybrid electric vehicle in the United States, despite the nearly $200 million in Obama administration loan money it has already received.
Fisker received federal funds in part to help purchase a shuttered General Motors plant in Delaware, where it predicted it would one day employ 2,000 auto workers to assemble the clean-burning gas-electric family car, known as the Atlantic.
But company executives began hinting in February that it would reconsider that plan and look for a cheaper place to build the car after the Department of Energy froze the $529 million green-energy loan the company had received, and had been drawing on since 2010.
Fisker used the first $169 million in taxpayer funds to bring to market the Karma, a flashy $100,000 hybrid sports sedan that it assembles in Finland.
Earlier this year, one of the Karmas stopped working in the middle of a Consumer Reports road test -- an embarrassing breakdown that Fisker later blamed on a faulty battery. The lithium-ion batteries became the subject of a recall, including for a defect that raised the risk of fires.
More recently, one of the high-priced cars went up in flames in the garage of its Texas owner.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
AP's Bauer Obsesses Over Walker Fundraising, Ignores Union Money and Resources
News Buster.com ^ | May 30, 2012 | Tom Blumer
Though he hasn't been alone in his applying the campaign fundraising double standard in Wisconsin's recall election, Scott Bauer at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, has a particularly odious item today about the dollars raised by each side. It's particularly odious because the word "unions" appears only once -- as the target of Walker, who has, as Bauer sees it, "rocketed to stardom after taking on public sector unions." There is no mention of the millions of union dollars which have poured into Wisconsin from all over the country, which, thankfully, someone else has quantified.
Bauer also continues to bitterly cling to the notion, concerning which yours truly has been nagging him since February of last year, that "most Wisconsin public workers lost their collective bargaining rights" as a result of Walker-supported legislation which passed in the Legislature last year -- as if they no longer have any collective bargaining rights at all. This has been and continues to be a flat-out falsehood. The first five paragraphs of Bauer's bombast follow the jump (bolds are mine throughout this post):
Wisconsin's Walker raises $31M in face of recalThat $31 million sounds impressive and somehow sinister, which seems to have been Bauer's point, until you look at what unions and "progressive" opponents of Walker have raised.
Republican Gov. Scott Walker has raised about $31 million since he took office 17 months ago, including a remarkable $5.9 million in the last five weeks reported to Wisconsin regulators Tuesday.
The first-term Republican reported his latest donations a week before he faces Democratic Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in a recall election that is also a rematch of the 2010 governor's race. The state elections board predicted Tuesday that turnout would be between 60 percent and 65 percent, nearing levels normally seen in a presidential election.
Barrett, who was bound to fundraising limits of no more than $10,000 from any one donor, reported an impressive $3.4 million over the past five weeks. He raised about $4.2 million since joining the race at the end of March and had $1.5 million cash on hand.
In his 2010 campaign, Walker set the state's fundraising record by bringing in $11 million. But he has nearly tripled that since by playing off his national conservative credentials as he rocketed to stardom after taking on public sector unions.
That fight, in which most Wisconsin public workers lost their collective bargaining rights, triggered the recall. Wisconsin law allowed Walker, as the subject of the recall, to raise unlimited amounts to pay for any debts he incurred over a nearly five-week period.
An April 22 Newsmax interview of Walker report his estimate that, in the words of reporters David A. Patten and Kathleen Walter, "big labor will invest as much as $60 million in its bid to defeat him." I'll bet that if Scott Bauer could disprove that contention, he would have in an AP report somewhere along the way. I don't think he has, because I don't think he can -- and Walker's $60 million estimate may not even include union officials who don't really have a day job but instead can spend weeks campaigning door to door and business to business. So he is instead pretending that the union funding doesn't exist. That way he makes Walker look the richly-funded heavyweight. How pathetic.
As to Bauer's ongoing claim about how "public workers lost their collective bargaining rights," here's a reminder of what he wrote in February of last year:
In addition to eliminating collective-bargaining rights, the legislation also would make public workers pay half the costs of their pensions and at least 12.6 percent of their health care coverage – increases Walker calls “modest” compared with those in the private sector.My response at the time:
... Unions still could represent workers, but could not seek pay increases above those pegged to the Consumer Price Index unless approved by a public referendum. Unions also could not force employees to pay dues and would have to hold annual votes to stay organized.
Geez, Scott, if “unions could still represent workers,” they still have “collective-bargaining rights” — perhaps not as extensive as before, but they still have ‘em. Zheesh.The response still stands, while Scott Bauer continues to misreport reality.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
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