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"Mitt Romney is more apt today to talk about his support for oil drilling than about the environmental policies that he advocated while governor of Massachusetts."
"He populated his Massachusetts administration with environmentalists, including one, Gina McCarthy, who now runs the clean air division of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama. He railed against the 'Filthy Five,' high-polluting power plants in the state. He issued a “climate protection plan” and lauded it as 'among the strongest in our nation.' Under his direction, Massachusetts helped create a regional cap-and-trade program — anathema to most Republicans — intended to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that scientists believe cause global warming.
But at the last minute, Mr. Romney refused to sign the greenhouse gas pact that his aides had spent more than two years negotiating; industry opposed it, and some former Romney policy advisers say his political team feared that it would doom his chances for the presidency. A current campaign policy adviser, Oren Cass, said Mr. Romney simply evaluated the proposal and 'concluded the costs imposed on the economy would be too high.'"
LIVE STREAM Make sure to catch the live stream of the entire event right here on the Social Good Summit site. "The Social Good Summit is a three-day conference where big ideas meet new media to create innovative solutions. Held during UN Week from September 22-24, the Social Good Summit unites a dynamic community of global leaders to discuss a big idea: the power of innovative thinking and technology to solve our greatest challenges. The most innovative technologists, influential minds and passionate activists will come together with one shared goal: to unlock the potential of new media and technology to make the world a better place, and then to translate that potential into action."
"Two recent national polls show a narrow gap between Mitt Romney and President Obama on the deficit."
"There are a lot of big boasts in this campaign, and not all of them are about the budget."
"For Mr. Ryan, as you may recall, has positioned himself as an icon of truth-telling and fiscal responsibility, while offering policy proposals that are neither honest nor responsible. He calls for huge tax cuts, while proposing specific spending cuts that, while inflicting immense hardship on our most vulnerable citizens, would fall far short of making up for the revenue loss. His claims to reduce the deficit therefore rely on assertions that he would make up for the lost revenue by closing loopholes that he refuses to specify, and achieve further huge spending cuts in ways that he also refuses to specify.
But didn’t the Congressional Budget Office evaluate Mr. Ryan’s plan and conclude that it would indeed reduce the deficit? I’m glad you asked that. You see, the budget office didn’t actually evaluate his plan, because there weren’t enough details. Instead, it let Mr. Ryan specify paths for future spending and revenue, while noting — in what sounds to me like a hint of snark — that “No proposals were specified that would generate that path.”
So Mr. Ryan basically told the budget office to assume that his plan would slash the deficit, then claimed the resulting report as vindication of his deficit-slashing claims. Sorry, but that’s the policy equivalent of sneaking into a marathon near the finish line, then claiming victory.
Still, Mitt Romney, not Mr. Ryan, is the presidential candidate, although that’s sometimes hard to remember. So how does Romney/Ryan differ from Ryan alone? It’s worse. Like the Ryan plan, the Romney plan offers huge tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy, while pledging to offset these cuts by closing unspecified loopholes; but Mr. Romney adds to the implausibility by also demanding higher defense spending and eliminating the Medicare cost savings contained in Obamacare. Realistically, the Romney plan would explode the deficit, not reduce it."
The Democratic Party platform to be approved Tuesday offers a stark contrast to the Republican one adopted last week, especially on abortion rights, gay marriage and the future of Medicare and Social Security.
"Democrats today, for the most part, balance between two slightly competing ideas: that government is part of the solution, while still acknowledging that it can be part of the problem. Meanwhile, they're up against a long-running Republican messaging campaign against 'big government.' The concept of big government goes back to around the beginning of the 20th century. Princeton historian Julian Zelizer traces the idea to the Wilson administration and its initiatives, including the creation of the Federal Reserve. 'Woodrow Wilson, who is still conservative by modern liberal standards, does allow for a pretty dramatic expansion of government,' Zelizer tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered. The real turning point, though, was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he says. 'That's the president who not only accepts and pushes for the growth of government, but tells the American people that it's absolutely essential that we have a government deal with the very big social problems that we faced as a nation," he says. "And by 1936, when he runs for re-election for the first time, FDR gives a full-throated defense ... of this idea that government is a positive part of American society.'"
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"The government creates jobs — yes, really." "Decades of anti-government rhetoric have made liberals wary of claiming their legacy as supporters of the state’s positive role. That’s why they have had so much trouble making the case for President Obama’s stimulus program passed by Congress in 2009. It ought to be perfectly obvious: When the private sector is no longer investing, the economy will spin downward unless the government takes on the task of investing. And such investments — in transportation and clean energy, refurbished schools and the education of the next generation — can prime future growth. Yet the drumbeat of propaganda against government has made it impossible for the plain truth about the stimulus to break through. It was thus salutary that Douglas Elmendorf, the widely respected director of the Congressional Budget Office, told a congressional hearing last week that 80 percent of economic experts surveyed by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business agreed that the stimulus got the unemployment rate lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been otherwise. Only 4 percent disagreed. The stimulus, CBO concluded, added as many as 3.3 million jobs during the second quarter of 2010, and it may have kept us from lapsing back into recession. So when conservatives say, as they regularly do, that “government doesn’t create jobs,” the riposte should be quick and emphatic: 'Yes it has, and yes, it does!'"
"President Obama has looked to Senator Michael Bennet, who managed to defeat a conservative Republican in 2010, a year of struggle for Democrats, for a road map in a battleground state."
Mitt Romney’s and Paul D. Ryan’s speeches seemed to signal the arrival of a campaign in which fact-checking concerns have largely been set aside.
"By 2050, nearly two-thirds of Texas public school students will be Hispanic and probably poor. But in the Laredo Independent School District, for one, that is already the case."
"But geography aside, Texas public schools may increasingly find more in common with the South Texas district. In 2011, the state reached two landmarks. For the first time, Hispanics became the majority of public school students. And to cope with a historic budget deficit, the Legislature did not finance enrollment growth in the state’s schools — something that had not happened since the modernization of the Texas public school system in 1949. Though the first turning point passed quietly and the second with much political strife, they both underscore the challenges ahead as a dramatic demographic shift occurs in public school classrooms statewide.
By 2050, the number of Texas public school students is expected to swell to nine million from roughly five million now, and nearly two-thirds will be Hispanic, according to Steve Murdock, a demographer and director of Rice University’s Hobby Center for the Study of Texas. The overall percentage of white students will drop by half to about 15 percent. Without an accompanying change in Hispanics’ current socioeconomic status, that also means Texas students will continue to grow poorer — and their education more expensive — in the next four decades, Dr. Murdock added. (Rice University is a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune.)
State population figures over the last decade show the shift is well under way in the public school system. Economically disadvantaged children in Texas classrooms make up 60 percent of all public school students, up from less than half in 2000. Students with limited English skills now make up 16 percent of them. Of about 979,000 children added to the state’s under-18 population from 2000 to 2010, 931,000 were Hispanic.
'When you look at children, there is no doubt. The future of Texas — the future of the United States — is tied to the minority population,' said Dr. Murdock, a former state demographer and director of the United States Census Bureau. 'It’s just mathematically true.'l
"In his very first television advertisement last year, Mitt Romney highlighted the nation’s dire unemployment crisis, its record number of home foreclosures and the rising national debt, and showed video of President Obama delivering this arresting remark: 'If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.' There was one problem: the quotation was taken so wildly out of context that it turned Mr. Obama’s actual meaning upside-down. The truncated clip came from a speech Mr. Obama gave in 2008 talking about his opponent, Senator John McCain of Arizona. The full quotation? “Senator McCain’s campaign actually said, and I quote, ‘If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.’ ” PolitiFact.com, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking Web site, rated the advertisement “Pants on Fire,” its most deceptive rating possible, but it achieved what the Romney campaign had hoped: people started talking about the sluggish economy and how Mr. Obama’s campaign promises had fallen short. And it set the tone for the campaign that followed, which has often seemed dismissive of fact-checkers. “We’re not going let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” Neil Newhouse, the Romney campaign’s pollster, said this week during a breakfast discussion at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., that was sponsored by ABC News and Yahoo News. He said that fact-checkers brought their own sets of thoughts and beliefs to their work, and that the campaign stands behind its ads."
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"Mitt Romney should approach the presidential debate Wednesday night with a prizefighter-like strategy – a mix of fancy footwork with a few knockout punches, Republican strategists suggest.
In a neck-and-neck race with President Obama but trailing significantly in several battleground states, Romney is pressed to close those gaps with less than six weeks remaining before Election Day.
Though both camps have tried tirelessly to manage expectations, should their candidate get rhetorically clobbered, Republican strategists have, over the past few days, called for Romney to take the offensive."
"He says those people 'pay no income tax,' and 'so our message of low taxes doesn’t connect.' Mr. Romney adds: 'My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.'
"Maya Angelou warned us: 'Believe people when they tell you who they are. They know themselves better than you do.' Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have told us exactly who they are. The American people would do well to listen."
"What does the Romney-Ryan-Rand worldview mean for you in practical terms? The answer is straightforward.
Did half your retirement disappear because high-flying Wall Street investors made risky gambles and left you paying the tab? Romney, Ryan and Rand say, 'If you weren't keeping tabs on the Wall Street investors then it's your own fault. They didn't break any laws when they made that money.'
Did a predatory lender dupe you into taking a sub-prime mortgage that you couldn't afford, leaving you with balloon payments that forced you into foreclosure? Romney, Ryan and Rand say, 'If you couldn't outwit the mortgage broker or predict the collapse of the housing market then it's your own fault. You deserve to go into foreclosure when the market hits bottom.'
Did you lose your job because a company had to close its doors, or outsourced your job to another country, leaving you unable to find work? Romney, Ryan and Rand say, 'If you aren't a valuable enough worker, then it's your own fault. Corporations are people, my friend, and they're just looking to make a profit. Maybe your parents will lend you some money.'
Maya Angelou warned us: 'Believe people when they tell you who they are. They know themselves better than you do.' Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have told us exactly who they are. The American people would do well to listen."
"President Obama needs to tell us what he stands for, and unearth a big policy proposal to prove it."
"He has three clear options.
"First, global warming. President Obama has occasionally said he’d like to do something about climate change if he gets a second term. Given the country’s immediate economic and fiscal problems, this seems obtuse to me. But if this is really where Obama’s passion lies, he should go for it."
"Second, broken capitalism. Obama could go before the convention and say that there has been a giant failure at the heart of modern capitalism. Even in good times, the wealth that modern capitalism generates is not being shared equitably. Workers are not seeing the benefits of their own productivity gains."
"Third, Bowles-Simpson. Everybody pays lip service to the Bowles-Simpson plan to reduce the deficit, but neither campaign really embraces it."
"Today the prevailing cut-to-the-bone business ethos means that a company like Caterpillar demands a wage freeze and lower health benefits from its workers, while posting record profits.
Globalization, including the rise of Asia, and technological innovation can’t explain all or even most of today’s gaping inequality; if they did, we would see in other advanced economies the same hyperconcentration of wealth and the same stagnation of middle-class wages as in the United States. But we don’t.
In Germany, still a manufacturing and export powerhouse, average hourly pay has risen five times faster since 1985 than in the United States. The secret of Germany’s success, says Klaus Kleinfeld, who ran the German electrical giant Siemens before taking over the American aluminum company Alcoa in 2008, is 'the social contract: the willingness of business, labor and political leaders to put aside some of their differences and make agreements in the national interests.'
In short, German leaders have practiced stakeholder capitalism and followed the century-old wisdom of Henry Ford, while American business and political leaders have dismantled the dynamics of the “virtuous circle” in pursuit of downsizing, offshoring and short-term profit and big dividends for their investors."
"Bold Nebraska @BoldNebraska
We are progressive, independent, moderate, populist & everything in between. We are Bold Nebraska--people creating change online, on the ground & on issues.
The Great State of Nebraska · http://www.boldnebraska.org"
"NEGOP & RNC have been bashing Obama over welfare waivers...too bad Gov Heineman and 28 other Rep. Govs asked for them: http://boldnebraska.org/roundup0827_31"
•"Ideological purity
•Compromise as weakness
•A fundamentalist belief in scriptural literalism
•Denying science
•Unmoved by facts
•Undeterred by new information
•A hostile fear of progress
•A demonization of education
•A need to control women's bodies
•Severe xenophobia
•Tribal mentality
•Intolerance of dissent
•Pathological hatred of US government
They can call themselves the Tea Party. They can call themselves conservatives. And they can even call themselves Republicans. The Republicans certainly shouldn't. But we should call them what they are, the American Taliban. And the American Taliban cannot survive if Dorothy Cooper is allowed to vote."
The Newsroom - HBO, August 26, 2012
"Benefits.gov is a partnership of many Federal agencies and organizations with a shared vision - to provide improved, personalized access to government benefit programs."
"As Mitt Romney presented himself to the world as the future leader of the United States on Thursday night, his nearly 40-minute long speech at the Republican National Convention focused little on foreign policy.
Not until the end of his talk did he reference global affairs, mainly blaming President Barack Obama for abandoning US allies and taking a diplomatic stance on Iran's nuclear issue.
Without outlining any concrete plans, Romney said he will adopt the bipartisan foreign policy principles of Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan, which focuses on containment of rising powers, such as the former Soviet Union.
"We will honor America's democratic ideals because a free world is a more peaceful world. This is the bipartisan foreign policy legacy of Truman and Reagan. And under my presidency we will return to it once again," the nominee said during the speech at the Tampa Bay Times Forum.
On defense, he claimed he will preserve the world's strongest military that "no nation would ever dare to test it".
Despite his harsh campaign rhetoric on China, the GOP presidential nominee only mentioned the country twice when attacking Obama sending away jobs to China and borrowing money from Beijing."
On the two-year anniversary of the end of our combat mission in Iraq, the President speak to troops at Fort Bliss, and discusses that part of ending wars responsibly demands standing by those who have served.
"But there is a flaw in the vision the Republicans offered in Tampa. It is contained in its rampant hyperindividualism. Speaker after speaker celebrated the solitary and heroic individual. There was almost no talk of community and compassionate conservatism. There was certainly no conservatism as Edmund Burke understood it, in which individuals are embedded in webs of customs, traditions, habits and governing institutions.
Today’s Republicans strongly believe that individuals determine their own fates. In a Pew Research Center poll, for example, 57 percent of Republicans believe people are poor because they don’t work hard. Only 28 percent believe people are poor because of circumstances beyond their control. These Republicans believe that if only government gets out of the way, then people’s innate qualities will enable them to flourish.
But there’s a problem. I see what the G.O.P. is offering the engineering major from Purdue or the business major from Arizona State. The party is offering skilled people the freedom to run their race. I don’t see what the party is offering the waitress with two kids, or the warehouse worker whose wages have stagnated for a decade, or the factory worker whose skills are now obsolete."
"We fact-checked several claims by Romney and the other speakers. Newt Gingrich said, 'It's striking how President (Jimmy) Carter and President Obama both took our nation down a path that in four years weakened America's confidence in itself and our hope for a better future.' Callista Gingrich continued, 'Both weakened the respect for America abroad.' We compared favorability ratings of the United States from the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency to the most recent figure under Obama. The U.S. on average has higher favorability ratings now, according to surveys. However, America’s favorability has eroded somewhat since Obama’s first year in office, though it’s still above the final levels of the Bush administration. We rated Callista Gingrich’s statement Mostly False."
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