COLUMBIA -- Gov. Nikki Haley said today that she thinks her failed effort to call the Legislature back into session this week will ultimately bring public pressure on lawmakers to take up and approve some of her proposals when they gather for a planned "wrap-up" session next week.
But the state Senate's top officer said Haley's power play might make lawmakers less likely to give her new authority.
The bill that caused the clash between the Republican governor and GOP-controlled Legislature would alter who controls the day-to-day operations of state government. Haley wants more authority and says her order for lawmakers -- issued last week and ruled unconstitutional Monday by the state's high court -- will nevertheless put them in the spotlight.
It's striking the scorn the Governor and the Donehue shop have for democracy and courts. Process Story's constantly whining about legislative Democrats who "drag their feet" and don't simply trade their votes for another plate of gruel. PS is really peeved that Democrats won't throw themselves under the redistricting bus, for example. Or, in a nice racial pivot, that the Democratic Black Caucus won't do it for the Republicans. Talk about turkeys calling for an early Thanksgiving-
There are two courts. The court of law and the court of public opinion. McConnell may win the first, but Haley will dominate the second. And it’s the second court that has long-term repercussions.
I like that Pawlenty would radically reduce the overtaxation of savings and investment. The capital-gains tax, the estate tax, the interest-income tax, and the dividend tax would all be gone. We’d basically have a consumption tax.Actually, this isn't a consumption tax. A consumption tax makes you pay on any income you consume. So, under a consumption tax, Paris Hilton wouldn't pay anything when she sells her family stock, but she would pay some kind of tax when she starts buying cars and tiny, precious dogs.
A consumption tax that exempts old assets is just a tax on future wages. And the same studies that show that a consumption tax (which taxes all old capital assets) is more efficient than an income tax also show that a wage tax is less efficient than an income tax-because not taxing capital requires higher tax rates on wages to raise the same revenue and hence distorts people’s work decisions more.So this is just your basic supply-side pixie dust plan, sprinkling massive windfall gains on the rich, not bothering to make the numbers add up and assuming implausibly high economic benefits will result. The interesting thing is that Pawlenty's version of voodoo economics is more radical than George Bush's 2000 version of voodoo economics, which was in turn more radical than Bob Dole's 1996 version of voodoo economics, which was itself totally nuts.
The bill (H. 4271), filed May 25 by Rep. Shannon Erickson, R-Beaufort, and co-sponsored by six other Republican representatives, would reduce the sales tax to 3.85 percent from 6 percent.
The bill would do away with a myriad of sales tax exemptions, though it would leave intact existing breaks on groceries, prescription medicine, durable medical equipment and utility bills, Erickson said Monday.
“I believe we would see businesses coming to South Carolina with the idea that everyone is on the same playing field,” Erickson told The Nerve when asked about the effect of her bill should it become law. “Our goal here is to focus a discussion on at least one piece of the (tax) code.”
Erickson said she and the bill’s co-sponsors, who she pointed out are all women, collectively decided to keep groceries, medicine and utility bills exempt from sales taxes because poor residents typically pay a larger percentage of their income on those items.
“We decided to put out a bill to safeguard what South Carolinians spend most of their budget on,” she said.This is another of the endless series of Field of Dreams tax bills the SCGOP keeps throwing up, arguing that if we strip state government of as much funding as possible, business will pick this state over places like Alabama and Mississippi, which have practiced the art of being backward for generations.
TP: Mr. Cain, you recently came under fire for your comments about the kind of people you would appoint to your cabinet. Would you be opposed to appointing an openly gay but qualified person to be in your cabinet?
CAIN: Nope, not at all. I wouldn’t have a problem with that at all. I just want people who are qualified, I want them to believe in the Constitution of the United States of America. So yep, I don’t have a problem with appointing an openly gay person. Because they’re not going to try to put sharia law in our laws."...Interestingly, Cain made these remarks while standing next to Iowa kingmaker and notorious homophobe Bob Vander Plaats, who seemed to register no objection to Cain’s comfort appointing openly gay people to his administration. Of course, Cain’s open-mindedness about gay appointees is seriously undermined by his rationale and paranoia about American Muslims imposing sharia law in the U.S."
Gov. Haley's press secretary, Rob Godfrey, offered this explanation via e-mail Thursday: "The first gentleman hosted a cookout last night where he took the opportunity to thank legislators who'd worked with and been respectful of the governor during session."Then the Supreme Court handed the governor her head for trying to force the legislature to reconvene when she hadn't the authority to demand it. Now legislators are complaining the governor's people sold them a bill of goods to get votes for the session recall.
Protesters, from Westside Baptist Church of Cowpens, Open Door Baptist Church in Easley, and True Light Pentecost Church of Spartanburg, held up signs with slogans like “No special rights for sodomites,” “Salvation and sodomy don’t mix” and “I am not a homophobic, I am a theophobic.”
The Rev. Travis Blackwell of Westside Baptist asked passers-by headed to the park if they died today, would they go to heaven.
Members of the Pentecostal church shouted, “Every one of you is going to hell” and “All y’all got AIDS” as people walked past. One woman from the group shouted at a police officer: “You going to keep us on the sidewalk and let these freaks walk on the street?”
“They develop a more inclusive vernacular that is the rhetoric of somebody who represents everybody, not just people who think like them,” Reed said in an interview before the conference. “It’s a little bit more pleasing to the ear — more likely to quote a [Congressional Budget Office] study than Scripture, probably, but still with the principle intact.”
We’ve talked about US incarceration rates on CT before. Peter Moskos approaches it with an interesting twist in his new book In Defense of Flogging. I have not read the book, but I did read his piece in the WSJ’s Ideas Market and you should, too. It does a very nice job of summarizing some of what is fundamentally wrong with the US prison system. Here’s a brief quote, but as we like to say, go read the whole thing:
In much of America, prisons have become nothing more than a massive government-run—one might even say “socialist”—job program. To oversimplify, but just a bit, we pay poor unemployed rural whites to guard poor unemployed urban blacks. Prison guards and private prisons advocate for more and more prisoners, literally profiting from human bondage. Such a peculiar institution should be unconscionable.
Without DeMint, all they have as contenders is a long list of cranks and hopeless cases. I doubt if even the most conservative of conservative leaders really want to have Michele Bachmann or Herman Cain as the GOP nominee, let alone Ten Commandments Judge Roy Moore. They may be ideologically pure, but even conservative purists (who care more about ideological loyalty than winning in November) have no interest in being embarrassed by a nominee who says crazy things or doesn’t really know what he or she is talking about.
He has compared himself to Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He has drawn parallels between himself and Winston Churchill as well as Abraham Lincoln.
But during his fifth day on the witness stand, even Rod Blagojevich managed to startle observers with a new one:
Miller is perhaps not the most symbolically auspicious spokesman for electable conservatism.
Rish, for one, acknowledges he doesn't believe members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are "doctrinally correct." But he says his decision in supporting candidates is more about what they stand for than what church they pray in.
"I'd like a candidate to be a mirror image of me, but that's not going to happen," he says. "So the best I can do is vote for the one that will run the country the best."Unless, of course, one is a woman, gay, or Islamic.
A 'sovereign citizen' in Pensacola, Florida allegedly opened fire at a seafood market after learning that they had run out of crawfish.
But Spurrier had done the math. And knowing that football coaches, especially those in Bowl Championship Series conferences, are making enough to foot the bill. He said the players could use the extra cash to give to their parents for travel, lodging and meals, or they could take their girlfriends out for dinner.
“This problem went undetected for too long because the department did not sufficiently understand and question the complicated analyses performed by our reimbursement consultant performing the shared savings calculations,” Keck wrote.
84) The state shall pass no law that restricts municipalities from enacting more strident regulations on environmental nuisances such as mega-hog farms.
Accused rapist of hotel maid in New York had an earlier moment with the Obamas!
Here's deposed IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French socialist who is accused of raping a maid from West Africa in a New York hotel, in an earlier undated photo with the Obamas...
"The conservative movement has developed a political narrative to go along with its ideology. According to this narrative, every political success is the result of standing up for true conservatism, and every defeat their just punishment for abandoning the true creed. Versions of this story reverberate on talk radio, Fox News, and other organs of conservative movement thought."
