Democrats are claiming that 99 percent of Wisconsinites won't be paying higher taxes under the new state budget. Our web reporter Rebecca Kleefisch heads out to find some of them...
Now, angered that the governor won't give him more tax money to steal, the ethically challenged county board chairman is pledging to derial their choo-choo train. Fred Dooley has the rundown of this particular comeuppance.
In the early morning marathon put on by the Joint Finance Committee, the Republican County Executives of Milwaukee and Racine County were excluded from having a selection on the RTA board and the decision was made to allow the County Board Chairmen in those counties to make the choice on who would serve on the RTA board....
In the wake of removing Scott Walker from the decision making process, the Legislature gave huge power to Milwaukee County Board Chairman, Lee Holloway. Chairman Holloway is extremely angry about Governor Doyle's veto of the new Milwaukee County Sales Tax and he is channeling his anger at the KRM project.
According to a JSonline article, Holloway has said he will do his best to kill the KRM project.
From JSonline:
Holloway said he would work against a Kenosha-Racine-Milwaukee commuter rail on a regional transit advisory board because of Doyle's veto on the county sales tax. Holloway said he will appoint himself and an ally to that board. That will make it difficult to win federal support for commuter rail if the largest county in southeastern Wisconsin is on record against it, Holloway said.
"We are going to vote against the KRM, right down the line," Holloway said.
So there you have it folks. Partisan trickery took an appointment away from Scott Walker and gave power to Lee Holloway. A ticked off Lee Holloway who will exact his vengeance on Jim Doyle's pet rail project because he lost a .65% sales tax increase....
The health care changes that Obama called for Wednesday would reshape the nation's medical landscape. He says he wants to cover nearly 50 million uninsured Americans, to persuade doctors to stress quality over quantity of care, to squeeze billions of dollars from spending.
But details on exactly how to do those things were generally lacking in his hour-long town hall forum before a friendly, hand-picked audience in a Washington suburb. The lingering questions underscore the tough negotiations awaiting Congress...
Yesterday we noted that President Obama was touting California, with its decades-old "energy-efficiency policies," as an example to the nation. After all, the president noted, "Californians consume 40 percent less energy per person than the national average. As Harvard's Edward Glaeser pointed out in an April NewYork Times blog post, the "primary reason" California's energy consumption is low is the weather:
January temperature does a terrific job of explaining carbon emissions from home heating and July temperature does almost as well at explaining electricity usage. California has the most temperate climate in the country and as a result, homes use less heat in the winter and less electricity in the summer. In hot, humid Houston or frigid Minneapolis, people use plenty of energy to artificially recreate what California has naturally.
Obama also claimed that California's paucity of power plants is evidence of its success. But California uses more electricity than it generates--some 53 terawatt-hours more in 2007, or just over 20% of total consumption, according to the federal Energy Information Administration--which means it has to import power from other states not subject to California's environmental restrictions.
Moreover, Californians pay an average of 14.42 cents a kilowatt-hour of electricity, the sixth-highest rate in the contiguous U.S. and more than the average of any region except New England. Obama, it seems, would like to make the rest of the country pay California prices for energy. It might be worth it if he could guarantee us California weather.
Sen. Daniel K. Inouye's staff contacted federal regulators last fall to ask about the bailout application of an ailing Hawaii bank that he had helped to establish and where he has invested the bulk of his personal wealth.
The bank, Central Pacific Financial, was an unlikely candidate for a program designed by the Treasury Department to bolster healthy banks. The firm's losses were depleting its capital reserves. Its primary regulator, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., already had decided that it didn't meet the criteria for receiving a favorable recommendation and had forwarded the application to a council that reviewed marginal cases, according to agency documents.
Two weeks after the inquiry from Inouye's office, Central Pacific announced that the Treasury would inject $135 million.
This takes place in Albany, where the New York state Senate remains locked in a power struggle in an evenly divided chamber. Rather than an insult to American patriotism, the Democrats here engaged in an insult to the intelligence of New Yorkers...
In this case, the refusal to stand comes as the culmination of a series of childish gestures. One member plays exies no erasies with the podium, while her colleagues try to make the chamber into the Democratic Club playhouse (no Republican cooties allowed!). When Republicans try to start the session on their own terms, the Democrats refuse to acknowledge their authority to do so — which is why they remained seated, except for one Democrat, who got pulled back down by his desk partner.
PRINCETON, NJ -- A Gallup Poll finds a statistically significant increase since last year in the percentage of Americans who describe the Democratic Party's views as being "too liberal," from 39% to 46%. This is the largest percentage saying so since November 1994, after the party's losses in that year's midterm elections.
Most major demographic and attitudinal subgroups show at least a slight uptick since 2008 in perceptions that the Democratic Party is too liberal. The increasing perception of the Democrats as too far left comes as President Obama and the Democrats in Congress have expanded the government's role in the economy to address the economic problems facing the country
Madison — The number of abortions performed in Wisconsin dropped slightly last year to its lowest level since the state began keeping records three decades ago, according to a state report released Tuesday....
Barbara Lyons, executive director of Wisconsin Right to Life, said her organization was worried abortions might increase in 2008 because abortion clinics in Appleton and Milwaukee that were closed for the last half of 2007 reopened at the beginning of 2008.
"We just see that women are deciding to have their babies," Lyons said.
Tanya Atkinson, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, didn't immediately return a message.
"Whatever her political future, the emergence of Sarah Palin raises questions that will not soon go away. “What does it say about the nature of modern American politics that a public official who often seems proud of what she does not know is not only accepted but applauded?”
I’m still looking for any quote from Palin at any time where she expressed pride in what she does not know....
The justification for inflicting this financial misery, of course, is the onrushing catastrophe of human-induced global warming - a catastrophe that can be prevented only if we abandon the carbon-based fuels on which most of the prosperity and productivity of modern life depend. But what if that looming catastrophe isn’t real? What if climate change has little or nothing to do with human activity? What if enacting cap-and-trade means incurring excruciating costs in exchange for infinitesimal benefits?
Hush, says Obama. Don’t ask such questions. “There is no longer a debate about whether carbon pollution is placing our planet in jeopardy,’’ he declared Saturday. “It’s happening.’’
No debate? The debate over global warming is more robust than it has been in years, and not only in America. “In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming,’’ Kimberly Strassel noted in The Wall Street Journal the other day. “In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country’s new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted . . . Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the ‘new religion.’ ’’...
How do you think conservative talk radio has affected the Legislature’s work?
The Republicans were essentially threatened and terrorized against voting for revenue. Now [some] are facing recalls. They operate under a terrorist threat: “You vote for revenue and your career is over.” I don’t know why we allow that kind of terrorism to exist. I guess it’s about free speech, but it’s extremely unfair.
Ed Morrissey comments:
There’s a lot of stupidity and tyranny locked into those few words. The First Amendment guarantees the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, even apart from the “free speech” issues Bass casually discards. Elected politicians are accountable to the people who elect them in a free society. Politicians do not acquire lordly status when they go to the Assembly, or anywhere else.
Usually, politicians are smart enough to at least pay lip service to getting feedback from their constituents. Instead, Bass calls them “terrorists” for … what? Calling their representatives and telling them not to raise taxes even higher, in the state with the sixth-highest per capita tax burden in the nation? Expressing their opinions? Telling politicians they won’t get their support if they vote for a tax hike? That’s democracy, not terrorism, although I’m hardly surprised that Bass can’t tell the difference.
Of course she didn't read the bill. Reading massive, economy-changing legislation before actually foisting it on the country is, well, so last century.
As explained in his veto message, (p. 18) Doyle axes a provision of the budget that would have provided compensation for newspapers with a circulation over 40,000 in Milwaukee County (widely believed to be the Shepherd Express) for printing legal notices.
But it’s Doyle’s rationale for vetoing the provision that should draw some belly laughs:
“I am vetoing this provision because it should be subject to the full legislative process where the merits of the provision can be fully and openly debated.”
Apparently, the Governor is willing to make some exceptions to this deeply held conviction. Like, for instance, every other portion of the budget.
Now comes the CBO with yet more news of the sort that neither Capitol Hill nor the White House is likely to welcome: its freshly released report on the federal government's long-term financial situation. To put it bluntly, the fiscal policy of the United States is unsustainable. Debt is growing faster than gross domestic product. Under the CBO's most realistic scenario, the publicly held debt of the U.S. government will reach 82 percent of GDP by 2019 -- roughly double what it was in 2008. By 2026, spiraling interest payments would push the debt above its all-time peak (set just after World War II) of 113 percent of GDP. It would reach 200 percent of GDP in 2038.
This huge mass of debt, which would stifle economic growth and reduce the American standard of living, can be avoided only through spending cuts, tax increases or some combination of the two. And the longer government waits to get its financial house in order, the more it will cost to do so, the CBO says.
It's hard to know where to start with the cap and trade bill.
It comes at a time when the scientific "consensus" on climate change seems to be unraveling. That always seemed likely. While we certainly experienced (but are not now experiencing) global temperature increases and it is certainly possible for carbon emissions to have an impact on climate, every time I waded in to some of the literature, I was struck by how uncertain the entire project is and how unlikely catastrophic climate change really is. Al Gore's horror shows never represented the scientific consensus and the science seems to be moving further away from his alarmist vision.
It comes at a time when we have heard, for eight years, that science has been politicized. While much of that criticism was overblown, science does get politicized and the change in administrations hasn't changed that sad fact.
It comes at a time when the economic analysis seems to suggest that that adjustment is a better avoidance, yet it sets wildly aggressive emission reduction goals. Maybe they can be met, but not because Congress voted for them. What passed on Friday is a leap of faith.....
Surely not? Political interference in science? The suppression of dissenting views on global warming? Not in the era of hope and change. Most troubling of all, CBS News is reporting on the story....
The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages.
Later this morning, Governor Jim Doyle will sign the 2009-2011 State Budget. While he is sure to issue a few vetoes, the bulk of this secretly-crafted, ill-conceived document will become law. We do not expect the Governor will dramatically reduce the spending (a $4 billion increase), the borrowing (a $2.9 billion increase), the taxing ($2.1 billion in this document, with room for property taxes to increase an additional $1.5 billion) or the structural deficit ($2.3 billion).
Death by a thousand cuts. Or in the case of the efficiency of the U.S. economy, by at least four: energy policy, health care policy, trade union resurgence, and fiscal madness.
Introducing a new feature for the website... Former Channel anchor Rebecca Kleefisch with her first Web Report from the state Capitol about the budget passed last night by the state senate.
My favorite is Pedro. Apparently, he's a listener.
