Thanks to everyone who liked my
original diary on Starve the Beast. With perfect timing, the AP has a new article out,
"NEARLY HALF OF STATES EXPECT TO CONFRONT BIG BUDGET GAPS," that: 1. reports on the growing alarm as Republican Starve the Beast policies continue to increasingly cripple at the state level, and 2. somehow, for some reason, as discussed in the original diary, refuses to say the words "Starve the Beast" or indicate that the "problem" being described is the intentional, openly acknowledged, multi-decade policy of one political party - the Republicans.
I've quoted a portion of the AP piece below, but you should read the entire article (linked above) because it is a perfect example of this complicit journalism, with the authors leaving just enough suggestions that something more complicated, "surprising" and nonpartisan (oil markets? projections? poor Obama recovery?) is at play rather than simply reporting that a great deal of this reflects a deliberate effort by Republicans to bankrupt government to obtain policy outcomes that they can't achieve through the ballot box. (I notice the authors don't even list the 22 states that they are writing about, presumably because the number of traditionally Red States, or states with a Republican governor, would not reflect "balance.")
[I previously included a selective quotation from the AP article that I was criticizing, but have decided to delete it because it appears to be distracting some commentators from the subject of the post. I don't agree with the commentators' understanding of the "Fair Use" doctrine - particularly when the quoted work is itself being criticized. But the legal debate on "fair use" is not as important as the actual subject of the post. The link to the same article text is provided above for anyone interested in reading it.]
8:31 AM PT: Note that the diary has been edited to only include a portion of the cited article because publishing the entire article, even with attribution and a link, may not be allowable.