If Mitt Romney had taken a moment to thank the wait staff at a Boca Raton fundraiser last year, me may now be president, or at least could have removed one of his biggest obstacles to the White House: The so-called “47 percent tape” that clouded the last two months of the race. The anonymous person who filmed the tape turns out to a bartender with a local catering company who is coming forward now that the election is over. He’ll reveal his identity tomorrow in a hour-long interview on the Ed Show on MSNBC, but in an interview with the Huffington Post Tuesday night, he suggested that he was disappointed that Romney never thanked the wait staff, as Bill Clinton had years before at a different event the same bartender happened to staff. Ryan Grim and Jason Cherkis report:Romney, of course, did not speak to any of the staff, bussers or waiters. He was late to the event, and rushed out. He told his dinner guests that the event was off the record, but never bothered to repeat the admonition to the people working there. One of them had brought along a Canon camera. He set it on the bar and hit the record button. The bartender said he never planned to distribute the video. But after Romney spoke, the man said he felt he had no choice. Continue Reading… … Read More
National Labor Relations Board Asks Supreme Court to Uphold Obama’s Recess Appointments
In January a 3-judge panel of United States Court of Appeals for
the District of Columbia Circuit found President Barack Obama’s
three purported recess appointments to the National Labor Relations
Board
to be unconstitutional because they were not actually made when
the Senate was in recess. In response, the NLRB said it
“respectfully disagreed” with the D.C. Circuit’s ruling and would
continue to carry out business as usual because “the President’s
position in the matter will ultimately be upheld.”
Will it? We shall soon find out. Today the NLRB
announced that “in consultation with the Department of Justice,
[the Board] intends to file a petition for certiorari with the
United States Supreme Court for review of that decision.”
The Supreme Court is practically guaranteed to take the case. In
2004, the 11th Circuit upheld a similar exercise of the recess
appointment power by President George W. Bush. With the circuits
split on this major issue, the high court has little choice but to
wade in. So prepare for some major legal fireworks over Obama’s use
of executive power in the coming months. … Read More
Hagel orders review of drone pilot medal
Following outrage from veterans groups and lawmakers that a new medal could honor UAV operators more highly than combat troops awarded Purple Hearts and Bronze Stars, newly appointed Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has ordered a review of the award.As HuffPo’s Amanda Terkel explained:The newly created Distinguished Warfare Medal, approved last month by then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, will honor members of the military for “extraordinary” achievements since Sept. 11, 2001. The accomplishments do not have to be restricted to a geographic region, meaning that remote warfare — such as drone operations — could be recognized. What upset many of the medal’s critics was not the creation of the award, but its so-called “order of precedence” that would put it above several traditional combat medals.Continue Reading… … Read More
Chaos on the streets of Brooklyn after NYPD kills teenager
http://www.youtube.com/v/i5zBj4W397k?version=3&f=videos&app=youtube_gdata Credit: Chaos on the streets of Brooklyn after NYPD kills teenager
The Battle Against School Choice in New Hampshire
Last year New Hampshire enacted a tax credit to the tune of 85
percent for businesses donating toward K-12 scholarships for
low-income students. (There are annual caps of between about $3 and
$5 million in total credits statewide.) The scholarships can be
used by parents to send their children to any school, public or
private, or to homeschool them. Now the program is under attack in
the state legislature and in the courts.
Such tax-credit-funded scholarships have been established in 11
states and are estimated to benefit more than 150,000 students. The
scholarships are generally successful; in Florida, one study
showed the presence of students receiving such scholarships
improves the performance of public schools in those students’
neighborhoods. The
Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice tracks the
performance of all variety of school choice programs. Its 2013
report [pdf]
notes that the nascent New Hampshire program “has considerable room
for growth,” pointing out that the scholarship is capped at 19
percent of what New Hampshire spends per public school student, and
that the annual cap (which does grow automatically) limits the
scholarship’s availability to less than 1 percent of students in
the state.
Yet even this is too much for opponents of the program. “The
attack is really driven by the teachers unions who don’t want to
have to compete,” the law’s senate sponsor, James Forsythe, tells
reason.com. “They have a ton of money and lobbying influence.” A
bill to repeal the law passed the state House last year, though
Forsythe argues that “the partisanship is turning,” pointing out
that five Democrats in the New Hampshire house voted against the
repeal. In the Senate, one Republican who opposed the bill when it
was first passed, Nancy Stiles, this time testified
against the repeal. According to Forsythe, this splits the
Senate 12–12, where a majority is needed to repeal the bill.
That’s good, because the state’s governor, Maggie Hassan,
opposes the law and has said she’ll sign a repeal if it comes to
her desk. Yet she supports a similar
scholarship program for college students—a law the teachers unions
do not have an incentive to oppose. (The governor’s office did not
respond to a request for comment.)
Meanwhile, seven taxpayers are suing the state over the tax
credit program. The plaintiffs, supported by the ACLU of New
Hampshire and by Americans United for Separation of Church and
State, argue that the program represents the use of public money to
support religious institutions, since scholarships can be applied
toward religious schools. “This is just a backdoor voucher scheme,”
according to the executive director of Americans United for
Separation of Church and State, Rev. Barry W. Lynn. “Whether it’s
through a traditional voucher or a tax credit, the result is the
same: Taxpayers are subsidizing religious instruction.” Yet that
argument would be just as applicable to Hassan’s college
program.
More importantly, the K-12 program is a tax credit–generated
scholarship that includes no appropriation of public money, similar
to charitable deductions offered in the federal tax code. So it’s
difficult to argue that the credits represent a public subsidy.
Indeed, it may actually save the government money: The fiscal note
prepared for the final
bill projected the program would save the state more than a
million dollars in its first three years, with expenditures going
down at a faster rate than revenue.
Despite this, Democrats argue that the tax credit constitutes a
lost opportunity for government spending. “I feel that if we cannot
adequately fund our public schools and we cannot adequately fund
our charter schools, we should not be creating yet another program
until we do the other programs properly,” Democratic Rep. Lorrie
Carey
told the Concord Monitor. Marc Goldberg, a spokesman
for the governor, went
further, claiming the tax credit “diverts millions of taxpayer
dollars to religious and private schools with no standards or
accountability.” In a hearing on the repeal bill, Rep. Mary Gile,
another Democrat,
called the credit “public money,” claiming it constituted “poor
fiscal policy and poor educational policy.”
Joining in the lawsuit as intervenor-defendants are several
parents taking advantage of their program. They’re being
represented by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public
interest law firm. The lead attorney on the case, Don Komer, says
the argument that the tax credit is the functional equivalent of
the government giving money “ignores all the private decision
making involved,” from the businesses who decide to donate to the
scholarship organizations that decide to whom to award the money,
to the parents who decide where to send their children. (Thus far,
only one scholarship organization has been approved by the state.)
Komer notes that the federal establishment clause has long
permitted these kinds of tax credits to support charitable
activity. The dispositive hearing is set for April 26.
One of the parents the Institute for Justice is representing,
Shalimar Encarnacion,
told the Manchester Telegraph that she doesn’t
understand opposition to the program, which could help her send her
children—one in remission from cancer, the other diagnosed with
ADHD—to private school. “This is something for kids,” Encarnacion
told the Telegraph. “The people that have issues with it,
they’re not thinking about the kids….This gets businesses to
invest in their communities, to better their communities. Seeing
that will make students better citizens. What’s wrong with
that?” … Read More
Only liberals still bothering with Paul Ryan’s silly budgets
I never want to see another chart about another Paul Ryan budget again. I swear, liberal wonk bloggers now pay exponentially more attention to Paul Ryan’s annual budget releases than conservatives of any sort do.Here’s what we already knew about Paul Ryan’s budget, before he released it: It would be so vague as to be basically impossible to score, it would involve a massive tax cut for wealthy Americans, it would effectively dismantle Medicare in a few years, and it won’t ever become law. So, today brought us I think four hundred charts, illustrating those points, in dozens of blog posts, admittedly mostly by Ezra Klein and his Wonk-Servants but also in just about every other liberal opinion organ with a budget or econ “wonk” on staff. Here is Slate’s Matt Yglesias explaining that Ryan’s plan to balance the budget is “lower taxes on the rich, higher taxes on the middle class, less program spending for the poor and the working class.” That was also his plan last year, and the year before!Continue Reading… … Read More
Despite hype, defense industry still thriving after sequestration
If you believe the hype, sequestration is going to deal a catastrophic blow to the politically powerful defense industry.It’s a “doomsday mechanism,” former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta declared. The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) – the leading advocacy group for Pentagon contractors – has also warned of the allegedly dire consequences of sequestration for their industry (which receives nearly $1 billion a day from the Pentagon), expressing “extreme disappointment that sequestration was not averted.”Continue Reading… … Read More
