Republicans Poised to Lose Ground in the Texas House

According to what I am reading in the Austin American-Statesman today, the Tea Party is about to make some more inroads on the Republican Party in the 2012 elections in a year when they will suffer setbacks due to the redistricting process.

In short, what is happening in Texas, and across America, is a continued polarization of politics, as moderates get primaried, and conservative agendas get progressively more radical. This is not so much happening on the left as it is on the  right.

Barry Goldwater, today, would be a Democrat.

Hard to fathom, but facts are facts.

How does this bode for Texas? Not well. Not well at all. It will probably be the case that Texas will shift to the right even more. Like Voter ID laws? Like Mandatory sonograms? Like underfunding education? Like mediocrity and loss of public services? Welcome to Republican Paradise in Texas, USA.

In short, while Texas will become less Republican in numbers, it will become more conservative in its majority make-up.

Maybe it’s time to book passage on a steamer to New Zealand.

Or a road trip to California.

Run Scott Walker, Run Like a Rabbit

What I saw today coming out of the Public Policy Polling website, found here, is that Wisconsin’s governor Scott Walker is standing at the edge of a cliff with Democrats poised to toss him over it.

Not only have Democrats been wildly successful in getting a gubernatorial recall petition qualified for a recall election, it now seems likely that he would go down to defeat if a vote were held today.

Yep, the darling of the Tea Party and the Koch brothers, Scott Walker is about to be skewered and turned on a spit over hot coals.

Scott Walker’s overreach has come home to roost, it seems. His anti-union, pro-fat cat tax cuts for the rich political stance has uncovered him as anti middle class, and a supporter of the 1%. A 1% that he perhaps would like to join someday.

But the numbers don’t lie. The state seems evenly split on dethroning Walker 49% to 49%. It could go either way. But given the fact that he gets the axe, the numbers are even more telling. In a race against his 2010 opponent, Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett, Walker will lose by 49% to 46%.  Former Senator Russ Feingold, if he should decide to enter the race, would beat down Walker by 52% to 45%.

In short, this is an election for Democrats to lose.

And given the primary results in Michigan and Arizona yesterday, it should be painfully clear to anyone that the Tea Party is in full retreat. Run and hide, Tea Party, run and hide, Scott Walker.

Run like a rabbit.

Hump Day Humor

I can't wait for Newt Gingrich to implode in public, giving the TEA Party-led Republican Party no other choice than to adopt Mitt Romney as its standard bearer. The excitement at the polls will be absolutely breath taking.

Literally.

Why Was Cain Ever in It?

Upon hearing that Herman Cain was “suspending” his presidential campaign my first thought was “Suspending? Like McCain suspended his campaign?”

Then I figured it all out. This guy, with an ego the size of Jupiter could never bring himself to announce an end to his campaign. It sounds so much better to say it this way, as if to say that he might be back.

But no, stick a fork in him, Herman Cain is done.

Then I asked myself, why was Cain ever in it to begin with? Was it really all about selling his book like the pundits say? A national book tour that also took in campaign contributions?

No, I now honestly think he was in it to win. The stars were all aligned. The Tea Party was slowly eroding any common decency that remained in the GOP. The national conservative mood was perfect for a guy like Herman Cain and he knew it.

And then you ask yourself how can someone with Cain’s reputation of sexually harassing women, and extra-marital affairs (and I don’t think it would have stopped at one revelation) think that there was no chance that no one would find out about them? That was my latest thought on the fact that Cain was in it merely to sell books.

But no. He really was in it to win.

And what leads me to think this now? In his latest denial that he would be ending his campaign today, Cain said this: “I’m on this journey for a reason. I don’t look back.”

That’s probably the only true statement of the facts that Herman Cain uttered in his whole time campaigning.

Reuters: US Treasury Credit Rating will be “D” if Debt Ceiling Not Raised

Standard and Poor’s managing director told a Reuters reporter today that if the US Treasury defaults on scheduled August 4^th payments because the Republican congress fails to raise the debt ceiling in time, it will revise the government’s current Triple-A rating, its highest ranking, to a “D” rating – the only rating lower than “D” is “D-Minus.”

This is the criteria Standard and Poor uses to assign a “D” rating:

“An obligation rated 'D' is in payment default. The 'D' rating category is used when payments on an obligation, including a regulatory capital instrument, are not made on the date due even if the applicable grace period has not expired, unless Standard & Poor's believes that such payments will be made during such grace period. The 'D' rating also will be used upon the filing of a bankruptcy petition or the taking of similar action if payments on an obligation are jeopardized. An obligation's rating is lowered to 'D' upon completion of a distressed exchange offer, whereby some or all of the issue is either repurchased for an amount of cash or replaced by other instruments having a total value that is less than par.”

Currently the US borrows 40 cents of every dollar it spends. So to avoid a “D” rating, after August 4^th the US government will have to cut its spending by 40% or risk going into default. This is obviously what Tea Partiers have in mind so while the ratings people think that there is only a remote chance that the debt ceiling won’t be raised in time, I am having my doubts.

Now someone has pointed out that US government debt is constitutionally guaranteed by the 14^th Amendment. This clause from Section 4 being the operative statement:

“The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

So theoretically S and P’s warning that they will lower the government’s credit rating to “D” is an idle threat because to do so would be unconstitutional. But I wonder about that. Theoretically raising the debt ceiling those scores of times in the past 50 years is also an unconstitutional act because a debt ceiling is not needed if “the validity of the public debt … shall not be questioned.”

My head hurts.

On Vetoing Additional Revenue for Texas

You see, it has become a central thesis in my blog posts this year that Texas Republican legislators and those in the Executive Branch have become so tax averse that they not only refuse to add to the taxation instruments available to them, like taxing people and corporations who have avoided paying their share, they actually act to cut taxes even further.

Texas takes in less money than it needs to fund the services that they are constitutionally mandated to pay for. And the reason is clear: Republicans have been taken over by the TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party. The TEA Party is actually a Libertarian movement – that is a movement by those who have political and economic ideas that can only be characterized as delusional.

First let me take care of something that has been nagging at me for awhile. TEA stands for Taxed Enough Already. That is, the taxes that they pay are simply enough. No more. Cutting taxes further simply makes no sense, then, in their message, unless their very party name is a victim of the fuzzy thinking that goes with their ability to correctly spell in their hand-painted signs.

TEA Partiers, then, aren’t for tax cuts. Or maybe they are.

But the thing that really and truly amazes me is that a gaping loophole in sales tax law, closed in a Republican-written bill passed and sent to the Governor’s desk was vetoed today by Governor Perry. Perry vetoed a law that would have allowed Texas to collect sales taxes from online vendors on items sold to Texans, effectively denying Texas the ability to collect millions of much-needed dollars.

Swear it’s true. Read about it here.

But it gets even better. Imagine denying the state of these millions of dollars of revenue and at the same time slamming local Texas vendors who compete with online vendors, but are at a disadvantage because goods bought online do not have a sales tax, goods bought from traditional Texas vendors do.

And today the story got even more interesting because language from the vetoed bill was just inserted in a “fiscal matters” bill that will be considered in the special session that Perry himself called. If Perry is truly serious about not taxing online sales, he will have to veto the entire “fiscal matters” bill, something he may not want to do.

A sad state of affairs that Governor Perry has to be pushed and pried into doing the right thing for Texas.