What Liberal Media? Cable News Blames Public Unions For WI Budget Shortfall

What Liberal Media? Cable News Blames Public Unions For WI Budget Shortfall

In response to public worker protests in Wisconsin, Fox News has falsely blamed public unions for the state's budget shortfall. In fact, the deficit is reportedly due to other obligations.

Fox Blames Public Unions For WI Budget Shortfall

Kilmeade States That WI Faces Budget Shortfall Of "Over $100 Million" And That Walker Wants To "Close That Gap" By "Revisit[ing] The Public Employee Deals." On the February 18 edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade stated:

KILMEADE: Wisconsin is a state like many states in this country that has a bit of a budget deficit, the tune of over $100 million. So one way in which new Gov. Scott Walker wants to close that gap is to go revisit the public employee deals, government worker deals that have been cut between union workers and the state government. So, why not put that forward? Why not have them pay into their pensions? Why not have them pay into their retirement health care, because we, together, have to balance the budget, and the people have spoken out in November. They want Republicans to do the cutting. And that was the easy part. [Fox News' Fox & Friends, 2/18/11]

Killmeade: Walker "Can't Balance The Budget Unless He Gets These Contracts In Line." Later on Fox & Friends, Kilmeade asserted that Walker "can't balance the budget unless he gets these contracts in line." [Fox & Friends, 2/18/11]

O'Reilly: "Wisconsin Has A $3.6 Billion Shortfall Through 2013 And Simply Cannot Afford To Pay Its Bills ... And Public Workers Are The First Ones To Take The Hit." On the February 17 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, host Bill O'Reilly stated:

O'REILLY: Well, the state of Wisconsin has a $3.6 billion- short fall through 2013 and simply cannot afford to pay its bills. This is happening in many states and public workers are the first ones to take the hit. Obviously that's not going over well in Wisconsin.

[...]

O'REILLY: But if state workers will not give back some of their benefits, there is no solution to the fiscal crisis anywhere. You can't raise taxes anymore. The folks are tapped out, right?

Where I live on Long Island some elderly people are actually selling their homes because they can't sell the high property tax rate. The solution in bankrupt states is where these two agree to some kind of give back perhaps over a few years, that way they can look for other jobs in the private sector if they don't believe they are being compensated fairly in the public arena. I think that would be fair.

"Talking Points" believes that class warfare is about to break out in America. Union benefits are strangling not only state budgets but also the private economy.

Yes, workers do need protection. They need some kind of security in the marketplace. But, the cold truth is, that federal and state workers have reached the top of their earning pyramid. Bankruptcy looms in California and other states and give-backs are coming. The blow back to that will be nasty. [Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, 2/17/11, accessed via Nexis]

Hannity Says That "Wisconsin Taxpayers" Are "Picking Up The Slack" For State Workers. On the February 17 edition of his Fox News show, Sean Hannity stated that "Walker is asking that members of the unions do the following, put 5.8 percent of their wages towards their pensions. Most contribute almost nothing as things stand right now." He then stated, "Its Wisconsin taxpayers, they're the ones picking up the slack." [Fox News' Hannity, 2/17/11, accessed via Nexis]

Rove Notes Budget Shortfall And Calls Walker's Proposal "Fair" -- But Fails To Note That Walker's Tax Policies Helped Cause Shortfall. On the February 17 edition of Hannity, Fox News contributor Karl Rove stated that Wisconsin faces a "$137 million shortfall in this budget. They have a 3.6 billion shortfall in the coming -- they need to make tough decisions." [Hannity, 2/17/11, accessed via Nexis]
In Fact, The Shortfall Is Largely Due To Obligations Unreleated To Unions

AP: Wisconsin Faces Shortfall "Due Largely To Anticipated Medicaid Expenses And A Court-Ordered Repayment To A Fund That Was Raided Four Years Ago," And Walker's Tax Policies "Actually Make The State's Ongoing Budget Problem Worse." In a February 1 article, The Associated Press reported that "[a] new analysis released Monday showed that Wisconsin's budget could be between $79 million and $340 million short by June 30 due largely to anticipated Medicaid expenses and a court-ordered repayment to a fund that was raided four years ago." The AP further reported that tax cuts pushed through by Walker will "make the state's ongoing budget problem worse":

In Walker's first month in office he's pushed a number of tax cuts that actually make the state's ongoing budget problem worse. The Fiscal Bureau predicted the state will collect about $190 million less in taxes over the next two years than previously thought, with $117 million of that coming from Walker's tax cuts.

Walker argues the tax cuts will actually spur economic growth by making Wisconsin a more desirable place for businesses to locate. Democratic critics say the potential benefit to the tax breaks isn't significant enough given the cost. [The Associated Press, 2/1/11]

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Outlines Major Causes Of Wisconsin's Budget Shortfall, Which "Include Two Big Obligations" Unrelated To Unions That Total Almost $260M. In a February 1 article, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel noted causes of the state's budget shortfall and reported that Walker's tax policies accounted for "more than half" of an anticipated $203 million decline in tax revenues:

[T]he Legislature's budget office reported Monday that the budget shortfall for this fiscal year ending June 30 will total at least $78 million and could rise to as much as $336.5 million, depending on when the state pays up on two massive bills.

"Wisconsin, probably more than any other state in the country, is actively and aggressively moving to get people back to work," Walker said at the bill signing.

The state already faces a more than $3 billion shortfall in the 2011-'13 budget, so approving the tax incentive bills likely means Walker will have to find more spending cuts later.

The report Monday by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau found that over the next three fiscal years, the state will collect $203 million less in taxes than previously estimated. More than half of that drop in expected tax collections is because of tax-cut bills that Walker has signed or is poised to sign.

The report found that the state is projecting that spending on health care for the poor and related administrative costs, prisons and the state public defender's office will go nearly $200 million over budget this year.

In addition, the state has two big obligations looming: a $58.7 million payment to the State of Minnesota after the end of a tax-reciprocity agreement between Wisconsin and its neighbor; as well as an additional $200 million that the state is under court order to return to a medical malpractice fund after an illegal fund transfer in 2007 by lawmakers and Gov. Jim Doyle. The state has to pay all of that money, but not necessarily in this fiscal year. [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 2/1/11]

Facts the media needs to get straight. The unions have agreed to pay and retirement benefits compromises. Walker has said that teachers and other union members must give up their bargaining rights forever, but has kept bargaining rights for police and firefighters. This is obviously not about money. It is about Walker using strong arm tactics to attack people and groups he does not like.

Disgraced Former Republican Tea Party Leader Calls On Right-Wing Activists To Pose As SEIU Organizers

But Tea Party Nation and Mark Williams, the disgraced former chairman of Tea Party Express, who was forced to resign after making offensive racial comments, are calling for a more radical approach. In an email alert to supporters sent last night, Tea Party Nation promotes Williams’ “great idea” to impersonate SEIU organizers at upcoming labor rallies in an attempt to embarrass and discredit the union.

Mohamed Hosni Mubarak Walker is to blame for Wisconsin's budget, not unions

Mohamed Hosni Mubarak Walker is to blame for Wisconsin's budget, not unions

Let's be clear: Whatever fiscal problems Wisconsin is -- or is not -- facing at the moment, they're not caused by labor unions. That's also true for New Jersey, for Ohio and for the other states. There was no sharp rise in collective bargaining in 2006 and 2007, no major reforms of the country's labor laws, no dramatic change in how unions organize. And yet, state budgets collapsed. Revenues plummeted. Taxes had to go up, and spending had to go down, all across the country.

Blame the banks. Blame global capital flows. Blame lax regulation of Wall Street. Blame home buyers, or home sellers. But don't blame the unions. Not for this recession.

Of course, the fact that public-employee pensions didn't cause a meltdown at Lehman Brothers doesn't mean they're not stressing state budgets, and that the pensions they've been promised don't exceed what state budgets seem able to bear. But the buildup of global capital that overheated the American housing sector and got packaged into seemingly riskless financial products that then brought down Wall Street, paralyzing the economy, throwing millions out of work, and destroying the revenues from state income and sales taxes even as state residents needed more social services? The answer to that is not to end collective bargaining for (some) public employees. A plus B plus C does not equal what Gov. Scott Walker is attempting in Wisconsin.

In fact, it particularly doesn't work for what Walker is attempting in Wisconsin. The Badger State was actually in pretty good shape. It was supposed to end this budget cycle with about $120 million in the bank. Instead, it's facing a deficit. Why? I'll let the state's official fiscal scorekeeper explain (pdf):

More than half of the lower estimate ($117.2 million) is due to the impact of Special Session Senate Bill 2 (health savings accounts), Assembly Bill 3 (tax deductions/credits for relocated businesses), and Assembly Bill 7 (tax exclusion for new employees).

In English: The governor called a special session of the legislature and signed two business tax breaks and a conservative health-care policy experiment that lowers overall tax revenues (among other things). The new legislation was not offset, and it helped turn a surplus into a deficit [see update at end of post]. As Brian Beutler writes, "public workers are being asked to pick up the tab for this agenda."

But even that's not the full story here. Public employees aren't being asked to make a one-time payment into the state's coffers. Rather, Walker is proposing to sharply curtail their right to bargain collectively. A cyclical downturn that isn't their fault, plus an unexpected reversal in Wisconsin's budget picture that wasn't their doing, is being used to permanently end their ability to sit across the table from their employer and negotiate what their health insurance should look like.

That's how you keep a crisis from going to waste: You take a complicated problem that requires the apparent need for bold action and use it to achieve a longtime ideological objective. In this case, permanently weakening public-employee unions, a group much-loathed by Republicans in general and by the Republican legislators who have to battle them in elections in particular. And note that not all public-employee unions are covered by Walker's proposal: the more conservative public-safety unions -- notably police and firefighters, many of whom endorsed Walker -- are exempt.

*The budget report is working with two time periods simultaneously: 2010-2011, and then 2011-13. The $130 million deficit now projected for 2011 isn't the fault of the tax breaks passed during Walker's special session, though his special session created about $120 million in deficit spending between 2011 and 2013 -- and perhaps more than that, if his policies are extended. That is to say, the deficit spending he created in his special session is about equal to the deficit Wisconsin faces this year, but it's not technically correct to say that Walker created 2011's deficit. Rather, he added $120 million to the 2011-2013 deficits, and perhaps more in the years after that.

Walker has said, along with some other recently elected right-wing nuts, they are going to create jobs. Now that's funny. Mohamed Hosni Mubarak Walker job creator,

The Department of Health Services last month signed a new contract with Deloitte Consulting for more maintenance and enhancement of the information system for SeniorCare and other income maintenance programs.

According to the public inspection copy of Deloitte’s technical proposal, the new, eight-year contract (known as CARES) increases the hourly billing rate from $92 to $104 and increases the fixed facilities rate from $1,320,000 to $2,040,000 a year. When multiplied by the 300,000 billable hours that DHS estimates will be available, this contract’s total annual cost is tens of millions of dollars.

DHS could scale back this contract by hiring information technology professionals and doing much of this work in-house for less money. That’s what the Department of Workforce Development did several years ago when they took over maintenance of the portions of the CARES system which deal with the W-2 and Child Care programs.

Why is DHS preparing to spend over $30 million a year on one information system when times are so tough? It won’t create jobs for Wisconsin residents since most of Deloitte’s workforce is subcontracted from India.

Maybe when Scott Walker promised during his gubernatorial campaign that he’d create 250,000 jobs, perhaps what he really meant was those jobs would be in India, not Wisconsin.

Why do Republicans hate America and American workers.

Wisconsin Gov. Walker Played Accounting Tricks To Show Budget Shortfall To Undercut Worker Rights

Wisconsin Gov. Walker Played Accounting Tricks To Show Budget Shortfall To Undercut Worker Rights

Wisconsin's new Republican governor has framed his assault on public worker's collective bargaining rights as a needed measure of fiscal austerity during tough times.

The reality is radically different. Unlike true austerity measures -- service rollbacks, furloughs, and other temporary measures that cause pain but save money -- rolling back worker's bargaining rights by itself saves almost nothing on its own. But Walker's doing it anyhow, to knock down a barrier and allow him to cut state employee benefits immediately.

Furthermore, this broadside comes less than a month after the state's fiscal bureau -- the Wisconsin equivalent of the Congressional Budget Office -- concluded that Wisconsin isn't even in need of austerity measures, and could conclude the fiscal year with a surplus. In fact, they say that the current budget shortfall is a direct result of tax cut policies Walker enacted in his first days in office.

"Walker was not forced into a budget repair bill by circumstances beyond he control," says Jack Norman, research director at the Institute for Wisconsin Future -- a public interest think tank. "He wanted a budget repair bill and forced it by pushing through tax cuts... so he could rush through these other changes."

[ ]...You can read the fiscal bureaus report here (PDF). It holds that "more than half" of the new shortfall comes from three of Walker's initiatives:

* $25 million for an economic development fund for job creation, which still holds $73 million because of anemic job growth.

* $48 million for private health savings accounts -- a perennial Republican favorite.

* $67 million for a tax incentive plan that benefits employers, but at levels too low to spur hiring.

In essence, public workers are being asked to pick up the tab for this agenda.

It is a well known chapter in the right-wing conservative playbook that if you cannot win the debate on facts, lie and lie some more. Sprinkle on some false accusations against your opponent and you have the gutter ideology of modern conservatism.

Stimulus raised GDP by up to 4.2 pct in Q1 2010 -CBO

The massive U.S. stimulus package put up to 2.8 million people to work and boosted GDP by up to 4.2 percent in the first three months of 2010, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday.

CBO's latest estimate does not differ significantly from its previous assessments of the impact of the $893 billion package, passed in 2009.

But it is sure to cheer congressional Democrats as they struggle to advance a smaller package of safety-net spending, tax cuts and other measures to boost the sluggish economy and bring down the 9.9 percent unemployment rate.

Vice President Joe Biden issued a statement saying the CBO report "is important validation that the action we took to rescue the economy last year has not only pulled us back from the brink, but put us on a firm path toward economic recovery."

Republicans have made their agenda crystal clear, Gov. Walker a good example, they do not care about jobs or the families that rely on those jobs.

Jamie Dimon's `Biggest Disaster' Is Waiting: Simon Johnson

Jamie Dimon, chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., has harsh words for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They are “the biggest disasters of all time,” Dimon told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission last fall, according to his just-released interview.

Along with others, Dimon greatly exaggerates the role Fannie and Freddie played in the financial crisis, a theme my MIT colleague, Daron Acemoglu, has written about with great clarity.

Too many bankers assert some version of the refrain: Fannie Mae made me do it. As the FCIC’s report makes clear, it was the private sector that led us into the financial crisis by making massive subprime bets and then using complex derivatives deals to magnify the downside risks.

Nevertheless, Dimon makes a good point in the sense that Fannie and Freddie became too powerful politically, had too little equity relative to their debt levels and took on reckless amounts of risk. They blew themselves up at great cost to taxpayers.

Who are the government sponsored enterprises today? Which entities are too big to fail, in the eyes of lawmakers and regulators, and therefore are receiving implicit, no-cost government guarantees?

The answer is our largest bank holding companies such as JPMorgan, the second-biggest U.S. bank in terms of assets behind Bank of America Corp. This point is made in the latest quarterly report from Neil Barofsky, the special inspector-general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Flawed Metrics

The facts are relatively easy to research. Private banks made a lot of bad loans, and bets those loans would continue to increase in value (derivatives trading). Fannie and Freddie are not in the direct to homeowner lending business. Fannie and Freddie do not review loan applications or run credit checks on people - private banks are supposed to do their due diligence. Unknowingly Fannie and Freddie bought many of the bad loans banks made. That gave those banks more capital to make more loans. Now Wall St hustlers and Republicans are trying to pin the blame for the actions of private banks on Fannie and Freddie - the Freddie Made Us Do It school of deflecting responsibility.

Republican Budgets, Paul Ryan(WI) and The Big Lie

Republican Budgets, Paul Ryan(WI) and The Big Lie

Paul Ryan has been saying of President Obama's budget, "What we have is $1.6 trillion in new tax increases, $8.7 trillion in new spending. He's going to be adding $13 trillion to the debt over the course of his budget." Glenn Kessler figures out where these numbers come from. It's staggeringly dishonest:

The problematic figure in Ryan's statement is the claim that the president proposed $8.7 trillion in new spending. In response to a question about how this number was obtained, the Committee staff provided a chart that showed that outlays would be frozen every year for the next 10 years at the 2012 level of $3.729 trillion.

Thus, while in 2021 Obama proposes to spend $5.697 trillion, the Committee would still be spending $3.729 trillion, for a difference of almost $2 trillion. Add up the difference for every year, over 10 years, and it amounts to nearly $8.7 trillion, which the committee calls "new spending."

In other words, the Committee assumed the president needs to freeze all spending, without adjustments for inflation or population growth, for 10 years. Moreover, it makes this assumption for all spending, even mandatory programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which need to be changed by law.

Whatever bit of optimism or stretching you find in the administration's budget, nothing comes within an order of magnitude of this kind of dishonesty.

Ryan's reputation as an honest policy wonk is a curious thing. It must owe itself to the total dearth of elected Republicans who can even halfway plausibly bullshit their way through some numbers.

Ryan has killed and buried any credibility he has as an honest budget wonk. He has drink deeply of the conservative fun with numbers kool-aid, thus sold out his integrity. This is very much a prerequisite for being a modern conservative. If the truth has to be stabbed through the heart as part of the larger crusade for ever more power and creating a permanent plutocracy, than so be it.

Republicans really care about working class Americans - Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner: If Jobs Are Lost As A Result Of GOP Spending Cuts 'So Be It'

Authoritarian Pig Andrew Breitbart sued by Shirley Sherrod over damaging video

Authoritarian Pig Andrew Breitbart sued by Shirley Sherrod over damaging video

While most gathered at CPAC this past weekend were busy gobbling up buffet-sized servings of Republican rage, one outsized commentator was left eating a slice of humble pie.

Former USDA official Shirley Sherrod has filed a lawsuit against conservative firebrand and web entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart. The suit stems from the notorious video Breitbart posted online last year, showing an out-of-context excerpt from a speech Sherrod gave to the NAACP Freedom Fund in March 2010. The clip suggested she had used her position at the Department of Agriculture to discriminate against white farmers. The media devoured the Breitbart's version of story so voraciously that the NAACP denounced Sherrod and the Obama administration fired her. The charge was, in fact, entirely untrue.

Sherrod argues in the lawsuit that the clip "damaged her reputation and prevented her from continuing her work." Breitbart, meanwhile, denounced the suit, saying he "categorically rejects the transparent effort to chill his constitutionally protected free speech."

Breitbart's media machine is doing its best to reframe Sherrod's complaint in the most favorable terms possible. One of his websites, BigGovernment.com, posted an article, titled "New Media Entrepreneur declares that his voice will not be suppressed," shortly after Breitbart was served. The piece referred to the complaint as the "Pigford Lawsuit" -- a nod to Breitbart's newest "obsession" and would-be vehicle for dragging Sherrod's name through the mud. Not surprisingly, the meme does not appear to have caught on.

Breitbart's full statement:

I find it extremely telling that this lawsuit was brought almost seven months after the alleged incidents that caused a national media frenzy occurred. It is no coincidence that this lawsuit was filed one day after I held a press conference revealing audio proof of orchestrated and systemic Pigford fraud. I can promise you this: neither I, nor my journalistic websites, will or can be silenced by the institutional Left, which is obviously funding this lawsuit. I welcome the judicial discovery process, including finding out which groups are doing so.

Right-wing propagandist Andrew Breitbart has run up quite the record in lies and baseless smears, Sherrod Hoax Exposed, but Breitbart's ACORN Fraud Lives On

Breitbart's Pigford Report: Distortions And Shady Sourcing

Will Breitbart, O'Keefe, and Giles come clean about the ACORN pimp hoax?

US Chamber’s Lobbyists Solicited Hackers To Sabotage Unions and Smear Political Opponents

US Chamber’s Lobbyists Solicited Hackers To Sabotage Unions and Smear Political Opponents

ThinkProgress has learned that a law firm representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the big business trade association representing ExxonMobil, AIG, and other major international corporations, is working with set of “private security” companies and lobbying firms to undermine their political opponents, including ThinkProgress, with a surreptitious sabotage campaign.

According to e-mails obtained by ThinkProgress, the Chamber hired the lobbying firm Hunton and Williams. Hunton And Williams’ attorney Richard Wyatt, who once represented Food Lion in its infamous lawsuit against ABC News, was hired by the Chamber in October of last year. To assist the Chamber, Wyatt and his associates, John Woods and Bob Quackenboss, solicited a set of private security firms — HBGary Federal, Palantir, and Berico Technologies (collectively called Team Themis) — to develop tactics for damaging progressive groups and labor unions, in particular ThinkProgress, the labor coalition called Change to Win, the SEIU, US Chamber Watch, and StopTheChamber.com.

According to one document prepared by Team Themis, the campaign included an entrapment project. The proposal called for first creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” to give to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then to subsequently expose the document as a fake to undermine the credibility of the Chamber’s opponents. In addition, the group proposed creating a “fake insider persona” to “generate communications” with Change to Win. View a screenshot below:

The security firms hoped to obtain $200,000 for initial background research, then charge up to $2 million for a larger disinformation campaign against progressives. We don’t know if the proposal was accepted after Phase 1 was completed.

The e-mails ThinkProgress acquired are available widely on the web. They were posted by members of “Anonymous,” the hactivist community responsible for taking down websites for oppressive regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and American corporations that have censored WikiLeaks. Anonymous published the emails from HBGary Federal because an executive at the firm, Aaron Barr, was trying to take Anonymous down. Barr claimed that he had penetrated Anonymous and was hoping to sell the data to Bank of America and to federal authorities in the United States. In response, members of Anonymous hacked into Barr’s email and published some 40,000 company e-mails.

It is widely believed that Wikileaks has sensitive information about Bank of America, and plans to expose it later this year. This revelation prompted Bank of America to hire the law/lobbying firm Hunton and Williams, which in turn, according to the e-mails posted online by Anonymous, hired HBGary Federal and other firms to go after Anonymous and supporters of Wikileaks. For instance, one proposal from HBGary Federal and its associates proposed targeting Salon reporter and Wikileaks-supporter Glenn Greenwald with “actions to sabotage or discredit” him.

ThinkProgress has published a series of articles investigating the Chamber and its activities. We exposed the Chamber’s efforts to coordinate a lobbying campaign on behalf of large banks, including JP Morgan, to kill significant portions of financial reform. In October, we published a series looking into the Chamber’s efforts to solicit donations from foreign corporations for the same account the Chamber used to run partisan attack ads during the midterm campaign, as well as the Chamber’s participation in secret fundraising meetings convened by the billionaire plutocrats David and Charles Koch.

Conservative pundits frequently call all unions and their members thugs. If unions are thugs what does that make the people who would engage in unlawful and immoral behavior to destroy them.

Florida Governor Rick Scott, Redistributionist

The pious claim of many Tea Party and other conservative movement activists and apologists is that they simply want to rein in runaway government spending and reduce disastrous levels of public debt. In practice, of course, they don't care about debt if it's created by corporate or high-end tax cuts, and they are often less interested in reducing government spending than in redirecting it to their favored constituencies.

A very good example of this phenomenon is coming to light in Florida, where newly elected governor Rick Scott, the famously controversial (that's putting it nicely) health industry executive who bought himself the Republican nomination last year and then won a very close general election, has rolled out his budget proposals for the economically battered and nearly dysfunctional Sunshine State.

Yes, Scott is proposing $5 billion in state spending reductions (in absolute terms, not reductions from some sort of current-services budget). Many of these cuts seemed to be ideologically driven, such as the decimation of the state Department of Community Affairs, which runs growth-management programs hated by developers; and a (roughly) ten percent cut in K-12 education, part and parcel of the state GOP's war with teachers and other state employees.

But the size of the cuts wouldn't be nearly so high if Scott were not also insisting on major tax cuts, notably in corporate taxes (due to be phased out entirely in a few years) and in state-controlled property taxes that support public schools.

Moreoever, nestled in his budget proposal are spending increases that are designed to redistribute resources according to conservative ideological prescriptions. Most remarkable is his request for $800 million (over two years) for "economic development incentives," which almost certainly means a gubernatorially-controlled slush fund to be used to bribe companies to relocate to Florida through tax abatements, free government services, and other subsidies.

Conservative Anti-Women Zealots 'Forcible Rape' Language Remains In Bill To Restrict Abortion Funding

'Forcible Rape' Language Remains In Bill To Restrict Abortion Funding

After significant public blowback, House Republicans last week promised to drop a controversial provision in their high-priority No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act that would redefine rape. But almost a week later, that language is still in the bill.

Last week, a spokesman for the bill's principal sponsor, Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), said, "The word forcible will be replaced with the original language from the Hyde Amendment." The Hyde Amendment bans taxpayer dollars from being used for abortions, except in cases of incest and rape -- not just "forcible rape," as the Smith bill, H.R. 3, would have it.

But as The New York Times first noted on Wednesday, the "forcible rape" language remains. Ilan Kayatsky, a spokesman for New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the top-ranking Democrat on the House judiciary subcommittee focusing on constitutional issues, told The Huffington Post that while Nadler hopes the bill will soon be changed, they have been treating it as it's written.

"So the fact remains: more than 150 Republicans lent their name to this bill, as drafted, which includes the forcible-rape provision," the Nadler spokesman said. Several conservative Democrats also signed on as cosponsors of Smith's bill.

Smith's spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.

There are several ways to change the language in legislation. It could be amended during the committee markup process, which has not yet been scheduled for H.R. 3. The bill could also be reintroduced, but a congressional staffer pointed out that the legislation's high-priority status likely inclines House leaders to keep the bill number already assigned, rather than renumbering it with a fresh introduction.

Another piece of legislation restricting abortion access, H.R. 358, also initially included the forcible-rape language, but Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.) has reintroduced that bill without it. Now, however, it includes a provision that would allow hospitals to refuse to perform an abortion on a woman, even if that refusal threatens her life.

Republicans have been chanting like wild eyed zealots for years that government needs to get out of the lives of citizens. All as they expanded government power and intrusion on civil liberties. Now they want the government to use all its power to force women to suffer, even to the point of death, because they have decided rape is not always rape and child molesting is not always child molesting.

Five myths about Ronald Reagan's legacy

5. Reagan was a conservative culture warrior.

Reagan's contributions to the culture wars of the 1980s were largely rhetorical and symbolic. Although he published a book in 1983 about his staunch opposition to abortion (overlooking the fact that he had legalized abortion in California as governor in the late 1960s), he never sought a constitutional ban on abortion. In fact, Reagan began the odd practice of speaking to anti-abortion rallies by phone instead of in person - a custom continued by subsequent Republican presidents. He also advocated prayer in public schools in speeches, but never in legislation.

In 1981, Reagan unintentionally did more than any other president to prevent the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling from being overturned when he appointed Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court. O'Connor mostly upheld abortion rights during her 25 years as a justice.

No wonder that home-schooling advocate Michael Ferris was one of many right-wing activists complaining about Reagan by the end of his presidency, writing that his White House "offered us a bunch of political trinkets."