Gingrich: ‘Yes,’ Romney’s Policies Will Lead To ‘Fewer Teachers’

By Igor Volsky on Jun 11, 2012 at 9:06 pm

The Romney campaign is now tripling down on its claim that the nation needs fewer public employees — like teachers, firefighters, and police officers — to help rebound the economy.

During an interview with CNN’s John King on Monday evening, Romney campaign surrogate Newt Gingrich defended Mitt Romney’s resistance to hiring “more firemen, more policemen, more teachers” and admitted that the former Massachusetts governor’s policy would lead to less teachers in the classroom:

KING: The president says use federal dollars to help. Governor Romney says no. [...]

GINGRICH: We have to come to grips with how big the challenge is, and does that mean there will be fewer teachers? The honest answer is yes. Does it mean that you’re not going to get quite the same pension plan people have been getting? The honest answer is yes. President Obama may say well, we can borrow our way out of that decision. I don’t think the American people agree with him.

Watch it:

Gingrich’s comments came in response to Romney’s critique of President Obama’s claim on Friday that the public sector is lagging behind in job growth. President Obama “says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers,” Romney said. “Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.” Former New Hampshire governor and top Romney surrogate John Sununu defended the remarks earlier on Monday, saying, “the taxpayers really do want to hear there will be fewer teachers,” ignoring the fact that Obama’s job’s plan is fully paid for and would not increase deficit spending.

Federal, state, and local governments have laid off more than 700,000 workers since Obama took office. Had that not happened, the unemployment rate would be a full point lower and the economic recovery would be stronger.

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Justice

One Year After Governor Signed Nation’s Worst Immigration Law, Alabama Still Has Not Learned From Its Mistakes

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Jun 11, 2012 at 6:50 pm

It has been one year since Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley signed HB 56, the nation’s most harmful immigration measure, into law. He praised the bill after signing it on June 9, 2011, calling it the “toughest bill in the country.”

Shortly after some of immigration provisions went into effect in September, the widespread damage from the law was obvious. By December, even Bentley admitted that HB 56 “need[s] revision,” although it would be months before lawmakers took action. Courts temporarily blocked parts of HB 56, but not before students were too scared to go to school and families were denied utilities:

Attack On School Children: Politicians readily admitted that the goal of HB 56 was to make Alabama a hostile place for undocumented immigrants, but as a result, families have fled the state out of fear, leaving schools with high absenteeism rates among Hispanic students. HB 56 required schools only to check the immigration status of all newly enrolled students, and 13 percent of Latino students dropped out by February, likely out of fear.
Families Denied Water, Food Stamps: Because of a provision of the immigration law preventing contracts between the state and undocumented immigrants, public utility companies have denied service to anyone who cannot prove they are a citizen or legally in the United States, effectively making it a felony for undocumented immigrants to take a bath in their own homes. No other state or developed nation has a ban this extreme on contracting with undocumented immigrants. Beyond public utilities, this “business transaction” ban led some U.S.-born children to be denied food stamps simply because their parents were undocumented immigrants.
Economic Damage: After families fled the state out of fear, farmers watched their crops rot without enough workers to help harvest, and some said they were at risk of losing their farms. And owners of poultry processing plants and catfish farms said they have lost workers and are having trouble replacing the workers who left. It’s estimated that HB 56 could cost Alabama as many as 100,000 jobs and billions in GDP losses, but the law’s author still said it has no “negative impact.”
Embarrassing Arrests: HB 56 turned into a PR nightmare for the state when police arrested a German Mercedes Benz employee for not having the right documents when he was pulled over in November. The charges were later dropped, but almost two weeks later, police also arrested a Japanese Honda employee for being in violation of HB 56 while driving even though he reportedly had his passport and international driver’s license. Charges were later dropped as well.

During the 2012 legislative session, Alabama legislators finally had the opportunity to address these glaring issues. But instead of repealing HB 56 or even taking out the worst provisions, like asking school children about their immigration status, lawmakers doubled down and made the immigration law even worse. Undocumented immigrants are still barred from renting property, and law enforcement officials can still check immigration status based on a “reasonable suspicion.”

Briefly, Alabama’s governor stood up to the anti-immigrant supporters of HB 56 and threatened to veto the proposed changes if they did not take out the requirement that schools check immigration status. But he eventually caved and signed the changes, which have one bright spot: legislators clarified what is a “business transaction” so that people are not blocked from having water in their homes.

Alabama did not learn the lessons of Arizona about the problems that result from these extreme immigration laws that do nothing but hurt the state. Now it’s serving as a lesson for other states who do not want to make the same mistake as Alabama’s lawmakers.

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NEWS FLASH

BREAKING: Department Of Justice Sues Florida Over Voter Purge | The U.S. Justice Department is suing Florida after the state disregarded the federal government’s request to suspend its voter purge campaign. In a letter to the Florida Secretary of State, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez argues that Florida is violating the National Voter Registration Act and the Voting Rights Act. “Please immediately cease this unlawful conduct,” Perez writes. The full text of the letter is available HERE.

Economy

GOP Governor Christie Uses Right Wing Myth To Justify Opposing Minimum Wage Increase

By Pat Garofalo on Jun 11, 2012 at 6:15 pm

Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) has announced that even if the New Jersey state legislature sends him a bill to increase the state’s minimum wage, he will veto it. Christie claims that the result of the bill — which would raise the Garden State’s minimum wage to $8.50 and index it to inflation — would be “more layoffs“:

“We’re telling small business owners that not only are we going to raise their costs by a buck and a quarter, but we’re also going to raise it with these cost-of-living adjustments,” Christie, a 49-year-old Republican, said during a town-hall style meeting in Lyndhurst. “Here’s what’s going to happen — they’re going to have to lay people off.”

Claiming that minimum wage increases will cause job losses is a favorite right wing tactic, but the Center for American Progress Action Fund’s T. William Lester, David Madland, and Nick Bunker note that the economic evidence doesn’t bear it out:

We reviewed academic research that examines the effects of minimum wage increases during a recession or stretch of time with high unemployment and found significant evidence that even during hard economic times, raising the minimum wage is likely to have no adverse effect on employment. [...]

Why is this the case? Studies generally find that policies that increase the compensation of low-wage workers significantly reduce turnover, boost worker effort, encourage employers to invest in training for their workers, and can increase demand for goods and services — all of which help balance out any potential negative effects.

It’s not only at the state level that progressives are attempting to increase the minimum wage, which peaked in terms of purchasing power at the federal level in 1968. Last week, a group of House Democrats introduced legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.

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Climate Progress

Climate Progress Traffic Continues Growing After Merger

By Joe Romm on Jun 11, 2012 at 6:04 pm

Climate Progress probably has the most widely read headlines and content of any dedicated climate blog in the world. There’s no way of knowing for sure because web statistics aren’t terribly reliable and much of our readership simply cannot be tracked.

Before the initial merger with Think Progress, I wrote a post on May 31, 2011, “… the world’s most viewed climate website.” I pointed out that using the web statistics comparison program favored by the leading denier website (Alexa), Climate Progress had the same number of page views as the site that quotes someone claiming it is “… the world’s most viewed climate website.”

Since then, we merged with TP and then, more recently, Climate Progress subsumed TP Green. The result is our direct page views are up 30% to 50% on most days. The climate disinformation sites have all stagnated (or declined) using their favored Alexa comparison program (and even using Quantcast). As an aside, Alexa is well known to be unreliable (and gamable), so it is the perfect comparison site for the disinformers, who are unconcerned with accurate statistics.

And CP’s measured traffic stats don’t even count the huge number of people who read the content without coming to this website. Some 8,000 people subscribe to the daily e-mail that delivers the previous 24 hours worth of posts — you can subscribe on CP’s right hand column. Also, since the merger, Climate Progress posts are routinely featured on the front page of Think Progress, which has more than 10 times our daily readership. And we continue to get our best content cross-posted at other highly trafficked websites, like Grist.

It’s not just the new design that has caused the rise in viewership. It’s also the increase in original content. I don’t think it reveals any secrets to say that the more high-quality original content your blog has, the more traffic you will get. We added the estimable Stephen Lacey right before the original merger and then picked up the highly capable bloggers of TP Green, Jessica Goad and Rebecca Leber. And they are on top of the first-rate CAPAF fellows who regularly write for CP.

It’s also clear that CP’s headlines are being viewed by vastly more people than they were before the merger. Headlines are important because they are probably read by 10 to 50 times more people than read the post itself. That’s why good headline writing is so important to blogging, something I discuss at length in my forthcoming book on communications and persuasion.

Social media are a key to getting headlines out. We send CP headlines out as tweets, and we’ve been adding Twitter followers at the rate of about 1000 per month and are nearly at 28,000. More important, retweets have jumped sharply since the redesign. Also, TP often retweets our headlines, and they have a remarkable 130,000 followers. And our Facebook “likes” have jumped sharply since the merger and particularly since we launched a FB page for Climate Progress.

Again, there is no way of knowing for sure how many people read the headlines — since you’d have to figure out viewership in search engines and content aggregators, too. Indeed, if you want some idea of just how many websites repost CP’s headlines (and sometimes its entire content) just do a Google search using the full headline for one of CP’s more popular posts. There are hundreds and hundreds of content and headline aggregators on the web.

If I had to estimate, I’d say CP headlines are probably read by at least twice as many people as before.

I don’t think it is surprising that the traffic for the disinformer websites is either stagnating or declining, whereas Climate Progress viewership is soaring.

Real science is intrinsically fascinating because it attempts to make sense of observations of the real world. We are dramatically changing the actual climate of the earth, and we are making more extreme many types of weather events that affect a great many people. Reporting on that story and understanding what comes next would be compelling even if it weren’t so consequential. The fact that unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases poses an existential threat to modern human civilization makes this the story of the century, if not the story of the millennium (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“).

Sure, awareness of and interest in climate change may appear to wax and wane over the short term — especially to pollsters who ask flawed questions (see “Exclusive Bombshell: Experts Debunk Polls that Claim Sharp Drop in Number of Americans Who Believe in Global Warming“) — but it is only going to continue to grow over time as the reality of the threat becomes painfully obvious to all but the most blinkered denier.

The situation for the disinformers is the exact opposite.

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Justice

Republican Infighting Leads to Chaos in Kansas Redistricting

By Andrea Peterson on Jun 11, 2012 at 5:40 pm

Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS)

The filing deadline for state races in Kansas passed earlier today, just four days after a federal court had to redraw the state’s legislative maps because two factions of the state Republican Party could not agree on which maps they wanted to pass. With only a few short days to round up candidates for the new districts, both political parties spent the weekend in chaos:

There are 25 open House seats, fully 20% of that branch of the legislature. Forty-six incumbent members have been tossed into potential races with other incumbents (not counting the spouse of the late Bob Bethell.)

Kansas law requires filers to “reside” in the district they wish to represent at the time of filing. That means the political parties mush work all weekend to find candidates for the open seats, and/or convince incumbents to establish residence in the new open districts before Monday at noon.

Yet, while the legislature’s failure to draw districts led to a hectic weekend for politicians across the state, the true victims are the people of Kansas. In some districts, it’s likely that only one candidate will manage to file, leaving the voters with no choice regarding who will represent them. It’s even possible that some districts could have no candidates at all.

Even members of the legislature themselves appear to be disgusted with the entire process. Leading moderate Republican Sen. John Vratil announced his retirement in response to the ordeal, claiming to have lost interest in the being part of the Senate and taking a shot at his fellow Republican Gov. Sam Brownback in the process. House Minority Leader Paul Davis (D) expressed similar concerns, telling ThinkProgress “the redistricting situation was caused by Governor’s Brownback desire to oust members of his own political party from the Kansas legislature. He is very intent on trying to drive out Republicans that don’t support his agenda – that’s really the root cause of why the legislature was not able to successfully complete the redistricting process.”

Yet, while state lawmakers no doubt deserve blame for being unable to complete a fairly basic legislative task, much of the blame for these events rests with the Supreme Court, which largely abdicated oversight over politically motivated gerrymanders in a case called Vieth v. Jubelirer. Thanks to this decision, partisan lawmakers now have no adult supervision when they set out to draw maps, and little real incentive to avoid using redistricting as a once-in-a-decade opportunity to consolidate their own power.

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NEWS FLASH

Hate Group Leader Compares Gay Pride To ‘Adultery Pride’ And ‘Drunkenness Pride’ | The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins today lambasted the month of June for being Gay Pride Month, arguing that there aren’t pride months for “adultery” or “drunkenness.” He went on to suggest that LGBT equality will have damaging impacts on society because public accommodation laws will compromise “religious freedom,” citing the infamous New Jersey case of a Methodist pavilion that violated its agreement with the state by discriminating against a same-sex couple. Listen to Perkins:

(HT: RightWingWatch.)

Economy

Millionaire GOP Senate Candidate Tommy Thompson’s Plan Would Lower His Own Taxes By $87,000

By Guest Blogger on Jun 11, 2012 at 5:10 pm

In Wisconsin, the senate race to succeed Herb Kohl (D) is heating up between Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D) and four Republican challengers. One GOP candidate, former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, has unveiled a tax plan that would give millionaires, himself included, a huge tax cut.

In a recent memo, the Baldwin campaign argued that Thompson’s 15 percent flat tax plan would allow the top 1 percent of earners to pay an average of $86,502 less in income taxes. Politifact and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel verified Baldwin’s assertion, with the caveat that many of the details of Thompson’s plan have yet to be released.

A Thompson spokesman, though, freely admitted that Baldwin’s analysis of the plan “seems sufficient,” adding that part of the intent of the plan is to raise taxes on the poor who currently don’t make enough money to have any federal income tax liability.

For her part, Baldwin co-sponsored the “Buffett Rule,” which prevents the richest Americans from being able to pay a lower tax rate than middle-class families.

Thompson raked in millions last year advising pharmaceutical companies he was once tasked with overseeing as U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. Thompson’s net worth is currently $13 million. And he isn’t the only conservative who would greatly benefit from his own radical tax proposal: 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney would save $5 million on his tax bill if his own tax plan were enacted.

– Steven Perlberg

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Alyssa

Idris Elba On the Politics of Guillermo Del Toro’s ‘Pacific Rim’

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jun 11, 2012 at 5:08 pm

Idris Elba talked to Vulture about Pacific Rim, the monster movie by Guillermo Del Toro he’s starring in, and wow does it sound incredible:

He’s yet another man of authority, but this time much higher up. He’s the head of the army and the army is the essential fighting force against these monsters. The world is crumbled and this alien lived underneath the surface of the Earth for a long time. Our only defense has been these massive robots that fight back — they’re basically tanks that are put together to look like men and can walk. I play the leader of that sort of movement. Then we lose our funding, basically, and the world decides to build walls around countries, which basically means the rich can get in and the poor can’t. So our characters go, “No. We’re going to fight this our way.” It could be a box-standard, fight-against-the-aliens sort of film, but not with Guillermo.

It sounds like it’s almost a commentary on class and immigration.

Well, it’s certainly a commentary on if the world were under attack who would survive and who wouldn’t. Interestingly enough, the poor would probably more survive than the rich.

Why is that?

Because they have less and are used to less; therefore, more resilient and more tough. If an alien attacks a big skyscraper, people in the skyscraper are going to die. The people on the floor may not.

It’s often splashier and scarier to pit humans against aliens in science fiction, and to portray alien invasion as an engineer of a new, happy, human solidarity. But we’re a lot likely to get fierce international and inter-class struggle and competition before we end up in a fight with spacemen. That Del Toro is acknowledging that and giving us his signature awesome monster design has me very, very excited indeed.

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Security

Romney Adviser Bolton Sees Opportunity In Syria To Provoke Russia, Iran And China

By Eli Clifton on Jun 11, 2012 at 4:52 pm

Today in a column in The National Review, Mitt Romney foreign policy adviser John Bolton split with his candidate’s calls to arm the Syrian rebels, concluding that, “neither U.S. military assistance to the opposition nor current administration policy, which has stumbled from failure to failure over the past year, will advance legitimate American interests.”

Instead, Bolton urges observers not to be swayed by the “emotion” of Syrians being killed by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces. “The television images from Syria will not change permanently until the underlying strategic terrain changes permanently,” he says. Bolton proceeds to lay out his own set of policy proposals to remove Assad from power and ultimately overhaul U.S. foreign policy by taking intentionally provocative actions against Russia, China and Iran.

First, Bolton, who served as George W. Bush’s ambassador to the U.N., suggests that “we should cut Syria off from its major supporters” in Iran, China and Russia. He proposes:

We should resume full-scale, indeed accelerated, efforts to construct the limited missile-defense system designed by George W. Bush to protect American territory not against Russia but against rogue states such as Iran and North Korea. [...] We should also announce our withdrawal from the New START arms-control treaty, and our utter disinterest in negotiations to prevent an “arms race” in space. Let Moscow and Beijing think about all that for a while.

Indeed, Bolton acknowledges that such actions “would likely break the famous ‘reset’ button [with Russia] beyond repair.” And his tearing up of the START treaty, constructing an expensive and provocational missile-defense system, and kicking off an “arms race” in space would undeniably leave Moscow and Beijing scratching their heads.

Bolton again reiterated his standard lines on Iran, calling for regime change and an end to diplomatic efforts on Iran’s nuclear program.

As for Syria itself, Bolton has said the U.S. should have turned toward Damascus once Baghdad fell in 2003. But his only solution now is to find and support “Syrian rebel leaders who are truly secular and who oppose radical Islam; who will disavow al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and other terrorist groups; and who will reject Russian and Iranian hegemony over their country.”

Bolton’s hawkishness is nothing new but the New York Times’s David Sanger suggested that Bolton may have a prominent role in crafting Mitt Romney’s foreign policy positions. Sanger reported that the Romney campaign’s foreign policy rhetoric last month, “sounds more like the talking points of the neoconservatives — the ‘Bolton faction,’ as insiders call the group led by John Bolton.”

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