According to Rick Perry, Republican Governors should stand by Wisconsin Scott Walker and his efforts to bust unions and annihilate the financial security of hard working Americans.
“Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is in the middle of what will be a defining moment for our country and the conservative movement,” said RGA Chairman Rick Perry. “It is essential that we stand with Governor Walker and show political leaders throughout the country that America is ready to take on its toughest political challenges.”
Rick Perry quickly walked back his love and support for Gov. Scott Walker.
How is that small government low taxes thing that delivered a $30 billion short fall of a rotten egg working out for you, Rick? Folks in Texas are not very happy about your slashing and burning of school budgets and social programs for economically challenged Texans and their children. Nor are we bragging much about your throwing the sick, the uninsured and the elderly into utter misery and deprivation just because you happen to suffer from a delusional case of narcissism.
Visit Houston much, Governor?
There is a price to pay for lax regulation and oversight, Mr. Perry.
Spooning rice into my daughter's perfect, chubby mouth the other night, all I could think about were the babies.
Those tiny babies, limbs splayed lifelessly on the lawn outside a fiery west Houston day care as firefighters tried futilely to revive them.
The next day, reading the story in the paper, I couldn't help but imagine my own toddler crawling her way out of the smoke, coughing, crying, searching. For me.
And I wouldn't be there.
Like the 50 percent of families with infants, and 75 percent with toddlers, my husband and I would be at work.
Every day, one of us drives our daughter to "school." We call it that because it makes us feel better about handing over our most precious joy to people we hardly know.
We gulp down the guilt and tell ourselves she's learning social skills and that the second income helps us give her a better life. But the guilt is always there. It's there when I see other moms rushing to play dates in mid-afternoon, while I'm rushing to an interview. It's there when some new study shows more health risks for kids whose moms work.
It was there a few minutes ago, when, as I was writing this column, a woman with my daughter's day care called to say she had a scratch, near her eye. She hadn't cried and it didn't break the skin. (A scratch, I thought, thank God.)
The guilt turns to fear when I hear about the kind of horrific tragedy that happened this week at Jackie's Child Care, where a fire that apparently broke out in the kitchen claimed the lives of three toddlers and hospitalized four other children.
There is also a devastating price to pay for the failure of conservative trickle down economics.
The G.O.P.'s Abandoned Babies
Dr. Jennifer L. Howse, the president of the March of Dimes, which in 2003 started a multimillion-dollar premature birth campaign focusing on awareness and education, has said of the decline: “The policy changes and programs to prevent preterm birth that our volunteers and staff have worked so hard to bring about are starting to pay off.”
The bad news is that, according to the March of Dimes, the Republican budget passed in the House this month could do great damage to this progress. The budget proposes:
• $50 million in cuts to the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant that “supports state-based prenatal care programs and services for children with special needs.”
• $1 billion in cuts to programs at the National Institutes of Health that support “lifesaving biomedical research aimed at finding the causes and developing strategies for preventing preterm birth.”
• Nearly $1 billion in cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for its preventive health programs, including to its preterm birth studies.
This is the same budget in which House Republicans voted to strip all federal financing for Planned Parenthood.
Mr. Blow, the author of the article, posed a question about the humanity of such Republican proposals.
It is savagely immoral and profoundly inconsistent to insist that women endure unwanted — and in some cases dangerous — pregnancies for the sake of “unborn children,” then eliminate financing designed to prevent those children from being delivered prematurely, rendering them the most fragile and vulnerable of newborns. How is this humane?
There is no humane here where the GOP and its tea party wing is concerned. They know no empathy. They know no sympathy. They know no shame. Just read the comments captured from a story about a daycare fire in Houston in which three babies were burned to death. Others are hospitalized with severe burns.
I wonder what the four mothers (who sadly lost their babies in the fire) will do with the money they earned the day their babies died?
Neither day care facilities nor manicurists should be regulated by the state. Let consumers decide which day care centers and manicurists they want to patronize, if any.
(Directed at the journalist who posted the piece about the Houston daycare fire): As usual, leftist Lisa wants to have the government to do everything for her, even evaluate where she leaves her child. She really should feel guilty about leaving her most precious possession in the care of someone else. She should not flatter herself by thinking that anyone would miss your column as much as her child misses her. She will miss important events in her child’s life.
It is called personal responsibility for your children.
Ms. Falkenberg could quite easily write her column from home but that is not the point.
Dumping your children in daycare, or parenting by proxy, in order to have an out-of-the-home career is, along with having an abortion or three, a feminist milestone. A right of passage if you will.
She might be making a big show for us here by wringing her hands until they are chapped and bloody but in reality there is not a day-care fire in the world that would get a leftist like this to stay at home and raise her own children.
The GOP certainly offers a huge and big tent for the unforgiving who love to forgive themselves.
And then some on the national level.
On the big bad deficit reduction efforts.
That’s not to say there is no fiscal mission in the right’s agenda, both nationally and locally — only that the mission has nothing to do with deficit reduction. The real goal is to reward the G.O.P.’s wealthiest patrons by crippling what remains of organized labor, by wrecking the government agencies charged with regulating and policing corporations, and, as always, by rewarding the wealthiest with more tax breaks. The bankrupt moral equation codified in the Bush era — that tax cuts tilted to the highest bracket were a higher priority even than paying for two wars — is now a given. The once-bedrock American values of shared sacrifice and equal economic opportunity have been overrun.
Who knew? The Koch boys happen to own the Republican Party lock, stock and barrel.
A Libertarian shift to disaster.
Look to Washington for the bigger story. As The Los Angeles Times recently reported, Koch Industries and its employees form the largest bloc of oil and gas industry donors to members of the new House Energy and Commerce Committee, topping even Exxon Mobil. And what do they get for that largess? As a down payment, the House budget bill not only reduces financing for the Environmental Protection Agency but also prohibits its regulation of greenhouse gases.
Here again, the dollars that will be saved are minute in terms of the federal deficit, but the payoff to Koch interests from a weakened E.P.A. is priceless. The same dynamic is at play in the House’s reduced spending for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Internal Revenue Service. and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (charged with regulation of the esoteric Wall Street derivatives that greased the financial crisis). The reduction in the deficit will be minimal, but the bottom lines for the Kochs and their peers, especially on Wall Street, will swell.
These special interests will stay in the closet next week when the Tea Partiers in the House argue (as the Gingrich cohort once did) that their only agenda is old-fashioned fiscal prudence. The G.O.P. is also banking on the presumption that Obama will bide his time too long, as he did in the protracted health care and tax-cut melees, and allow the Fox News megaphone, not yet in place in ’95, to frame the debate. Listening to the right’s incessant propaganda, you’d never know that the latest Pew survey found that Americans want to increase, not decrease, most areas of federal spending — and by large margins in the cases of health care and education.
I wonder if voters feel really good about the choices they made in 2010.