Justin's Political Corner
On Sunday, economist Paul Krugman hit back against GOP claims that public sector employment has increased under Obama, and that such jobs consist mainly of wasteful bureaucrats and somehow count less economically than private sector ones. Back in September it was tea party Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) toeing that line, and this morning it was former Republican gubernatorial candidate Carly Fiorina.
The exchange commenced immediately after Krugman made the point that, had government employment in the current recovery followed the same path it followed under previous recessions in the Bush and Reagan years, unemployment now would be slightly above 6 percent:
CARLY FIORINA: I think it’s important to remember, when we talk about the economy, that a private sector job and a public sector job are not the same things. They’re not equivalent. I’m not saying public sector jobs aren’t important. But a private sector job pays for itself. A private sector job creates other jobs. A public sector job is paid for by taxpayers. […]
PAUL KRUGMAN: But when we say public sector jobs, it is not a bureaucrat in Washington, D.C.
FIORINA: Oh, it is, actually.
KRUGMAN: When we talk about public sector jobs — when we look at the ones that have been lost in large numbers in this — it’s basically school teachers. Don’t think about bureaucrats. It’s school teachers. What we’ve laid off hundreds of thousands of school teachers.
And when we talk about the cuts in public spending that have happened, they are not, you know, some god awful who knows what. It’s actually public investment. It’s largely fixing potholes and repairing bridges.
So, you know, you have this image of these wasteful bureaucrats doing god knows what. What we’ve seen is an incredible drought of basic infrastructure, and laying off hundreds of thousands of school teachers.
FIORINA: It is a fact that virtually every department in every organization in Washington, D.C. has seen its budget increase for the last 40 years. That money is being paid to hire people. The number of people who are — of course there are some teachers…
KRUGMAN: The vast bulk of public sector employees are at the state and local level. They are largely school teachers plus police officers plus firefighters. And your notion that it’s all these bureaucrats — that’s a myth that’s used…
FIORINA: It’s not a myth, it’s a fact. It’s not a myth, it’s a fact. We don’t have enough private escort job creation.
It’s a myth. Public sector jobs at the federal level have actually remained pretty stable over the last forty years. They began and ended the period around approximately 2.8 million, with a bounce to about 3.1 million circa-1990. Public sector jobs at the state and local levels increased significantly over those forty years, peaking at a bit over 19 million total when President Obama entered office. (They’ve fallen since, accounting for the decline in overall public employment.) But nearly all of that growth was in teachers and support staff for the education system, who now total nearly 7 million of those state and local workers.
The other major categories of jobs in state and local public employment are, as Krugman noted, police, firefighters, health care workers, and maintenance workers and drivers for the country’s transportation infrastructure. And the overall population of the country has also been growing, so even though the raw number of state and local workers increased significantly, the ratio of those workers to the overall population did not — 59 per 1000 in 1980 versus 65 per 1000 today.
ABC News’ White House correspondent is leaving the network for a new role at CNN.
He will host a new weekday program on CNN and serve as chief White House correspondent for the network beginning in 2013, CNN said in a statement on Thursday.
“We are thrilled to have Jake join CNN and take the helm of a brand new weekday program,” said CNN executive vice-president Ken Jautz. “Jake is an exceptional reporter and communicator, and we look forward to developing a program that takes advantage of all of his strengths, his passion and his knowledge of national issues and events.”
His departure now comes as ABC News shows no indication that it will appoint a new host for “This Week” anytime soon. When George Stepanopoulos stepped down as host in 2010, many thought that Tapper would replace him. Tapper was the interim host, but Christiane Amanpour was chosen to host the show instead. When she stepped down in 2011, Tapper was passed over again.
ABC News announced Tapper’s departure in a statement Thursday. Jon Karl, formerly senior political correspondent, will become the network’s new chief White House correspondent.
h/t: Huffington Post
Just days after several key Republicans sought to distance themselves from Indiana senate candidate Richard Mourdock in the wake of his misogynistic comments on rape, top-level Romney surrogate and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich tried a different approach, taking the time to defend Mourdock’s comment that a forced pregnancy resulting from a rape was a “gift from god” as a mainstream Christian value on Sunday’s episode of This Week with George Stephanopoulos:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, Mr. Speaker, you heard Stephanie Cutter bring up the issue of Richard Mourdock, the Republican Senate candidate in indiana, saying that it’s wrong for romney to stand up for him. and say that his comments were wrong. your response?
GINGRICH: My response is, if you listen to what Mourdock actually said, he said what virtually every catholic and every fundamentalist in the country believes, life begins at conception.…
STEPHANOPOULOS: Mr. Speaker, what Mr. Mourdock said exactly was that this life after rape, as horrible as it may be, is something that god intended to happen. Do you agree with that?
GINGRICH: And he also immediately issued a clarification saying that he was referring to the act of conception and he condemned rape. Romney has condemned rape. One part of this is nonsense. Every candidate I know, every decent american i know condemns rape. Okay so, why can’t people like Stephanie Cutter get over it? We all condemn rape…
Despite Gingrich’s statement, Republicans, including Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan, have actually spent more time qualifying and redefining rape than condemning it. In just the last year, Republicans at every level of government have sought to manipulate the definition of rape, introducing such terminology as “legitimate rape,” “forcible rape,” “honest rape,” and more.
No, Pig Newton, we will NOT get over it! So shut your fucking piehole!
MMFA:
Conservative commentator Ann Coulter responded to the October 22 presidential debate by referring to President Obama as “the retard.” Her comments come one month after she appeared as a panelist on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
Think Progress: On ABC’s This Week, Mary Matalin Calls Paul Krugman A ‘Liar’ For Telling The Truth
During a roundtable discussion on George Stephanoupolos’ This Week Sunday morning, GOP political consultant Mary Matalin got into a heated exchange with Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, calling him a “liar” for previously referring to Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform plan as a “voucher” program:
MATALIN: You have mischaracterized and you have lied about every position and every particular of the Ryan plan on Medicare, from the efficiency of Medicare administration, to calling it a voucher plan, so you’re hardly credible on calling somebody else a liar.
Excuse me, Reince! Your party had a TERRIBLE week.
Mitt Romney had a good week even as his “47 percent” comments dominated the headlines, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus said Sunday.
“I think that we had a good week last week,” Priebus said on ABC’s “This Week.” “I think in retrospect, in that we were able to frame up the debate last week in the sense of, what future do we want and do you want out there.”
That came after Priebus said, earlier on in the interview, that Romney has been clear his “47 percent” remark “probably wasn’t the best-said moment in the campaign” and, ultimately, this was “probably not the best week in the campaign.”
That comes even as many high-profile Republicans, including Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, have begun arguing that the Romney campaign needs a turnaround and that, even more fundamentally, the Republican Party needs to change.
Last week, prominent far-right fringe voice Dana Loesch has been in a heap of lies, ranging from her rampant Islamophobia by the demonization of Huma Abedin to declaring aCONSERVATIVE Christian caller who criticized Chick-Fil-A’s anti-LGBTQ polices a “phony Christian.” Also, on ABC’s This Week, Loesch lied her ass off to the American people.
(Cross-posted from DanaBusted.blogspot.com)
Last week, CNN contributor Dana Loesch claimed a State Department official has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood — even as her CNN co-workers Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper dismissed such charges as “McCarthy-like.”
On her July 19 radio show, Loesch was discussing charges initially brought by Rep. Michele Bachmann, who in June sent a series of letters to federal agencies claiming that “individuals and organizations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood” are influencing State Department policies. Bachmann singled out Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin — who is also married to former Rep. Anthony Weiner — and claimed that Abedin’s family has connections to the Muslim Brotherhood; she later openly wondered how Abedin “was able to avoid being disqualified for a security clearance.”
From the 07.19.2012 edition of KFTK’s The Dana Show:
Next up is Loesch’s berating of a Christian conservative caller who opposed Chick-Fil-A’s anti-LGBTQ policies on The Dana Show.
And this past Sunday, St. Louis’s leading loon made up more lies on ABC’s This Week.
From the 07.29.2012 edition of ABC’s This Week:
ABC again invited CNN contributor and conservative pundit Dana Loesch to be part of its This Week roundtable, even though she has promoted a conspiracy theory that her CNN co-workers described as “McCarthy-like.”
On her radio show earlier this week, Loesch promoted the fringe idea that Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin “is essentially a member of the female version of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim Sisterhood.” The comment was the subject of a letter circulated by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) attacking Abedin.
Similarly, Loesch attacked a caller to her show this week who said she opposed Chick-Fil-A management’s stance against gay marriage, telling her that “I know you hate Christ.” Loesch claimed that as a supporter of marriage equality, the woman could not be a Christian. Polls over the last decades have shown declining opposition to same-sex marriage among evangelicals, and among Americans in general.
From the 07.29.2012 edition of ABC’s This Week:
But Loesch nevertheless repeated the claim on This Week, saying, “obviously the CEO is a Christian, people are shocked that he’s for traditional marriage? It just doesn’t make sense to me.”
Conservative Columnist Will: “Early Voting Is ‘Deplorable’”
Conservative columnist George Will described early voting as “deplorable” during ABC’s This Week, arguing that the phenomena “complicates” campaigning for the presidential candidates.
(via Olbermann on ABC’s This Week: ‘Almost deliberate’ gas price hikes are to hurt Obama | The Raw Story)
Liberal commentator Keith Olbermann on Sunday suggested that the price of gas had been artificially manipulated since President Barack Obama took office to hurt his chances at re-election.
In an appearance on ABC, Olbermann noted he had become suspicious after gas prices increased from $1.61 a gallon when Obama took the oath of Office in January 2009 to nearly $4 a gallon earlier this month.
“The lowest gas prices in the last six years, the nadir of gas prices at the pump, was the day of this president’s inauguration in 2009,” Olbermann explained. “There has to be some connection between that being the least-busy political moment of a president’s career — when you’re not going to hurt him and you’re not going to harm him that way — and the price of gas.”
“There has to be an almost deliberate or at least a side-effect quality to that. There must be.”
Last week, the president proposed measures that would give regulators more power to limit manipulation of the oil markets.
“We can’t afford a situation where some speculators can reap millions while millions of American families get the short end of the stick,” he told reporters.
But Republicans like Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) quickly dismissed the proposal.
On Sunday morning, ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos gave right-wing shock pundit Ann Coulter a national platform to opine on national politics and promote herself and her books. This Week is generally a serious and reasonable look back on the week’s political events. Coulter, however, is neither serious nor reasonable – not even close.
Coulter, a self-described “mean-spirited, bigoted conservative,” goes out of her way to provoke and offend and even promote violence.In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Coulter attacked a group of widows that had joined together to lobby for a government investigation into the attacks, culminating with the 9/11 Commission:These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzies. I have never seen people enjoying their husbands’ death so much.
- Women shouldn’t be allowed to vote: “If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe dream, it’s a personal fantasy of mine, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.”
- Killing an abortion doctor isn’t murder: “Well, apparently, this one random nut who shot Tiller — I don’t really like to think of it as a murder. It was terminating Tiller in the 203rd trimester.”
- John Edwards is a “faggot”: “I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.”
- Whites don’t think about blacks because they’re inferior: “Here’s a little inside scoop about white people: We’re not thinking about you. Especially WASPs. We think everybody is inferior, and we are perfectly charming about it.”
- Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to fly on airlines: “I think airlines ought to start advertising: ‘We have the most civil rights lawsuits brought against us by Arabs.’” “[Muslims] could use flying carpets.”
- Jews need to be “perfected” by becoming Christian: “We just want Jews to be perfected, as they say. That is what Christianity is. We believe the Old Testament, but ours is more like Federal Express.”
