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Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Alan Grayson: Rick Scott Wants A Tax Cut For Rick Scott

Uploaded by  on Mar 9, 2011
Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) explains the real reason why Florida Governor Rick Scott is pushing to eliminate corporate taxes and cut education funding in Florida. Grayson tells MSNBC's Cenk Uygur that Scott is "taking money out of children's pockets dollar for dollar so he can stuff it in his own." The interview took place on March 8, 2011.

UPDATE: #Wisconsin GOP passes union-stripping bill

 

Walker applauds move

Gov. Scott Walker this evening applauded the Senate's actions.

His statement:

"The Senate Democrats have had three weeks to debate this bill and were offered repeated opportunities to come home, which they refused. In order to move the state forward, I applaud the Legislature's action today to stand up to the status quo and take a step in the right direction to balance the budget and reform government. The action today will help ensure Wisconsin has a business climate that allows the private sector to create 250,000 new jobs."

-- By JR Ross
 Senate approves amended budget repair bill
The state Senate quickly approved the amended budget repair bill this evening 18-1 moments after it was passed out of conference committee.

The Senate offered no debate on the bill as Sen. Dale Schultz, R-Richland Center, was the only member to vote against it.

Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca raised concerns about whether the conference committee was properly noticed, said he'd like to offer amendments and asked for details on the revised bill.

Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, told Barca the bill was the same one the Assembly voted for almost 60 hours with some changes, but he did not detail what they were other than reading a statement at the beginning of the meeting that the revised bill would not trigger the constitutional requirement of 20 members being present for a vote on a fiscal bill.

-- By JR Ross and Andy Szal
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UPDATE @7:32 EASTERN: NBC News reports that the Wisconsin Senate has passed a bill stripping unionized state workers of collective bargaining rights without any Democrats present.It went 18-1, with the Assembly looking likely to vote tomorrow morning. Democrats say the rushed proceedings violate the state's open meetings law and that they'll be asking the State Attorney General to intervene.
Previously: Potentially big news in Wisconsin just now. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports that Republican Senators have moved Governor Walker's budget-repair bill to a joint committee. That committee can then rework the bill and send it back to the House and Senate for a vote. From the Journal-Sentinel:
What changes would be made remains unclear, but Democrats said they had not been consulted on them. They raised concerns that Republicans would take out all the spending in the bill and leave only the changes to collective bargaining.
To pass spending measures, 20 senators must be present, but Republicans hold just 19 seats. But Republicans would not need any Democrats to be present to pass the collective bargaining changes as a standalone bill.
That squares with what we're hearing, too -- that Republicans are splitting Governor Walker's bill into two parts. They can vote by themselves, without a budget quorum, on anything that's not fiscally related. Since the union-busting is not about the budget (as we've been saying throughout the standoff), they could vote on that without the Democrats present.
A Republican source in Madison tells NBC's Mike Taibbi that Senate Republicans could vote on the provisions to strip collective bargaining rights as soon as tonight. Mr. Taibbi reports that the source is furious because a compromise with Democrats had nearly been in place. Another report, on WisPolitics, makes it sound like today's development happened in a hurry.
We'll have much more on the show at 9 PM Eastern.

Obama Ratifies Bush

MARCH 8, 2011


The Administration embraces military tribunals at Gitmo.

No one has done more to revive the reputation of Bush-era antiterror policies than the Obama Administration. In its latest policy reversal, yesterday Mr. Obama said the U.S. would resume the military tribunals for Guantanamo terrorists that he unilaterally suspended two years ago, and he may even begin referring new charges to military commissions within days or weeks.
The political left is enraged by what it claims is a betrayal, but we're glad to see Mr. Obama bowing to security reality and erring on the side of keeping the country safe—with one exception, about which more below.
On a conference call yesterday, senior Administration officials tried to sell their military commissions process as more "credible" than Mr. Bush's, but their policy changes are de minimis. In 2009, Congress made technical reforms for handling testimony and classified information. By executive order, a new panel will now also conduct a "periodic review" of detentions. But the bipartisan Military Commissions Act of 2006, or MCA, had already included "administrative review boards" dedicated to the same goal.
The White House yesterday also stressed its commitment to civilian terror prosecutions going forward, but that also doesn't mean much. Last year the Democratic Congress barred funding for transferring enemy combatants from Gitmo to the U.S., and that won't change with a Republican House.
Getty Images
U.S. military guards move a detainee in Guantanamo Bay.
The real news here is the final repudiation of Attorney General Eric Holder's attempt to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 plotters as criminal defendants on U.S. soil. The killers at Guantanamo will now be brought to justice via a process that the President once depicted as akin to the Ministry of Love in "1984." On the campaign trail in 2008, Mr. Obama claimed that Mr. Bush "runs prisons which lock people away without ever telling them why they're there or what they're charged with."
In an August 2007 speech that his advisers touted at the time, Mr. Obama promised to repeal this "legal framework that does not work." He even claimed that Bush policies undermined "our Constitution and our freedom" and that the Bush Administration had pressed a "false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand," a line he recycled in his Inaugural Address. He went out of his way to vote against the Military Commissions Act.
So much for all that. Yesterday the senior Administration officials even praised the "bipartisan effort" that produced that law. They're right. The MCA was a serious and painstaking compromise under the constitutional guidance of the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision, but the anti-antiterror lobby—including candidate Obama—maintained it was an affront to American values. The real test of Mr. Obama's new maturity will be if he puts the guts back into the tribunal process, restoring the funding and talent necessary to handle complex prosecutions that have been lost over the years amid the assault on Gitmo.
The other note of trouble is Mr. Obama's decision, also announced yesterday, to seek Senate ratification of a radical 1977 revision to the 1949 Geneva Conventions known as Additional Protocol 1. President Reagan repudiated Protocol 1 in 1987 because it vitiated the distinction between lawful and unlawful enemy combatants. Terrorists fight out of uniform and target civilians and thus do not deserve traditional prisoner-of-war protections. This was the two-decade political consensus until the Bush Presidency. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post editorialized in favor of Reagan's Protocol 1 decision.
Our guess is that Mr. Obama has adopted Protocol 1 to appease the domestic left and especially the "international community" that will be dismayed by his new embrace of Gitmo and George W. Bush's policies. Remember the moralizing Europeans? (See here.) Mr. Obama is nonetheless complicating the task of U.S. terror fighters, and encouraging further barbarism, by extending the laws of war to terrorists who hold combat restrictions in contempt.
Mr. Obama's antiterror policy migration may be startling but it does have a historic precedent. Republican isolationists opposed much of Harry Truman's policy framework at the dawn of the Cold War, only to have Dwight Eisenhower ratify nearly all of it when he became President. The responsibilities of power, and the realities of a dangerous world, tend to be educational.