“Several years ago, when 17,000 aborted babies were found in a dumpster outside a pathology laboratory in Los, Angeles, California, some 12-15,000 were observed to be black.”–Erma Clardy Craven (deceased) Social Worker and Civil Rights Leader
Cleaver used to be outspoken about protecting women and children from Planned Parenthood. He wasn’t always pro-abortion. There was a time, before the character-morphing act of running for national political office, that he was passionately pro-life. And he wasn’t just a pro-life wallflower; he was actively engaged. He was once on the Board of Advisors of Missouri’s largest prolife organization, Missouri Citizens for Life (now Missouri Right to Life) while he was a Kansas City councilman (see embedded pic of letterhead with his name in left column). Apparently, he left his pro-life convictions behind when he ran for Democrat mayor of Kansas City. Read more….
Former presidential candidate Herman Cain and Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus will be in Missouri next month for two breakfast events in St. Louis and Kansas City called the “Missouri Faith Based and Community Leaders Breakfast” hosted by Job Creators Solutions. Founded by renowned businessmen Bernie Marcus and Herman Cain, Job Creators Solutions assists employers in educating employees about policy issues and candidate positions affecting their company, job security, wages and benefits, and their families.
The St. Louis breakfast will be held Thursday, October 11th at 8:00 AM at the Crowne Plaza Hotel – 200 North 4th Street, St. Louis, MO 63102. The event is free but you must RSVP and have a ticket. (Click here to RSVP)
The Kansas City breakfast will be held Friday, October 12th at 8:00 AM at the Crowne Plaza Hotel Kansas City Downtown– 1301 Wyandotte St, Kansas City, MO 64105. The event is free but you must RSVP and have a ticket. (Click here to RSVP)
The New York Times reported yesterday, “Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the Senate’s third-ranking Democrat, threw cold water on Tuesday on one emerging approach for striking a bipartisan deficit-reduction deal — an overhaul of the tax code that lowers top income tax rates but raises more revenue. Mr. Schumer’s position complicates efforts to seal a deal before January, when the ‘fiscal cliff’ of tax increases and automatic spending cuts goes into effect.”
ABC News added, “In a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Schumer shot down the plan that is currently being negotiated by small groups of lawmakers behind closed doors. That plan embraces the tax reform model of lowering tax rates for all and closing loopholes. . . . Everyone from the president’s fiscal commission – more commonly known as the Bowle’s Simpson commission – to GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney have championed some version of this type of ‘lower the rates, broaden the base’ reform. But Schumer said today the version being negotiated on Capitol Hill needs to be flat-out scrapped.”
And Politico points out, “It’s a dramatic departure from the 1986 rate-lowering method of tax reform that congressional tax writers have spent the past several years trying to replicate. It’s also a rejection of the type of tax code overhaul endorsed by groups such as the Simpson-Bowles commission and the Gang of Six. If embraced by other Democrats, Schumer’s approach would represent a hardening of the party’s position on taxes and could complicate the prospects for a bipartisan deal before year’s end to avoid the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts and the start of automatic budget cuts.”
So once again, a top Senate Democrat has taken the position that raising taxes is apparently the most important thing to the majority party in the Senate. Senate Democrats are so determined to raise taxes, they’re putting it ahead of economic considerations and bipartisan tax reform ideas.
Responding to Schumer’s retrenchment on tax increases, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said, “Sen. Schumer is now the second member of the Senate Democrat leadership to endorse ‘Thelma and Louise economics.’ Senior Democrats are now openly acknowledging their plan to hold the economy hostage to massive, job-killing tax hikes, and espousing the fiscally irresponsible view that says the country should be driven off the fiscal cliff rather than Congress working toward bipartisan solutions to reform and strengthen entitlements without killing jobs. And he admits that Democrats don’t intend to reform entitlements or our tax code as a means to restore fiscal sanity, create jobs, or protect our seniors, but rather to use the effort as a lure to entice support for even more job-killing tax hikes. The Speaker and I have called for extending all the income tax rates for a year, ensuring that no one sees an income tax hike in January and preventing the economic harm and massive job loss that will come if Sen. Schumer and Washington Democrats follow through on their threats to drive us off the fiscal cliff. This uncertainty needs to be dealt with sooner rather than later. We need to find a way to deal with the sequester not by cutting a penny less, but by intelligently making the decisions that are necessary to keep our promise to reduce the debt by $2.1 trillion and to get our economy back on track.”
The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler takes down another favorite talking point of President Obama and Democrats in Congress today: that the economic crisis was somehow caused by the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.
Kessler writes, “While one can argue whether deregulation under Clinton or Bush played a bigger role in the financial crisis, the notion that the Bush tax cuts ‘led’” to the 2008 crisis is especially puzzling. The campaign’s back-up material for the Obama ad cites only one source — a column by our colleague Ezra Klein. . . . There’s one problem though: the column does not back up Obama’s statement about tax cuts. . . . Just to be sure, we checked with Klein, and here is how he responded: ‘I am absolutely not saying the Bush tax cuts led to the financial crisis. To my knowledge, there’s no evidence of that.’”
Further, Kessler notes, “we are unaware of any respected academic study making this link. . . . Indeed, the official government inquiry, the 631-page final report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States, makes no mention of the Bush tax cuts.” And, Kessler points out, that report was “endorsed by every Democrat on the panel.”
It’s also worth pointing out that it’s rather odd for President Obama to be making the claim that the tax rates approved under President Bush were calamitous yet Obama signed a two-year extension of these tax rates.
Kessler concludes, “It is time for the Obama campaign to retire this talking point . . . . The financial crisis of 2008 stemmed from a variety of complex factors, in particular the bubble in housing prices and the rise of exotic financial instruments. In any case, the Bush tax cuts belong at the bottom of the list — if at all. Moreover, it is rather strange for the campaign to cite as its source an article that, according to the author, does not support this assertion. We nearly made this Four Pinocchios but ultimately decided that citing deregulation in conjunction with tax cuts kept this line out of the ‘whopper’ category. Still, in his effort to portray Romney as an echo of Bush, the president really stretches the limits here. Three Pinocchios.”
Reuters wrote last night, “The federal government will buy an Illinois prison that the Obama administration once considered as a successor to the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Attorney General Eric Holder said on Tuesday.”
Politico adds, “The unusual move to ‘reprogram’ existing Justice Department funding bypassed House appropriators, who had objected to the purchase. . . . In 2010, the Obama administration and Durbin floated the idea of moving some Guantanamo prisoners to the Illinois facility, but the proposal was opposed by Congressional Republicans as well as civil liberties and human rights groups, and the House later voted overwhelmingly to prevent the transfer of any Gitmo prisoner to the U.S.”
Indeed, Reuters notes, “Congress blocked funding for President Barack Obama’s idea and tightly restricted all transfers from the camp at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base in eastern Cuba.”
But the purchase still raises some serious concerns, especially because the Obama administration went ahead with the purchase without approval from Congress.
Former presidential candidate Herman Cain and Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus will be in Missouri next month for two breakfast events in St. Louis and Kansas City called the “Missouri Faith Based and Community Leaders Breakfast” hosted by Job Creators Solutions. Founded by renowned businessmen Bernie Marcus and Herman Cain, Job Creators Solutions assists employers in educating employees about policy issues and candidate positions affecting their company, job security, wages and benefits, and their families.
The St. Louis breakfast will be held Thursday, October 11th at 8:00 AM at the Crowne Plaza Hotel – 200 North 4th Street, St. Louis, MO 63102. The event is free but you must RSVP and have a ticket. (Click here to RSVP)
The Kansas City breakfast will be held Friday, October 12th at 8:00 AM at the Crowne Plaza Hotel Kansas City Downtown– 1301 Wyandotte St, Kansas City, MO 64105. The event is free but you must RSVP and have a ticket. (Click here to RSVP)
The Wall Street Journal has a must-read editorial today on the failures of President Obama’s economic policies. The editorial opens by noting an exchange where former President Bill Clinton, making the case for Obama, is lecturing CBS’ Bob Schieffer that “I don’t know a single serious economist who believes that as much [economic] damage as we had could have been healed [in four years].” “Well,” the WSJ editors write, “let’s see. We can think of several serious people who said we could heal the economy in four years. There’s Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Christina Romer, Jared Bernstein, Mark Zandi, and, most importantly, President Obama himself.”
The editorial explains, “Mr. Obama told Americans in 2009 that if he did not turn around the economy in three years his Presidency would be ‘a one-term proposition.’ Joe Biden said three years ago that the $830 billion economic stimulus was working beyond his ‘wildest dreams’ and he famously promised several months after the Obama stimulus was enacted that Americans would enjoy a ‘summer of recovery.’ That was more than three years ago.
“In early 2009 soon-to-be White House economists Ms. Romer and Mr. Bernstein promised Congress that the stimulus would hold the unemployment rate below 7% and that by now it would be 5.6%. Instead the rate is 8.1%. The latest Census Bureau report says there are nearly seven million fewer full-time, year-round workers today than in 2007. The labor participation rate is the lowest since 1981.
“So it has gone with nearly every prediction the President has made about where the economy would be today. Mr. Obama promised that the deficit would be cut in half in four years, but the fiscal 2012 deficit (estimated to be above $1 trillion) will be twice the 2008 deficit ($458 billion).”
The Journal editors write, “There’s nothing unusual about candidates making grandiose promises that don’t come true. . . . The bad faith wasn’t then. It’s now. Mr. Obama really believed that government spending would unleash a robust recovery in employment and housing—an ‘economy built to last.’ Now that this hasn’t happened and with the Congressional Budget Office predicting a possible recession for 2013, Team Obama claims these woeful results were the best that could have been expected. The problem with this line is that every President who has inherited a recession in modern times has done better.Under Mr. Obama, measured on the basis of jobs, GDP growth and incomes, this has been by far the meekest recovery from the past 10 recessions.”
They conclude, “When campaigning to be President in 1960, John F. Kennedy denounced slow growth under Eisenhower and Nixon and said ‘We can do bettah.’ Growth was 7.2% in 1959 and 2.5% in 1960. Since the recession ended under Mr. Obama, growth has been 2.4% in 2010, 1.8% in 2011 and, after Thursday’s downward revision for the second quarter, 1.7% in 2012.
“Mr. Obama is running for re-election trying to convince Americans that an economy limping at less than 2% growth, 8% unemployment, real incomes down 5.7% since the recovery began, and deficits of more than $1 trillion is the best we could achieve. We liked it better when he stood for hope and change.”
The AP reports today, “The U.S. economy grew at a sluggish 1.3 percent annual rate in the April-June quarter, held back by the severe drought that reduced farm production in the Midwest. The growth rate was lowered from a previous estimate of 1.7 percent, the Commerce Department said Thursday.” AFP called the data “far weaker than previously believed” and economist Chris Williamson told CNNMoney, “The 1.3% increase in GDP was the weakest since the third quarter of last year and one of the weakest seen since the recovery began three years ago.” CNNMoney added, “Growth is still frustratingly slow, and economists often say the economy needs to expand at least 3% a year to bring the unemployment rate down significantly.”
Given yet another set of disappointing economic numbers, it just reinforces the folly of Democrats’ desire to raise taxes now. When he signed the last full extension of tax rates, President Obama said that “tax rates for every American were poised to automatically increase on January 1st” and allowing that to happen “would have been a blow to our economy just as we’re climbing out of a devastating recession.” The president was right when he signed that extension in December 2010, and clearly, things haven’t improved since then.
So why are the president and Democrats now so adamant about raising taxes? In July, 51 Senate Democrats voted for a massive tax hikes. And The Wall Street Journal editors observed, “Mr. Obama is demanding tax increases, not tax cuts, and large increases at that.”
As Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said after Democrats voted for their tax hike, “After nearly four years of spending and debt, millions of Americans are still struggling amidst the slowest recovery in modern times, and the economy is flat on its back. And they want to raise taxes. . . . [T]wo years ago, Democrats agreed that the higher taxes they’re now fighting for would hurt the economy. At a time when economic growth was 3.5 percent, 40 Democrats voted to keep rates where they were on the grounds that it was the best thing for jobs.”
With growth as low as 1.3% now, do Democrats still think it’s the time to raise taxes?
Democratic St. Louis County Councilman Steve Stenger has fired the first early salvo in the much anticipated battle between Stenger and the ethically challenged Charlie Dooley. Although not up for re-election until 2014, political pundits believe Dooley is very vulnerable.
